Progressivism for Whites Only
Although many progressive leaders championed improving the lives of ordinary citizens, not all Americans were included in this protected group. Many leaders had racist and xenophobic attitudes and policies that oppressed marginalized groups at the same time as enacting "progressive" reforms.
Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, had very negative attitudes toward American Indians:
I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Turn three hundred low families of New York into New Jersey, support them for fifty years in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel, they rob and murder, not the cowboys, who can take care of themselves, but the defenseless, lone settlers on the plains.
Another progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, has been criticized by several historians on racial grounds. According to critics, Wilson believed that slavery was wrong on economic labor grounds, rather than for moral reasons. They also argue that he idealized the slavery system in the South, viewing masters as patient with "indolent" slaves. While president of Princeton University, Wilson had discouraged blacks from applying for admission, preferring to keep the peace among white students and alumni. Cabinet heads appointed by President Wilson re-segregated restrooms and cafeterias in their buildings. Wilson defended his administration's segregation policy in a July 1913 letter responding to Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of the New York Evening Post and founding member of the NAACP; Wilson suggested the segregation removed "friction" between the races.
Disenfranchisement of Black Voters
Progressives repeatedly warned that illegal voting was corrupting the political system. It especially identified big-city bosses, working with saloon keepers and precinct workers, as the culprits in stuffing the ballot box. The solution to purifying the vote included prohibition (designed to close down the saloons), voter registration requirements (designed to end multiple voting), and literacy tests (designed to minimize the number of ignorant voters).
All the Southern states (and Oklahoma) used devices to disenfranchise black voters during the Progressive Era. Typically the progressive elements in the states pushed for disenfranchisement, often fighting against the conservatism of the Black Belt whites. A major reason given was that whites routinely purchased black votes to control elections, and it was easier to disenfranchise blacks than to go after powerful white men.
After the end of the Civil War, with the passage of new constitutions, Southern states adopted provisions that caused disenfranchisement of large portions of their populations by skirting US constitutional protections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. While their voter registration requirements applied to all citizens, in practice they disenfranchised most blacks.
The new provisions of the state constitutions eliminated black voting by law. Secondly, the Democratic legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to assert white supremacy, establish racial segregation in public facilities, and treat blacks as second-class citizens. The landmark court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) held that "separate but equal" facilities, as on railroad cars, was constitutional. The new constitutions passed numerous Supreme Court challenges. In cases where a particular restriction was overruled by the Supreme Court in the early 20th century, states quickly devised new methods of excluding most blacks from voting, such as the white primary. The only competitive contests in southern states were reduced to Democratic Party primaries.
For the national Democratic Party, the alignment after Reconstruction resulted in a powerful Southern region that was useful for congressional clout. But, prior to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Solid South inhibited the national party from fulfilling center-left initiatives. Southerner Woodrow Wilson, one of the two Democrats elected to the presidency between Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the first Southerner elected after 1856. He benefited by the disenfranchisement of blacks and crippling of the Republican Party in the South.
These laws stayed in effect throughout the Progressive Era and were not challenged by any of the major reformers.
The AFL and Immigration Restriction
Although racism manifested in many forms throughout the Progressive Era, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) mounted perhaps one of the most organized and concerted efforts of xenophobic legislation against non-white immigration during this period. In its first years, the AFL admitted nearly every laboring group without discrimination. Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, opened the Federation to radical and socialist workers and to some semiskilled and unskilled workers. Women, African Americans, and immigrants also joined in small numbers. However in the 1890s, the Federation shifted its policy and began to organize only skilled workers in craft unions, quickly making it an organization of white men.
The AFL was at its most influential during Woodrow Wilson's administration. Particularly during World War I, both unions and the government sought cooperation between labor and capital as the best means of rationalizing and increasing American production on behalf of the war effort.
This rise in AFL prominence allowed it to not only strictly regulate its own members, but to influence the development of anti-immigration policy over the course of the early twentieth century. While the AFL preached a policy of egalitarianism in regard to African American workers, by 1912, it was actively discriminating against them. For instance, the AFL sanctioned the maintenance of segregated locals within its affiliates — particularly in the construction and railroad industries — a practice which often excluded black workers altogether from union membership and thus from employment in organized industries. Generally the AFL viewed women and black workers as competition, strikebreakers, or an unskilled labor reserve that kept wages low.
Such racist policies in the AFL did not only apply to African Americans. In 1901, the AFL lobbied Congress to reauthorize the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act was a federal law signed by Chester A. Arthur allowing the U.S. to suspend Chinese immigration, a ban that was intended to last 10 years. The AFL also initiated one of the first organized labor boycotts against Chinese immigrant workers, by putting white stickers on the cigars made by unionized white cigar rollers while simultaneously discouraging consumers from purchasing cigars rolled by Chinese workers. By the outbreak of World War I, the AFL vigorously opposed unrestricted immigration and capitalized on the fears of white workers who believed that an influx of unskilled immigrants would flood the labor market and lower wages. As a result, the AFL intensified its opposition to all immigration from Asia and was instrumental in passing and enforcing immigration restriction bills from the 1890s to the 1920s, such as the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the Immigration Act of 1924.
Political Cartoon
Editorial cartoon showing a Chinese man being excluded from entry to the "Golden Gate of Liberty." The sign next to the iron door reads, "Notice—Communist, Nihilist, Socialist, Fenian & Hoodlum welcome. But no admittance to Chinamen." The cartoon's caption reads, "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT. Enlightened American Statesman—'We must draw the line somewhere, you know.'"