In 1904 George Edwin Taylor, a farmer and former newspaper editor from rural Iowa, ran for president of the United States. In 2011 the historian Bruce L. Mouser published a biography, George Edwin Taylor: His Historic Run for the White House. The reason this all but forgotten candidate from America’s political periphery was worthy of a biography is that he was the first African American to run for the presidency.
By contrast, Mark Twain’s run for the presidency is only briefly noted in his biographies, when noted at all—and appropriately so, as Twain was just making a joke. Taylor was serious. As to their racial difference, Taylor’s candidacy reveals that it actually occludes more insightful distinctions that reveal the shape of racial views back then being far less simple than many today may assume. Twain identified with the interests of wealthy Americans, most of whom voted Republican, but so too did most African Americans, continuing to hew to the party of Lincoln. Taylor likewise identified with fellow African Americans, but he also saw common cause with farmers and industrial workers, most of whom were Democrats and many of whom were racist. Nevertheless Taylor aligned with and was active in the Democratic Party.
Until his presidential bid.
Following the official end of Reconstruction in 1877, the powers-that-were in the South before the Civil War became the powers-that-be via their formerly dominant Democratic Party. But they now had to deal with the enactment in 1868 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to former slaves. To combat this amendment when rebuilding their party’s platform, they included trap doors to impede African Americans from voting. Among the ways they devised, and that were subsequently enacted by their state legislatures, were poll taxes and literacy tests—deemed legal since, ostensibly, they applied to everyone. At the national level the Republicans did nothing to intervene on behalf of African Americans being deprived of their rights. By the 1904 presidential election enough African Americans despaired of making inroads in the Republican Party that they convened in St. Louis to form the National Liberty Party for the purpose of nominating their own presidential candidate or exerting more influence by forming a bloc of African American voters.
The keyword in the previous sentence is or. From the outset the absence of a unified vision regarding the mission of this new party repeatedly undermined its effectiveness, which in turn discouraged many highly regarded African American leaders from committing to the effort. While Taylor was highly regarded, he was not the first pick of the convention. In fact he was fifth—and before getting to him, they’d even picked a white guy.
First to be nominated was Alexander Walters, an activist bishop in the AME Church who had served on various commissions and in other political capacities.1 He declined the offer. The convention then set its sights on J. Milton Turner, who was the first African American in the nation’s diplomatic corps when President Grant appointed him ambassador to Liberia.2 He too said no thanks. The delegates in St. Louis then voted to back the candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt. Or not, as the next day they rescinded that vote and opted instead to nominate William T. Scott. He accepted.3
“Candidate for President Arrested” read the headline in Minnesota’s St. Paul Globe on July 14, 1904, two days after the reports of Scott’s nomination. The article reported, “William T. Scott, candidate for president of the United States on the National Liberty Party (colored) ticket, was arrested today on account of an unpaid fine. . . . Several months ago, Scott, who runs a saloon and summer garden, was convicted of conducting a disorderly place.”4
Scott was removed from the ticket and replaced with George Edwin Taylor, whose rise had been as impressive, albeit less exuberant, than that of the more charismatic Scott. Nevertheless several of the details surrounding Scott’s removal provide us with a view of racism being camouflaged in that era. Despite the widespread acceptance back then of racist ridicule in depictions of African Americans in literature and by whites in blackface on stage, many Americans sought to cloak their racism from others (and, perhaps, themselves) in ways that would soon be aimed at the Taylor campaign.
“It is extremely painful to learn that the presidential candidate of the National Liberty Party, who is the conductor of a beer garden in East St. Louis, has been arrested for keeping a disorderly place,” one Pennsylvania news report began with seeming sincerity. It then pulled the rug out from under that concern when it went on to make a play on words regarding alcohol: “This is a free country and allows almost anyone to run for president, but the National Liberty Party appears to have reached the limit.”5
Similarly from an Arizona newspaper: “The National Liberty Party (colored) has selected Payne and Scott as its standard bearers, although one of its candidates is a little handicapped by reason of being in jail at East St. Louis for failure to pay [a] fine for running a disorderly house.”6 The phrase “disorderly house” was often a form of camouflage. Today it may sound like a euphemism for “whorehouse,” but the term encompassed much more. A “disorderly house” was a place where any illegal activities were believed to occur habitually—a term so broad that, in time, courts ruled it unduly vague and therefore susceptible to arbitrary and capricious enforcement.7 Which is also to say, a useful tool for racists.
Camouflage of a different stripe was embedded in the report of Scott’s arrest that appeared in a St. Louis newspaper when it stated, “It is an insult to the Negro of the state of Illinois and of the United States by placing such an objectionable Negro at the head of such a movement.” After citing this statement in his biography of Scott, Bruce Mouser (the biographer also of Taylor) asked, “‘Objectionable Negro’?”8 The phrase was not random at the time. In A Guide into the South (1910), the word objectionable occurs six times—five in the context of African Americans, the sixth in reference to a spring at a particular resort having a “not objectionable scent.” Similarly “objectionable Negro” was frequently used in other books and newspapers at the time.9 But hold onto your hats. The St. Louis newspaper that hurled this term at Scott was that city’s African American newspaper, the Palladium.
