Democracy is the manner of life of men who understand and love one another. We shall achieve democracy exactly in proportion to an understanding of our neighbors and our love for them. Democracy is now weak in America for we want of these qualities.
—RAY STANNARD BAKER, October 1919
On Election Day 1920, Woodrow Wilson tightly gripped his cane and tried repeatedly to climb the three small steps that Dr. Grayson had built for him for physical therapy at the White House. Wilson was not on the Democratic ticket that day. Nor was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The Democratic Party’s choice for president was Ohio governor James M. Cox, who had what was considered an advantage that year: no close ties to the Wilson administration. For vice president, the Democrats chose the thirty-seven-year-old assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a fifth cousin of the recently deceased President Theodore Roosevelt.
California senator Hiram Johnson, Washington senator Miles Poindexter, Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, Illinois governor Frank Lowden, U.S. food administrator Herbert Hoover, General Leonard Wood, and Ohio senator Warren G. Harding competed for the Republican nomination. Governor Lowden, who had gained national fame during the 1919 Chicago race riots, and General Wood, who had won acclaim for administering martial law in the riot-stricken towns of Longview, Texas, and Omaha, Nebraska, were deadlocked in the race until the Ohio senator moved ahead and won the nomination. The Republicans’ choice for vice president was Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge. Their platform focused on damning the League of Nations, lowering taxes, and tightening immigration laws. They pledged to bring a nation tired of idealism and instability back to “normalcy.” Al Jolson sang for the campaign: “We need another Lincoln to do the nation’s thinkin’.”
The Socialist Party’s candidate was Eugene Debs, who ran his presidential campaign from his prison cell at the Atlanta federal penitentiary. His platform included improved labor conditions and welfare legislation. Debs won 919,799 votes.
The winning ticket of Harding and Coolidge achieved 61 percent of the popular vote compared to the Democrats’ 34 percent; and 404 electoral votes compared with the Democrats’ 127.
Nearly 27 million Americans voted in the 1920 election, including women. The U.S. House of Representatives had passed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in May of 1919 with a count of 304 legislators for and eighty-nine against; two weeks later so did the Senate, with a vote of thirty-six Republicans and twenty Democrats for it; and eight Republicans and seventeen Democrats against it. The senate victory came after four hours of debate during which senators fearful of such a change made every argument against the radical notion of women voting. Fear of the unknown, as one reporter described it, had been the greatest obstacle in the long, arduous journey to achieve women’s suffrage. That June, acknowledging the struggle that precedes progress, Alice Paul told the press, “Freedom has come not as a gift but as a triumph.” To reach their goal of voting in the 1920 presidential election, however, the suffragists had to persuade thirty-six states to ratify the amendment and so during the summer of 1919, members of the National Woman’s Party, of which Paul was president, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, whose president was Carrie Chapman Catt, hit the road in a nationwide campaign. In the summer of 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state, thus making it possible for women to vote in the 1920 presidential race.
At the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in the summer of 1920, Attorney General Palmer had tried to win the nomination, standing firmly on the platform of an ongoing crusade “to tear out the radical seeds that have entangled American ideas in their poisonous theories.” But by the summer of 1920, the American public was beginning to lose interest in Palmer’s zealous hunt for the Red Menace and to shed its fears of an impending overthrow of the U.S. government. Fear mongering wasn’t as easy as it had been in the stormy, threatening months of 1919. The number of labor strikes, for example, was diminishing considerably. In August 1919 there had been 373, and by December there were only forty-five. In early January of 1920, the steel strike, which at its peak included 350,000 workers nationwide, ended without gaining concessions and after losing $112 million in wages—and twenty lives. In 1920 it was clear that labor’s leadership—the AFL, Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis—would do their own Red hunting to purge their memberships of the radical element that had been so damaging to labor’s image. Although anti-alien sentiments were still strong among most Americans, the specter of Bolshevism was not interrupting the average American’s dreams. In fact, it didn’t seem all that menacing, especially compared to the economic and emotional challenges of postwar and post-flu America. Getting a job, buying a car, and bringing a new generation into the world to clear the air of the miasma of death were the major concerns.
