The Rise of Segregation in the Federal Bureaucracy, 1900-1930 Author(S): August Meier and Elliott Rudwick Source: Phylon (1960-), Vol

Clark Atlanta University

The Rise of Segregation in the Federal Bureaucracy, 1900-1930 Author(s): August Meier and Elliott Rudwick Source: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 28, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1967), pp. 178-184 Published by: Clark Atlanta University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/273560 Accessed: 12/09/2010 21:46

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http://www.jstor.org By AUGUST MEIER and ELLIOTT RUDWICK

The Rise of Segregation in the Federal Bureaucracy, 1900-1930 t fTTHE INTRODUCTION OF SEGREGATIONinto the civil service," wrote Ralph J J. Bunche in 1940, "was one of the blackest and most abominable spots on the Wilson Administration." 1 Certainly, the growth of racial segregation in the federal bureaucracy is a well-known aspect of Wil- son's presidency.2 Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson and Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo have been held personally responsi- ble for this innovation. One popular account even blames the Presi- dent's wife, who on a visit to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving was shocked to find white and Negro clerks lunching together.3 A few historians have indicated that the practice began under Presi- dent Taft.4 Generally forgotten, however, has been the fact that this was a Republican as well as a Democratic policy. It was introduced at least as early as the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt, and was expanded during the period of Republican ascendancy in the 1920's.5 The developments during the Wilson Administration impressed both contemporaries and historians for several reasons. Certainly a dramatic increase in the extent of segregation in the government bureaus oc- curred at that time. Moreover, people anticipated that the Democratic Wilson Administration, with its strong Southern tone, would exhibit widespread discrimination. Thirdly, the opening months of the Wilson presidency were a period of general deterioration in the status of Ne- groes, involving the exclusion of colored men from most patronage positions traditionally held by the race and serious attempts to enact jim crow laws and anti-intermarriage statutes for the Northern states and

1Ralph J. Bunche, "The Political Status of the Negro" (Unpublished Memorandum for Car- negie-Myrdal Study of Negroes in America, 1940), p. 1384. 2 Kathleen Wolgemuth, "Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation," Journal of Negro History, XLIV (April, 1959), 148-73; Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton, 1956), pp. 246-52; Laurence J. W. Hayes, The Negro Federal Government Worker (Washington, 1941), pp. 30-35; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944), p. 327; Richard B. Sher- man, "Republicans and Negroes: The Lessons of Normalcy," Phylon, XXVII (First Quarter, 1966), 75; all either implicity suggest or explicitly state that the practice began under Wilson. The NAACP national board of directors in protesting the Wilsonian policy, called it a "new and radical departure." (Washington Bee, August 23, 1913); see also Link, op. cit., p. 250. sCrisis, XXXV (November, 1928), 369; Cleveland Gazette, January 19, 1929. E.g., August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, 1963), 165. Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church, the leading Negro Democrat at the opening of Wilson's presidency, recalled that the humiliating policy had actually started in the "latter part of Roosevelt's administration, and was continued during Taft's." AWMEChurch Review, XXI (October, 1914), 209. 178 SEGREGATION IN THE FEDERAL BUREAURACY 179 the District of Columbia. Finally, and most important of all, there was the dramatic confrontation between the President and the Negro radical protest leader Monroe Trotter over the issue of federal segregation. Trotter headed a delegation which had obtained an audience with the President to discuss the matter. The conference closed unpleasantly when Wilson ordered Trotter out of his office for what he deemed insulting language. This act of the President received enormous publicity and outraged Negroes all over the country.6 Even contemporaries were not aware of the full extent of the trend toward segregation in the federal departments under Republican presidents both before and after Wilson. Among the Negro newspapers con- sulted, only the Washington Bee gave much attention to the issue prior to the Wilson Administration. During the 1920's,it was chiefly the Cleve- land Gazette, whose editor was a close friend of Neval Thomas, president of the Washington, D. C. branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which carried numerous and detailed accounts. Generally speaking, the situation seems to have received publicity in 1913-1914and again in the middle twenties only when national protest organizations made it the subject of a vigorous campaign. Segregation of Negro clerks in the federal executive departments was part of a larger movement toward the limitation, if not the exclusion, of Negro white collar workers from the civil service. The "rule of three," first used in 1888, permitting the selection of any of the top three applicants for a position, became a notorious instrument for weed- ing out qualified Negroes.7 Agencies also found excuses for not promot- ing Negroes and even justified the existence of segregated units as the only way Negroes could be promoted to supervisory positions.8 Most government departments hired few colored clerks, and the ma- jority of Negro white collar workers were concentrated in the Treasury, Interior, and Post Office Departments.9 Where Negro clerks were few or absent, the clamor for segregating them did not arise; accordingly it was in these three departments that the problem of segregation (as dis- tinct from hiring and promotion practices) was most critical. During the period treated in this article, there were also reports of segregation in the War, Commerce, and Justice Departments. Segregation of government clerks took various forms. Negroes were commonly required to work in separate rooms, or in a separate section of a larger room in which whites also worked. Segregated lockers and lavatories were also widespread. Most pervasive of all apparently was the practice of segregated lunchrooms.