All of these issues beset the National Liberty Party’s convention, culminating in its ultimately nominating Taylor. These are the same complexities that cause us to question whether Taylor was a “fringe” candidate or a third party candidate. For beneath these semantics is the key question: Was Taylor’s candidacy widely viewed with ridicule?
Clearly, even in 1904 many white Americans spoke of Taylor’s presidential bid with respect. Days after his nomination, the Omaha Bee ran an article recounting the education he cobbled together while growing up in Wisconsin, his entry as a youth into the newspaper trade as a printer’s assistant and subsequent rise through the ranks of that white newspaper to become its city editor, moving on to create his own newspaper in Iowa, and later becoming a successful farmer and active Democrat.10 Press material announcing Taylor’s candidacy and providing a more detailed account of his life appeared verbatim as newspaper articles in numerous northern states.11
In Taylor’s hometown of Ottumwa, Iowa, both of the newspapers—one aligned with Democratic Party views, the other with Republican—printed in full Taylor’s “Letter of Acceptance,” that era’s version of the speech nominees deliver today at their party’s convention. In it Taylor spoke of the poll taxes and literacy tests used to block African Americans from voting. He then pivoted from pointing at southern Democrats to pointing at northern Republicans:
The present president [Theodore Roosevelt] and the Republican congress, together with the Supreme Court, dodge behind the ghost of Jefferson Davis . . . while to the politically crucified negro of the South they say “peace, be still, run with patience in the race that is set before you.” The only difference I am able to discern between the [southern] Democrats and the present administration Republicans, as to the subject of disfranchisement, is that the former are scrupulously honest in expressing their determination . . . while the latter are most unscrupulously dishonest, trying to run with the hounds, but sop with the coons.12
Taylor’s still-pungent words did not fall on deaf ears throughout the country. But that’s because no other newspaper printed his words, though several, in reporting on his candidacy, summed up his thoughts in words of their own.13 In Ottumwa the newspaper editors knew Taylor personally. Elsewhere he was known racially. From that distinction arises the proverbial, albeit genuinely felt catch-phrase of subconscious denial of prejudice, “Some of my best friends are [FILL IN THE BLANK].” Taylor’s candidacy provides a unique view of that distinction in action.
In one instance, however, Taylor was handed a nationwide megaphone in the form of a weekly magazine called the Independent, which published an article he wrote shortly before the election. Once again he cited what all Americans knew, that African Americans were being systematically excluded from voting in the South, but this time he replaced witticisms such as racing with hounds while sopping with coons with something more powerful: muscle. “No other race of our strength would have quietly submitted to what we have . . . without rebellion, a revolution, an uprising,” he wrote. “We, too, propose a rebellion, a revolution, an uprising, but not by physical force, but by the ballot—through the National Liberty Party.”14
But Taylor’s views on racism transcended race. He saw the efforts to marginalize African Americans in the larger context of maintaining power by diminishing the power of others. While skeptical of the Socialist Party and aware of the racism among many Populists, Taylor took the opportunity in this magazine article to urge other groups facing forms of persecution to recognize their common ground: “Whenever the [African American] race and their co-laborers shall array themselves in one grand independent political phalanx, the very foundations of the two dominant political parties will be shaken, and the leaders of both will be brought to a realization of the danger which threatens their organization, and the rights of the people will again be considered by them instead of those of special classes as is the present rule.”15
If the truth and intelligence of his statements did not inoculate Taylor against ridicule, add to them the fact that he also spoke to his expectations as a candidate for president—expectations that were far from those of a fool. “The campaign will be of an educational nature, and confined largely to the distribution of literature,” the Ottumwa Weekly Democrat reported in a follow-up article on Taylor’s candidacy.16 The previously mentioned newspaper reports that summed up his acceptance letter included Taylor’s fondest presidential hope, that his candidacy “may hold the balance of power which will decide who shall be president.”
All told, there was nothing ridiculous in Taylor’s candidacy. Except, for some number of Americans, his race.
“Taylor is nothing more than a tool used by the Democratic Party to cut into the Negro vote of the Republicans,” declared H. R. Wright, an attorney and Republican activist.17 But grab hold of your hats again: Wright was African American. Moreover he was one of many African Americans who looked askance at Taylor and the entire effort to form a separate party based mainly on race. In reporting on the planned convention to create the National Liberty Party, an African American newspaper in Minnesota smirked, “We know nothing of the affair, but suppose some schemers are trying to catch suckers, of which it is said one is born every minute.”18 Here again Taylor’s candidacy reveals racial views at the time to be far from simple.