In February of 1920 the Justice Department did conduct another raid, which Hoover organized and in which twenty-nine members of an Italian anarchist group were detained in Paterson, New Jersey. But by the spring of 1920, there would be no more raids. Nor would there be any more mass deportations. The public was slipping from Palmer’s anxious grasp and the Justice Department was facing criticism for its tactics in the January raids. In May of 1920, Zechariah Chafee, Felix Frankfurter, and ten other prominent lawyers and law professors, under the auspices of a group they called the National Popular Government League, published To the American People. Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice, which accused the bureau of conducting hundreds of arrests, searches, and seizures without warrants, thus violating the detainees’ constitutional rights. Worse still, the government had imprisoned many of the aliens on exorbitant bails, the article said, and the Justice Department had denied them legal representation. Some detainees were even mistreated, possibly tortured, the article claimed. The work of Chafee’s league and the widely publicized article provoked two congressional hearings—one in 1920 and the other in 1921—focusing on the accusations that the Justice Department’s methods had been overzealous and potentially illegal.
After such attacks, Palmer made a few alterations in his story. The raids, he claimed, were his dutiful response to pressure from the Senate and a product of his loyalty to the American public. He had quickly answered the call of a hysterical populace. This hypocrisy damaged his image. Even more damning, however, was the second big revolution fizzle. That spring Palmer and his associates warned America that history might repeat itself on May Day 1920. In fact the demonstrations might be worse than those on May 1, 1919. This indeed might be the inception of the long-anticipated revolution. But there was no violence in America on May 1, 1920.
Palmer’s credibility plummeted with the slashing speed of a guillotine’s blade. By the time he stepped down from his post as the nation’s fiftieth attorney general, on March 5, 1921, his political career was effectively over. During the next fifteen years he remained active in the Democratic Party but only in the capacity of helping with various campaigns such as Al Smith’s presidential campaign in 1928 and Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1932. In 1936, a week after his sixty-fourth birthday, Palmer died of complications after surgery to remove his appendix.
The Justice Department continued to investigate the bombing of Palmer’s house throughout 1920. After the February raids in Paterson, Hoover himself went to Ellis Island to interrogate the leader of an Italian anarchist group in search of information about the June 2, 1919, bombing and the leaflets found at the sites. The man denied that his group, L’Era Nuova, had anything to do with the 1919 incidents. It was the Galleanists who had done it, he said. He also gave Hoover the name of an anarchist printer in Brooklyn who might have printed the flyers. Hoover sent agents to the shop who found the exact type used for the flyers found in front of Palmer’s house and at other bomb targets. Two printers who were Galleanists were arrested and questioned on the fourteenth floor of the bureau’s New York offices. One of them, Andrea Salsedo, confessed on May 2 to having printed the flyers and then jumped out the window—an apparent suicide, the government said, though his widow sued the government for wrongful death. Newspapers in New York and Boston ran stories saying that Salsedo had fingered the Galleanists for the June 1919 bombings. Although it was never absolutely confirmed, the government files reveal that there was some certainty that the man who blew himself up on Palmer’s steps was Carlo Valdinocci, a Galleanist who was close to two members of the same anarchist group, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
“Anarchist chaser” William J. Flynn, the man Palmer praised as the nation’s “greatest anarchist expert,” resigned from his post as director of the Bureau of Investigation in September of 1921. Flynn was the first person to hold that title. He was succeeded by William J. Burns. Three years later, in 1924, J. Edgar Hoover took over the job, remaining in the post through the administrations of eight U.S. presidents, until the very day he died on May 2, 1972.
Under Hoover, the Bureau of Investigation became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. It gained the authority to carry guns and make arrests. And it carried on the tradition of a “shadow war” begun in 1917 to fight the German enemy within U.S. borders. By the 1920s, Hoover’s bureau had consumed most of the domestic intelligence files, networks, and methods established in the Army’s Military Intelligence Division by Ralph Van Deman and carried on briefly by Marlborough Churchill. The MID had ostensibly returned to its mission of investigating military personnel only, although some branches remained connected to their contacts in the American Protective League. Except for spying on Marcus Garvey, the Negro Subversion division of the MID filed few reports from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s. In the late 1930s, however, it resumed its mission as it probed black unrest, A. Philip Randolph and the 1941 march on Washington, as well as the activities of the Communist Party of America in black communities.
The American Protective League survived all the official announcements of its termination in 1919 as well as Attorney General Palmer’s unwillingness to reinstate officially its battalions of devoted agents for his war on radicals. Using names such as the Patriotic American League in Chicago and the Loyalty League in Cleveland, vestiges of the APL lived on. And considering the many APL reports informing the MID and the Justice Department in 1918 and 1919 about revolution brewing in America and about dangerous citizens lurking in the nation’s immigrant communities, the idea that the nation needed to protect itself from its own civilians, in peacetime as well as war, became an established tenet. It was here to stay—as familiar and traditional as the flag itself. Thus, whether or not the APL ever again was given official recognition and authority, its eager volunteers were used periodically not only by state and city agencies to gather information about suspicious individuals and groups but also by a Justice Department that for many years did not have enough staff to conduct the numerous investigations it deemed necessary to maintain internal security. Even Palmer unofficially secured its aid for the early January 1920 raids. And between 1920 and 1924, the Ku Klux Klan added strength to its resurgence by recruiting members from the Southern branches of the APL and adopting techniques such as tapping phones and planting spies at meetings and in post offices.