6 Washington Bee, November 21, 1914; AME Church Review, XXI (January, 1915), 309-18; Link, op. cit., p 252. 7 Hayes, op. cit., pp. 49-51. Even under McKinley the rule was commonly used as a discrimina- tory device. (Washington Bee, September 16, 1899). s E.g., Pittsburgh Courier, August 20, 1967. Hayes, op. cit., p. 113. 180 PHYLON

The federal bureaucracy had never been free of discrimination. Dur- ing Reconstruction, when Negro clerks were first employed in sig- nificant numbers,?1 some were segregated; but toward the end of the century such practices were "at a minimum." 11 Although Theodore Roosevelt's Administration is known for the expansion of the civil service merit system, during his years as president Negroes often complained about discrimination in hiring and pro- motions 12 and there was a tendency to segregate the colored clerks in some departments. As early as March, 1904, the Washington Bee noted that a "Negro colony" had been established in "one or two departments of the government," specifically the Pension and Record Division of the War Deepartment, where Negro clerks were "set off in one corner of the building." Six months later the Bee asserted that the trend toward segregation was growing. It especially singled out the Treasury, War, and Interior Departments, "where scores of colored clerks are placed in rooms without a white clerk in them." 13 In mid-1905 the Bee protested about the Bureau of Engraving of the Treasury Department, where only Negroes were assigned to one corner known as "the rag house," doing very hot and disagreeable work. Nearly a year later a wooden partition separating the two races was constructed in the women's locker room in the new wing of this Bureau. Thereafter colored printers' assistants who worked on all floors of the building were forced to use this one locker room. It was reported that "in many instances the colored girls are not given clean towels and neither are they given decent wash basins." Not quite two years later the Bureau of Engraving provided separate toilet rooms for the white and colored women; the one for Negroes was unheated.14 Meanwhile racial segregation and exclusion had appeared in certain restaurants located in federal buildings. At the United States Court- house restaurant, both Negro employees and the general public experi- enced discrimination.15 During the summer of 1905, even such prominent figures as Municipal Judge Robert H. Terrell and Recorder of Deeds J. C. Dancy had been refused service at the lunchroom of the General Land Office in the Interior Department. And early in 1908 the Treasury Department lunchroom refused to serve Lewis H. Douglass, son of Frederick Douglass.16 By this time, the Washington Bee observed, things were "getting worse," and over the next four years under Taft, segregation was ex-

o Probably the first Negro clerk was appointed by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase in 1863. 1 Crisis, XXXV (November, 1928), 369. 12E.g., Washington Bee, April 6, 1901; July 2, 1904; July 22, 1905; April 21, July 21, August 11, 1906; February 23, November 16, 1907. 18Ibid., March 19, 1904; September 3, 1904. 4 Ibid., July 15, 1905; May 19, June 2, June 30, 1906; March 7, 1908. 15 Ibid., August 8, 1905; March 16, April 13, 1907. 6 Indianapolis Freeman, August 12, 1905; Washington Bee, February 22, 1908. SEGREGATION IN THE FEDERAL BUREAURACY 181 tended even further. In 1910 it was instituted in the Census Bureau and in the diningroom for White House employees.17 During the first months of the Wilson Administration, the pattern was expanded further, especially in the Post Office and Treasury De- partments.18 Intervention by prominent Negro Democrats such as Bish- op Alexander Walters brought down the insulting signs designating separate lavatories in the Treasury Department, but the employees were quietly told to use the old jim crow facilities.19 Protests in 1913 and 1914 by the NAACP and by militants such as Monroe Trotter are cred- ited with halting the spread of the policy of separating clerks in the government offices.20 Nevertheless, contrary to the general impression, this was not the end of the story as far as the Wilson Administration was concerned. The war preparedness efforts and World War I itself were accompanied by further incidents. In August, 1916, the superin- tendent of the State, War, and Navy Departments building set up separate men's rooms. Protests led to a reversal of the policy a month later.21 The War Trade Commission, however, decided to maintain separate toilets for Negroes. And after the war, segregation was instituted in the lunchroom of the Library of Congress.22 Negro leaders made segregation in the federal departments an important campaign issue in the election of 1920. After the Republican nominating convention, national committeeman Henry L. Johnson, who conducted the Republican campaign among Negroes, stressed that the race wanted a general executive order forbidding segregation in any federal department. James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the NAACP, conferred with candidate Harding, who asserted that he op- posed segregation in the government departments and promised that if elected he would abolish the practice by executive order. However, he refused to make a public statement, fearing it would hurt the party politically.23 Yet after the election, Harding did not issue the order. In the early months of the Administration, an Associated Negro Press representative noted that Attorney General Daugherty ignored repeated requests to remedy the jim crow conditions in the Division of Mails and Files of the Justice Department which he had inherited from the Democrats. The reporter added that colored laborers were just about the only Negro employees who were not in segregated work groups. Two years later,