Needless to say, there was no shortage of smirks from whites. “All Reformers are funny, but none of them are quite as funny as the Reformers of the National Liberty Party,” California’s Modesto Evening News chortled. Iowa’s Cedar Falls Gazette sniffed, “We are not yet ready to turn the government over to them, and the fact that they are clamoring for this state of affairs is proof positive that they are incapable . . . and wholly unable to control what they seek.”19
Just as an absence of facts camouflaged the ridicule heaped on Scott following his arrest on the unsubstantiated claims in the charge that he operated a “disorderly place,” so too were details deleted when the Iowa State Bystander stood by and said, “And lastly, the National Liberty Party, headed by one Geo. E. Taylor of this state as its sponsor and candidate for president with no platform and but few principles in [his] letter of acceptance.”20 In point of fact Taylor’s party had adopted a platform, one that was just as extensive as those of the Democrats and Republicans, all of which was detailed in Taylor’s letter of acceptance. In addition to advocating federal intervention to dismantle racially aimed restrictions on voting, Taylor cited the platform calling for the enactment of pensions for veterans of the Mexican-American War and the Civil War and for former slaves. It also called for a federal prohibition on polygamy (this issue aimed at that era’s Mormons in Utah), independence for the Philippines, the elimination of tariffs on imports, the establishment of a national arbitration board to resolve disputes between labor and management, and the use of a national referendum when Congress so deems. But—hat-grab time again—the Bystander was an African American newspaper.
Undoubtedly there was outright racist ridicule based on stereotypes of African Americans. Such remarks, however, appear to have gone from ear to ear without settling on a printed page where more equality-minded Americans could spot it and swat it. Nevertheless Taylor’s candidacy lifts the camouflage used to cloak such stereotypes.
“Colored Man Fails to File His Nomination Papers” headlined an article in Iowa’s Marshalltown Times-Republican. Similarly his hometown Ottumwa Weekly Courier told readers Taylor “neglected to file the necessary papers and his name and that of his party will be missing from the ticket voted in Iowa.”21 These depictions of Taylor as inept, at best, and in way over his head, at worst, cloaked quite a few facts from readers.
By the time the newly formed National Liberty Party nominated Taylor, there was barely enough time, if that, to organize at state and local levels, learn the requirements of those states for filing to be on the ballot, completing the paperwork for each, and coming up with filing fees and related costs for each state.22 Further thwarting those efforts was the continuing uncertainty as to the mission of the party, exemplified by Taylor’s running mate, W. C. Payne, endorsing Roosevelt eight weeks into the campaign, such as it was.
There was yet another wrinkle in the shape of racial views at the time. Ohio’s Stark County Democrat declared, “If Mr. Turner’s [meaning Taylor’s] colored brethren don’t stand by the National Liberty Party better than they stood by the Negro Protective Party in Ohio some years ago, he will scarcely get a thousand votes in the United States.”23 Getting Taylor’s name wrong was most likely an honest mistake, and “colored brethren” may or may not have been intended to convey ridicule. But predicting the number of votes Taylor turned out to be spot on, given that some 13,500,000 votes were cast in that year’s presidential election. Taylor received approximately 2,000 votes—a difference of less than .001 percent from that newspaper’s prediction.24
“George E. Taylor, candidate of the National Liberty Party for president in the past campaign, has announced his intention to try again. Nailed the ‘colors’ to the mast, as it were,” Iowa’s Times-Republican punned shortly after the election.25 But it was not to be. The National Liberty Party collapsed and disappeared.
In time Ottumwa’s unit of the Democratic Party accepted Taylor back, and in return for his efforts on behalf of the party’s gubernatorial candidate in 1907, he was provided with the salary—and job, ostensibly, given that he was now fifty years old—of a police officer.26 In response to which, the season was opened for ridicule. “From nominee for the office of president of the United States to night policeman in Smoky Row, in the ‘red light’ district, Ottumwa, is the unique change which time has wrought for George E. Taylor,” Iowa’s Oxford Mirror reported. But the news was not confined to Taylor’s home state; articles appeared in papers ranging from North Dakota’s Bismarck Daily Tribune to the Washington Post—that seemingly even-keeled news vessel telling its readers, “Ottumwa [Iowa] enjoys the distinction of having as a member of its police force a man who, during the last national campaign, made the race for the office of President of the United States. George E. Taylor, who was nominated for President by the National Liberty Party . . . has just been appointed to the position of night patrolman by Mayor-elect T. J. Phillips. . . . The Liberty Party is composed of colored voters.”27
Was it because Taylor was African American that newspapers across the nation, including the Washington Post, chimed in on this incident of small-town graft? You decide.
Indeed “you decide” was the underlying dynamic in much of the racist ridicule aimed at Taylor and the National Liberty Party. After all, African Americans have never been the only ones victimized by an absence of key details in press attacks. Nor have they ever been the only object of the adjective “objectionable.” And, theoretically at least, literacy tests and other requirements for voting did not only apply to them. Likewise laws regarding a disorderly place. Nor, to take the flip-side from a contemporary example, does the right to carry a firearm in public theoretically apply only to whites. But would you want to be a law-abiding black man with a gun holstered to your hip?
In Taylor’s candidacy we see how the shape of racial views in his era bore more facets than we may have thought. In addition it brings greater perspective and more dimensions to the changes that led to the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. Yet it also brings very clearly into view an aspect of racism that has not changed: the use of camouflage that hides prejudice in ways that say You decide.