In 1924, Hoover announced that he would not allow civilian volunteers to be part of domestic surveillance, a position he maintained even at the outbreak of World War II and officially throughout the rest of his career. Still, in the 1940s Hoover called upon the American public to spy on and send the government reports on “neighborhood subversives.” This inspired a resurgence of “private intelligence units” that continued to operate in most American cities long after the end of the Second World War, through the second Red Scare of the 1950s, and into the 1960s, at least. Although Hoover never would give volunteer spies the official authority they so desired and although organizations such as the APL never again assumed the level of power they achieved during 1918 and 1919, the web had already been constructed. And like an old map stuffed in a drawer, it could be retrieved, dusted off, and used again by leaders uninformed about its precipitous past and disrespectful of the difference between democratic dissent and dangerous disloyalty. As the APL’s official historian Emerson Hough wrote in The Web: “The A.P.L. had folded its unseen and unknown tents. It will bivouac elsewhere until another day of need may come.”
Mollie Steimer, Jacob Abrams, Samuel Lipman, and Hyman Lachowsky spent 1920 in federal penitentiaries waiting for favorable news from their attorney, who fervently pressed forward with his campaign for their amnesty. Enlisting the aid of every contact he had ever known in government and every contact’s contact, Harry Weinberger doggedly pursued the attorney general, the president, the president’s secretary, and the U.S. pardon attorney, urging them all to see the case from his point of view. Why keep his young clients in prison for twenty years? Why not send them back to Russia? How could deporting them threaten or injure the nation? Even the law that they violated was soon to be repealed.
On his side were leftists and socialists as well as mainstream figures such as George Creel, the former head of Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, and Ray Stannard Baker. “I shall be very glad indeed to sign the recommendations for amnesty. I sympathize with Justice Holmes’ decision and believe these men [and woman] should be pardoned and allowed to return to Russia,” wrote Baker in a March 23, 1920, letter. Weinberger again called upon Baker in September that year to put pressure on Palmer and yet again in February of 1921 to urge the president to pardon his clients before leaving the White House.
On February 8, 1921, although Wilson still refused to pardon them, he did authorize the commutation of their sentences to two and a half years. This meant that Steimer would be in prison for twenty-one more months and the others, who had started their terms earlier, for sixteen more months. Weinberger was told that the Wilson administration and specifically Palmer “would do nothing further in the matter.” Still he pressed harder.
On March 1, Weinberger wrote to Baker asking if he would personally talk to Wilson about the matter in the last days of Wilson’s presidency. “If [Wilson] leaves office without letting these four Russians go, he will come under the quotation from Emerson ‘Your actions speak so loud, I can’t hear the fine words you say,’” Weinberger wrote. “I hope you can put the pressure in the next day to save the situation.”
But Wilson never moved on it. “I have all along believed that these poor people should be set free and allowed to return to Russia,” wrote Baker to Weinberger on March 3. “I have said so where I thought it would help. I think the only thing now to do is to take it up with the new administration.”
In March, Congress repealed the law that the Justice Department had used to prosecute Abrams, Steimer, Lipman, Lachowsky, and Schwartz as well as Eugene Debs and numerous others since its passage in May of 1918. This was the Sedition Act, which had extended the reach of the Espionage Act to include “disloyalty” in speech and writings. The Espionage Act would never be repealed and as of 2006, it was still on the books. Although Weinberger considered the Sedition Act to be unconstitutional and its repeal must have been good news for him as well as for the numerous lawyers who agreed with him, the Abrams case clients were not at all affected. And the new administration did not appear to be any more lenient toward political prisoners.
Disheartened and wearied by a series of disappointments, Weinberger was unable that spring to write his usual optimistic notes to his four young incarcerated clients. Still, he was unstoppable. By late spring and into the summer of 1921, he had managed to persuade everyone from President Warren Harding to J. Edgar Hoover that something must be done about Steimer, Abrams, Lipman, and Lachowsky. At one point President Harding actually agreed to pardon them but the pardon attorney, James A. Finch, protested. That October, Weinberger agreed to a deal that if he made all the arrangements for the four Russians to return to Russia and conducted all the negotiations with the Russian government to accept them, and if the government did not have to pay for their voyage, then their sentences would be commuted immediately after such plans were finalized.