Washington Bee, May 30, 1908; Chicago Defender, July 30, 1910; Baltimore Afro-American, January 22, 1910; Washington Bee, May 15, 1914. is Link, op. cit., p. 247; Crisis, VII (November, 1913), 343. 19 Baltimore Afro-American, October 25, 1913; January 17, 1914; New York Age, August 28, September 11, 1913. 2 Link, op. cit, p. 252; Wolgemuth, op. cit., p. 171. 2 Washington Bee, September 9, 1916; New York Age, September 14, 1916; James Weldon John- son's column in ibid., September 18, 1920. 2Washington Bee, August 24, 1918; New York Age, August 23, 1919; Secretary's Report, NAACP National Board of Directors Minutes, December, 1919. 3 Richmond Planet, July 17, 1920; NAACP Board Minutes, September, 1920. 182 PHYLON

James Weldon Johnson descibed segregation in the various departments of the federal bureaucracy as "widespread."24 During the final days of the Harding Administration, and under Coolidge, who succeeded him, conditions again became worse. Early in July, 1923, a few weeks before Harding's death, an important symbolic issue for Negroes arose when segregation was extended to the office of the Register of the Treasury. The post, which Negroes had traditionally held under Republican administrations, had remained in white hands when the Republicans returned to office in 1921. Register H. V. Speelman, a white Ohioan, placed the Negro clerks in a special unit under a Negro section chief. In 1923 Speelman decided that "efficiency" required the erection of a beaverboard partition to prevent Negro clerks from having any contact with the whites. To stop clerks of both races from using the same elevator together, he required Negroes to arrive and depart fifteen minutes earlier than the whites.25 Adding further humiliation, he established jim crow lavatories for Negro women and even demanded that the male clerks perform menial labor such as load- ing and unloading trucks. In response to a vociferous Negro protest, Speelman made only one concession: he restored integrated lavatories.26Jim crowism in the Register's office received national attention after the names of Negro and white employees who died in World War I were memorialized on separate tablets on Armistice Day, 1924. Vigor- ous protests by Negro veterans led Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon to direct that a framed scroll listing all names alphabetically be substituted for the tablets.27 If the office of Register of the Treasury provided the biggest symbolic issue, from the point of sheer numbers the problem was most critical elsewhere in the Treasury - at the Bureau of Engraving and Print- ing, where more Negro women were employed than in any other agency. Under Republicans as under Democrats, Negroes were jim crowed in working stations, toilets, and the cafeteria.28 In 1924 Neval Thomas surveyed conditions in the various government agencies. He found Negroes allowed at only a few tables "in an out of the way section" of the Government Printing Office cafeteria, and "ram- pant" segregation in the Post Office Department, with colored workers excluded from the cafeteria and employees lounge and segregated in the locker rooms and toilets. The national NAACP at its 1924 annual conference condemned the Republican Party for allowing segregation in government offices. A year later an NAACP investigator found that