Making the necessary contacts in Russia would not be easy. However, a surprising coincidence lessened Weinberger’s task: Ethel Bernstein, Lipman’s wife, worked at the Foreign Office in Moscow and knew how and with whom Weinberger needed to connect. Within a month, the Russian government cabled Weinberger with the information that the four young Russians would be admitted back into Russia if indeed the United States released them from jail. Weinberger then focused on raising funds for their passage, telling the funders that because of what they had endured he wanted to book them in second class instead of third. He also tried to arrange reunions between his clients and their family members before the deportation. He could not persuade the government, however, to allow Abrams and Lachowsky to leave Ellis Island with security escorts for a few hours to visit Abrams’s sister and Lachowsky’s mother, who were both too ill to attend the deportation farewell.
On November 23, the four young Russians boarded the SS Estonia bound for Latvia. At least sixty friends and family members gathered on the dock to send them off, including Mollie Steimer’s mother and Lachowsky’s bedridden mother, who was carried on a cot to see her son one more time. In saying goodbye to Weinberger, both Lipman and Abrams handed him notes of appreciation for all he had done for them. Lipman thanked him for his “laborious and continuous work” on their behalf and he wrote that he wished “for the day when you will be proud of your native country—but until then—do not give up.”
In December, President Harding pardoned Eugene Debs, then sixty-six years old. On Christmas Day 1921, Debs was at home in Indiana where he would spend the last five years of his life writing articles, giving speeches, and trying to recover from the physical strain of his imprisonment. “Is it not strange that in this land of fabulous plenty there is still so much poverty, so many million of our people whose life consists of a long, hard, fierce struggle all the way from youth to age and at last death comes to the rescue and stills the aching heart and lulls that victim to dreamless sleep?” he asked an audience in Chicago in 1925. Debs died the following year. His home in Terre Haute was later designated a National Historic Landmark.
Mollie Steimer and her comrades were also back “home” in Russia by Christmas Day 1921, having arrived in Moscow on December 15. Steimer stayed in Russia until September of 1923 when she and her male companion, Senya Fleshin, were expelled from Russia for providing food, clothing, and books for incarcerated anarchists and protesting the harsh conditions at the prisons and concentration camps. They continued their relief work for anarchists in Berlin and in Paris, living in one city or the other, depending on political circumstances, until December of 1941, when they moved to Mexico. There, Steimer was reunited with Abrams and his wife, who had lived in Mexico since 1926, when they edited a Yiddish newspaper in Mexico City. Steimer and Fleshin, a photographer, eventually ran a photographic studio called SEMO—for Senya and Mollie—in Cuernavaca, where they spent the rest of their lives together. The iron-willed, tenderhearted girl Emma Goldman once described as “fearfully set in her ways…a sort of Alexander Berkman in skirts” died in 1980 at age eighty-two in Cuernavaca. By then her fellow defendants in the Abrams case had all passed away.
Their exceptionally devoted and “liberty-loving” attorney, Harry Weinberger, continued to champion the cause of civil liberties, and then in the 1920s, expanded his practice to copyright law. He had a special interest in screenplays and the theater and represented playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill. Weinberger was one of the organizers of and the lawyer for the Provincetown Players, whose roster of writers and actors included O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, and Paul Robeson. When O’Neill was sued for plagiarism for his play Strange Interlude, Weinberger represented him, won the $2.5 million case, and became well known for his phrase: “A sure sign of greatness, with success, in literature is that someone sues for plagiarism.”
In 1941, he began writing his autobiography, which he called The Fight. But on Sunday, December 7th, that year, he put down his manuscript. So stunned was he by the injustice of the attack on Pearl Harbor that he not only suspended his writing but he also changed his stand on the issue of war. Until then Weinberger had been a pacifist who opposed conscription as well as an isolationist who contested the League of Nations. By 1942, he strongly agreed with U.S. entry into the Second World War.
Although he never completed his autobiography, Weinberger wrote an article that he called “A Rebel’s Interrupted Autobiography: A Personal Document on the Impact of War on One Who Has Made a Lifelong Fight Against It.” In it, he praised the courage of immigrants coming to America “with bare hands and stout hearts,” giving the best of their sons and daughters, enriching American soil with their blood, making America the powerful nation it became. “It is the little men and women who carry on the ordinary work of civilization and who love and transmit to their children the songs, the stories and the poetry of democracy and liberty and who supply the backbone and support of democracy everywhere,” Weinberger wrote. He talked about literature, about the law, about Henry George and other influences in his life. He talked of his cases and the causes at their core. He talked of war. And he talked of oppression. “My autobiography, interrupted by the bursting of bombs and the marching of invaders’ hosts, can wait while I live the life of a rebel against oppression to the full,” his last line read.
On the morning of March 6, 1944, Weinberger, at age fifty-eight, died of a heart attack at his Greenwich Village apartment. Headlines hailed him as a “copyright expert.” And although the obituaries culled many details from his life, none revealed his extraordinary devotion to his clients, his depth of character, or his exceptional dignity. And none were so beautifully written as Jacob Abrams’s farewell note to Weinberger in 1921:
“I know you to be a man first and the lawyer after. I also believe that you are a liberty loving man for you could not carry on your legal work in defending those that fight for it if it would be a matter of dollars and cents only. [I] hope that in the near future we will not need lawyers to defend the human rights.”
Lynching had existed in America since colonial times, but in the 1880s and 1890s white supremacists used it more than ever before and perhaps more sadistically than in the past to oppress and control African-Americans, especially in the South. Between 1889 and 1922 at least 3,500 men and women, mostly black, were lynched in America. Ninety-nine percent of the perpetrators were never punished. Ida B. Wells-Barnett headed up the first bold national crusade to stop it. The NAACP was organized in 1909 to bolster the cause. The 1919 Anti-Lynching Conference, with the help of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others, shone a national spotlight on the barbarity of the crime. And on January 26, 1922, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the first bill to make lynching a federal crime with a vote of 230–119. But lynching never became a federal crime.
Sixteen anti-lynching bills presented to the Senate between 1901 and 1920 never emerged from committee. In fact, the nearly two hundred anti-lynching bills introduced into Congress during the first half of the twentieth century all failed. Then, on February 7, 2005, the U.S. Senate issued a resolution apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of the victims for its failure to enact anti-lynching legislation and for depriving the victims of “life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the U.S.” The resolution called attention to the history of lynching “to ensure that these tragedies will be neither forgotten nor repeated.” On June 13, 2005, the Senate, perhaps blushed with shame, adopted the resolution.
In another belated recognition, Sergeant Henry Lincoln Johnson received a posthumous Purple Heart in 1997 from President Bill Clinton. Despite Johnson’s heroism during the Great War and France’s recognition of his bravery, he had never received a military award from his own country. In 1998, the New York National Guard filed an application for Johnson to receive the highest U.S. military award, the Congressional Medal of Honor. While evaluating Johnson’s war record in consideration of the award, a military committee discovered Johnson’s gravesite, which for seventy years had not been known. Johnson’s death was in fact as much of a mystery as his postwar life.
In 1919, after Johnson helped raise funds for Liberty Bonds, he returned to Albany and to his family: Edna and their two-year-old son, Herman. There he tried to find work that would not require him to stand for any prolonged period of time. Despite his achievements and his fame, he could not find an employer who would accommodate his needs. The government did not assist him in his search for work nor did it provide him with any disability benefits. In 1923, he and Edna were divorced. With Herman, Edna moved to Kansas City to live with relatives. Without his family, without a job, and without relief from his pains, Sergeant Johnson, the pride of his race in 1918 and 1919, slipped into a valley of depression and alcoholism. He died alone and impoverished at the Albany Veterans Administration Hospital on July 2, 1929, at age thirty-two.
For many years, Henry Johnson’s son believed that his father was buried in a pauper’s cemetery in Albany. But in 2002, the military committee that was considering his nomination for the Medal of Honor discovered a newspaper clipping noting his burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Still, there was no grave at Arlington under the name Henry Lincoln Johnson. Probing further, committee members found the name William Henry Johnson in the cemetery files and checking the original paperwork for this man, they learned that back in 1919 there had been a clerical error. And so it was that in 2002 New York governor George Pataki honored New York’s and the nation’s hero at his Arlington gravesite, giving him full military honors. In 2003, Johnson was given the Distinguished Service Cross. In 2004, Albany renamed a post office facility the U.S. Postal Service Henry Johnson Annex, adding to other recent local honors such as a bust of Johnson in the city’s Washington Park and a major Albany thoroughfare renamed after him. By 2006, the campaign for him to receive the coveted Medal of Honor was not yet successful.