24St. Louis Argus, June 17, 1921; Secretary's Report, NAACP Board Minutes, March, 1923. 25Cleveland Gazette, July 14, 1923; Atlanta Independent, July 5, 1923, October 18, 1923; Kansas City Call, November 16, 1923. 26 Atlanta Independent, November 1, 1923; Kansas City Call, November 30, 1923, June 27, 1924; St. Louis Argus, October 3, 1924; Cleveland Gazette, July 5, 1924. 27Atlanta Independent, November 20, 1924; Kansas City Call, December 5, 1924; St. Louis Argus, December 5, 1924. 28Cleveland Gazette, August 9, April 15, 1924. SEGREGATION IN THE FEDERAL BUREAURACY 183 segregation in the bureaus was "more or less obvious to any observer." In 1926 Moorfield Storey, the NAACP president, concluded that the segregation was probably worse under Coolidge than during any previous administration.29 Meanwhile the issue had become a focal point for the agitation of Trotter's National Equal Rights League and the Washington branch of the NAACP.30 Late in 1926, representatives of the two groups conferred with the President. He maintained that much discrimination had been eliminated, and agreed to work hard to stamp out what remained.31 Despite Coolidge's protestations, the segregation policy actually expanded. In July, 1927, when several Negro examiners in the Interior Department were assigned together in a new work station, E. C. Finney, acting Secretary of the Interior, told objectors that "the purpose of the consolidation was not to segregate colored employees, but to place an important unit of the Pension Office completely in their charge."32 Although the colored male clerks were no longer permitted to give dictation to white female stenographers but had to submit the material to them in longhand, Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, held that this step was taken to promote "efficiency."33 He rescinded the segregation in the Pension Bureau only after a vigorous protest campaign led by Neval Thomas.34 Subsequently the protest of Thomas and the National Equal Rights League prompted Secretary of Commerce Her- bert Hoover to end segregation in the Bureau of the Census.35 Mean- while Thomas with the help of the League and the national NAACP also attacked segregation in the Interior Department's General Land Office and in the Treasury Department. These struggles, however, were un- successful.36 The 1920's ended with the problem of the Treasury Department un- touched, some segregated work units existing in the Interior Depart- ment, and the general prevalence of jim crow lavatories, locker rooms, and cafeterias.37 Hoover had eliminated segregation in the Depart- ment of Commerce at the time he wanted to obtain the presidential nomination. As chief executive, however, he ignored the problem while blandly receiving delegations of Negroes who came to see him about the persistent discrimination.38

29Ibid., August 9, 1924; Crisis, XXVIII (August, 1924), 152; Secretary's Report, NAACP Board Minutes, February, 1925; NAACP Board Minutes, May 10, 1926. 30 E.g., Pittsburgh Courier, November 3, 1923; St. Louis Argus, August 28, 1925; NAACP Board Minutes, September 13, 1926; Cleveland Gazette, June 25, 1927. 51 Cleveland Gazette, October 2, 1926; Pittsburgh Courier, February 26, 1927. 32Kansas City Call, August 5, 1927; Pittsburgh Courier, August 20, 1927. s Crisis, XXXIV (December, 1927), 334. See Cleveland Gazette, November 12, 1927, and Crisis, XXXV (November, 1928), 388, for a similar situation in the Land Office. 34Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1927; Cleveland Gazette, October 22, 1927; Secretary's Report, NAACP Board Minutes, October, 1927; Crisis, XXXIV (December, 1927), 334. 85Cleveland Gazette, April 7, 1928; Richmond Planet, April 14, 1928. 30 Atlanta Independent, December 22, 1927; Secretary's Report, NAACP Board Minutes, March, 1928; New York Age, April 7, 1928, May 12, 1928; Pittsburgh Courier, January 14, 1928. a7Crisis, XXXV (November, 1928), 369, 388; NAACP Board Minutes, January, 1929. 38New York Age, December 12, 1930; Pittsburgh Courier, December 5, 1931. 184 PHYLON

Thus, in the first third of the century, two Republican presidents before Wilson and three Republican presidents after him permitted the growth and spread of a policy of segregating the relatively few Ne- groes able to obtain white collar positions in the executive departments. Ironically, the climax of this process came not under Woodrow Wilson, who had been born in the South, but during the Administration of Calvin Coolidge, that most Yankee of presidents.

By JAYE GIAMMARINO

Heart of Hearts

United Nations, symbol of the Age, A giant heart enmeshed in East and West; With drama aptly played on center-stage- Each Solomon applies his wit at best. United Nations, universal heart, That channels hope for worldly ills like blood; And Understanding, pulse and counterpart Of love for man, an embryonic bud.

The heart that wakes to good evokes no beat For legions that display the tiger's tooth, As nations throw off chaff and take the wheat To feed the fire within the brain of youth. And as the force of life links heart and mind, This mesh of hearts unites all men in kind.