The fates of Mabel Puffer and Arthur Hazzard were no less difficult to uncover. Litigation continued for two more years. The grand jury did not find enough evidence to indict Hazzard on the charge of larceny. Still, Puffer’s half-nephew, who became her permanent legal guardian, sued Hazzard and his family in an attempt to reclaim the gifts and money Puffer had given him. Hazzard filed a countersuit against Puffer’s relatives and their lawyers, which a judge dismissed. And then he filed a suit against Puffer alone, alleging breach of promise to marry him. Eventually he dropped the suit. In 1921 a judge ordered Hazzard to return the gifts he had received from Mabel Puffer during their courtship, including $3,200 plus interest, which was the total amount that she had given him over the years. Puffer and Hazzard were never reunited. In fact they may never have seen each other again after 1921. She was committed to the Worcester Mental Hospital, while her guardian handled the issues of reclaiming her property from her fiancé. Puffer died of heart failure in 1937 in Worcester. Hazzard lived with his mother in their house behind the Ayer police station until at least 1930 when he was forty-nine years old, according to census records. In the 1930s, Hazzard seems to have disappeared, and thus far there is no trace of a record of his death. The legal lynching of the Puffer and Hazzard relationship was forever buried in the files of insanity cases in the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
In the 1920s William Monroe Trotter continued his boisterous and bold attacks against race discrimination, segregation, and lynching. Turning his back on the Democrats in 1920, he campaigned for a U.S. senator from his home state of Ohio, Warren Harding, whom he hoped would be far more receptive to race issues than Woodrow Wilson had been. President Harding soon knew the name Trotter and the causes he so tirelessly pursued. So did Harding’s successors. In 1926, Trotter carried petitions to President Calvin Coolidge with 25,000 signatures calling for an end to the segregation of federal offices in Washington—a system Wilson had put into place. When traffic caused him to be late for the meeting with Coolidge and a presidential staffer was critical, Trotter said, “Why, the President is Republican. The Negro has been waiting 50 years on the Republican Party; it won’t hurt the President to wait a few minutes on the Negro.” The meeting with Coolidge lasted twelve minutes and the president told Trotter that the federal buildings were in the process of being integrated. In 1933, Trotter was back again in the capital with the same request, this time seeking the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt for the cause of desegregating U.S. government offices.
Despite a rushing stream of disappointments, Trotter never quit the fight for “real democracy.” During the remaining years of his life, his fierce adherence to integration led him to battles not only with resistant whites but also skeptical blacks who worried that integration could lead to loss of racial identity. His persistence seemed only to fuel his reputation as a militant and zealot. And while his work was a harbinger of the 1960s civil rights movement in America, he would never know the impact of his commitment and sacrifice. The tragedy of Trotter’s life was that he would die “without much assurance that his dedication had been worth it,” his biographer later wrote.
In the 1930s, Trotter struggled financially to keep his newspaper and his causes alive. He lived in an apartment in Boston with Mrs. Mary Gibson, the woman who in 1919 had taught him to cook so that he might find a job on a ship bound for France. On the night of April 6, 1934, unable to sleep, Trotter went up to the roof of the apartment building. Recently he had been agitated and nervous, often pacing back and forth in his office and at home. That night he paced across the flat roof, returned to his room again to try to sleep, and then went back to the roof. Early the next morning Mrs. Gibson’s son heard an odd sound and, seeing that Trotter was not in his room, looked for him on the roof. Peering over the front edge, he saw Trotter lying motionless on the ground below. The great guardian of justice died on the way to the hospital. It was his sixty-second birthday. Whether Trotter fell or jumped, no one would ever know. In 1969, Boston’s first officially desegregated public school was named the William Monroe Trotter School. And seven years later Trotter’s home on Sawyer Street, where he had lived for many years, was designated a National Historic Landmark. “We have come to protest forever against being proscribed or shut off in any caste from equal rights with other citizens and shall remain on the firing line at any and all times in defence of such rights,” so wrote Trotter in the first issue of The Guardian in 1901. The last issue of The Guardian was April 20, 1957.
In the years following 1919, The Crisis pushed hard for anti-lynching legislation. And it became a virtual bulletin board for the budding cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Like a poem with orchestral sweep, the Harlem Renaissance was an expression of black liberation coming from the many voices of poets, playwrights, novelists, songwriters, musicians, painters, and sculptors. One part literary movement and one part social revolt, it was an outpouring of talent that awakened all of America willing to listen to the richness of the African-American heritage. Emerging out of the spirit and struggle of 1919, the “New Negro,” as black writer Alain Locke called the metamorphosis of his race in the 1920s, raised the consciousness of African-Americans to a new level of self-awareness and pride.
The 1920s would be as much about Langston Hughes and the New Negro as it would be about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age. And much of the Harlem Renaissance talent would grace the pages of The Crisis, whose editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, was considered the patriarch of the movement. Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, among many others, proclaimed their rightful place among the nation’s most talented writers.
The organized black resistance to white mobs in 1919, the anti-lynching campaigns, and the emergence of the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance laid the foundation for the civil rights movement forty years later, which would give birth to the world for which African-Americans of 1919 had struggled.
For the United States, the Great War did not officially end until October 1921, when the Senate passed a bill officially declaring that America was no longer at war with Germany, Austria, or Hungary. The United States never ratified the Treaty of Versailles nor did it ever become a member of the League of Nations.
Sixty-three countries belonged to the League at its peak, including France and Great Britain, both of which joined at the start and stuck with it until the end. A succession of events in the 1930s, such as Italy’s attack against Ethiopia, showed how weak the League was in the face of flagrant violations of its peace-directed Covenant. In 1933 Germany, under Nazi leadership, withdrew its membership, followed by Japan, Italy, and more than a dozen nations. Nearly extinct by 1940 and clearly unable to stop World War II, the League dissolved at the end of the war. Although it was never strong enough to prevent war or to fulfill Wilson’s mission of collective security, the lessons of the League helped to shape the next attempt at international cooperation, the United Nations.
In 1920 the winner of the coveted Nobel Peace Prize was Woodrow Wilson. The next year Wilson returned to private law practice in Washington, but he spent most of his time at home on S Street in his library. Neither the three steps that Grayson had built for him nor any other therapy or treatment could restore the president’s health. He was nearly blind, partially paralyzed, and sadly bitter.
On the night of November 10, 1923, the eve of Armistice Day, Wilson delivered a speech from his home to the American public using the new national medium, the radio. It would be the last time the American nation as a whole would hear the eloquent words of the man so many of them had once idolized. He began:
The anniversary of Armistice Day should stir us to great exaltation of spirit because of the proud recollection that it was our day, a day above those early days of that never-to-be forgotten November which lifted the world to the high levels of vision and achievement upon which the great war for democracy and right was fought and won; although the stimulating memories of that happy time of triumph are forever marred and embittered for us by the shameful fact that when the victory was won, be it remembered—chiefly by the indomitable spirit and ungrudging sacrifices of our incomparable soldiers—we turned our backs on our associates and refused to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace, or the firm and permanent establishment of the results of the war—won at so terrible a cost of life and treasure—and withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation which is deeply ignoble, manifestly cowardly and dishonorable.
His last lines were:
The only way in which we can worthily give proof of our appreciation of the high significance of Armistice Day is by resolving to put self-interest away and once more formulate and act on the highest ideals and purposes of international policy. Thus, and only thus, can we return to the true traditions of America.
The next day, at least twenty thousand people gathered outside his window to show their appreciation and admiration. He spoke briefly to them on his front steps. Three months later, on February 3, 1924, Woodrow Wilson died at home.
The visitation was at the house on S Street, where the body lay in the large room at the front. The service was held at the Chapel of the National Cathedral in Washington. “It was the most notable gathering of Americans I had ever seen on any one occasion,” wrote Ray Stannard Baker in his journal.
After the funeral, Baker found himself repeating a passage he had recently read and committed to memory from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “The just man passeth away, but his light remaineth: and it is after the saviour’s death that men are mostly saved. Mankind will reject and kill their prophets, but will love their martyrs and honor those whom they have done to death.”
Baker had spent a good deal of time with Wilson in recent years. In fact, he had lived with the Wilsons for their last two months in the White House and had moved with them to S Street, where Baker had his own study for the purpose of writing his next book. The president had decided in December of 1920 to allow Baker to read through all his papers from the conference, many of which were secret documents and confidential memos. It was an invitation that Baker never anticipated. In Baker’s book What Wilson Did at Paris, he had been so honest in his criticism of the president’s unwillingness to reveal the inner workings of the conference that he believed the president might be offended and even shun him. The “supreme failure of the Conference was the complicated failure in publicity,” Baker had written. But to Baker’s surprise, Wilson actually respected him for his candor and even suggested that Baker write a book that would reveal the secret machinations of those crucial months in Paris. The result was Baker’s 1922 three-volume work entitled Woodrow Wilson and the World Settlement—A History of the Peace Conference.
Despite its ponderous title, the work had a vast audience, some of whom hailed it as an excellent accomplishment, while others skewered Baker, labeling him an apologist for Wilson. Indeed, the book stirred a rather heated debate between those who believed Wilson had known about the secret wartime treaties among the Allies regarding colonies and territories, believed the peace conference was a farce, and thought Wilson was a liar; and those, like Baker, who believed that Wilson had ignored the treaties and had in turn naively trusted the Allies to set aside such old agreements. Baker defended Wilson, saying that the president had assumed that after the terms of the Armistice were agreed upon, then the secret aims of wartime would be set aside for the higher purposes of peace and a new world order. He pointed out that Lloyd George had given a speech in January of 1918 in which he disavowed “the imperialistic aims of the Allies as disclosed in certain of the secret treaties.” Baker compared the situation to the San Francisco earthquake, which he had covered as a journalist. After such disasters and shocks as earthquakes and wars, “men remembered themselves again,” as Baker put it, and were lifted to a higher plane. He went so far as to say that Wilson did not even read the secret treaties. For the rest of Baker’s life he would be enmeshed in one controversy or another regarding Wilson’s character and his work at the peace conference, especially the matter of the secret treaties. Although it was a hugely complicated issue that historians would continue to debate, Baker would always believe that Wilson, though a difficult, stubborn man, had tried his best to push his ideals at the peace conference. But his critics could see only the ashes of a dream torched by Wilson himself, who lacked the courage to stand up to the old despotic ways that had caused the war and who was unwilling to give up America’s own imperialistic aims. Perhaps in the pursuit of truth, Baker was derailed by hope.
While that pot was still simmering, Baker began his next project, which was a multivolume set of the president’s public papers. Then in the midst of that immense task came another: the biography of Woodrow Wilson. Baker had explained his vision for such a work to the president in a letter in 1923 and again in 1924 but the president never responded—at least not directly to Baker. Always torn between his journalistic side and the creative life he expressed through the works of David Grayson, Baker decided in the summer of 1924 that he must choose one or the other. Although his journal revealed that he chose David Grayson over Ray Stannard Baker, he was still not at ease with his decision. By January of 1925 he in fact had changed his mind. It was then that Mrs. Wilson shared with him a letter the president had dictated to her nine days before his death, a missive to Baker that read: “Every time you disclose your mind to me you increase my admiration and affection for you. I always dislike to make, even intimate, a promise until I have at least taken some steps to facilitate my keeping it. I am glad to promise you that with regard to my personal correspondence and other similar papers I shall regard you as my preferred creditor, and shall expect to afford you the first—and if necessary exclusive—access to those papers. I would rather have your interpretation of them than that of anybody I know.”
Baker proposed a four-volume work on the life of Wilson, and eventually wrote eight volumes entitled Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters. The first volume appeared in 1927 and the last in 1939. In 1940, Baker won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for the last two volumes of the series. He then embarked on his own story, publishing the first volume of his autobiography in 1941. Before he completed the second volume in 1945, Baker worked as a consultant to Darryl Zanuck for the $5.2 million film Wilson, which debuted in August 1944.
David Grayson too was prolific. Despite Baker’s twenty-year immersion in the life of Woodrow Wilson, Grayson wrote Adventures in Solitude in 1931, The Countryman’s Year in 1936, and Under My Elm in 1942, as well as numerous essays for Reader’s Digest. One side of Baker marched forward with the fast rhythm of every devoted journalist while the other side wanted to stop the march of progress and ponder the meaning of life. In Under My Elm, Grayson wrote: “I have been where there was too much talk, too many things, food more than I needed, amusement keyed too high; where speed and not beauty seemed the test of life; and I come home again to my own calm hills, my own town, to the beautiful quiet of my own thoughts. If only people would be still for a little and look at the world before they drown everything in torrents of talk!”
Springtime would always be a celebration for Baker. Even from his sickbed after suffering a heart attack in the spring of 1946, he watched his bees and his budding trees from an open window. By July he was outside again. On July 8 he wrote in his journal, “Walking out this morning into the clear still sunshine, I had a great thought. It has been with me all day, blessing what I have seen and done, restoring my soul, giving me new courage and strength…” He never completed the sentence and never revealed what the thought was. The next entry in his diary was written by another hand, on July 12: “Dear Ray died at 3:30 this morning after a severe heart attack.”
Baker’s last published work was the second volume of his autobiography, entitled American Chronicle. It covered the period from his years as a muckraking journalist to the completion of his eight volumes on the life of Wilson. And he ended it in a way that effectively showed a union of the voices of Baker and Grayson. With a touch of Baker, he wrote in the last paragraph that his greatest satisfaction in the late years of his life was to know that his writings about Wilson had advanced an understanding of the man, thus allowing Wilson to be recognized for the “pre-eminent man that he was.” And then with a touch of Grayson, he ended the book with a poem that reflected his now deep understanding of all truth seekers who boldly pursue a cause:
Curious, in time, I stand, noting the efforts of heroes:
Is the deferment long? Bitter the slander, poverty, death?
Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground?
Lo! To God’s due occasion,
Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms,
And fills the earth with use and beauty.