FDR - Jean Edward Smith [416]
2. The term “New Freedom” derives from a collection of Wilson’s campaign speeches, arranged and edited by William Bayard Hale and published by Doubleday in early 1913. In retrospect, writers rarely distinguish between TR’s New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and lump the two together as manifestations of the progressive wave that swept the country in the early twentieth century. In fact, the election of 1912 turned on the difference. Both movements sought to benefit the common man, but each reflected a different stream of thought. Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism embraced the Hamiltonian tradition of a strong central government, dominated by executive power, that intervened vigorously in the economy on behalf of the many. Taken literally, it exhorted voters to put national needs ahead of sectional or individual advantage. Wilson’s New Freedom, by contrast, hewed more closely to Jeffersonian states’ rights, minimized the role of the federal government, and sought to achieve prosperity purely through regulation of the market place. It stressed individual liberty rather than collective action. Once in office, Wilson gradually accepted a greater role for the national government than he had originally espoused. FDR’s New Deal was much closer to TR’s New Nationalism than to Wilson’s New Freedom. See Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom 242–243 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), and the sources cited therein.
3. Josephus Daniels dates the decision to segregate the federal government to a cabinet meeting on April 11, 1913. According to Daniels, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, a former Texas congressman who helped swing the Lone Star State behind Wilson at Baltimore, raised the issue, complaining of the distaste white mail clerks felt at working with blacks: “It is very unpleasant for them to work in a [railway mail] car with Negroes where it is almost impossible to have different drinking vessels and different towels, or places to wash and he was anxious to segregate white and Negro employees in all Departments of the Government. The President said he made no promises in particular to Negroes, except to do them justice, and he wished the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.” No member of the cabinet objected, then or later. With Wilson’s approval, cabinet officers immediately began to segregate their departments, though no formal executive order was ever issued. The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels 32–33, E. David Cronon, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). Also see Kathleen Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation,” Journal of Negro History 158–173 (April 1959); Nancy J. Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,” Political Science Quarterly 61–79 (March 1968).
4. W. E. B. DuBois, “An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson,” The Crisis, September, 1913. Booker T. Washington, who had not supported Wilson, expressed a similar sentiment to the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard on August 10, 1913: “I have recently spent several days in Washington, and I have never seen colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.” For Washington’s view of the 1912 election, see Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 353–355 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). When Washington attended Wilson’s 1901 inauguration as president of Princeton, he was the only honored invitee who was not accommodated in a faculty house.
5. Josephus Daniels, who ran Wilson’s publicity organization in the South during the campaign, made the party’s position crystal clear in an editorial in his Raleigh News & Observer a month before the election. The South, he said, was solidly Democratic because of “the realization that the subjugation of the negro, politically, and the separation of the negro, socially, are paramount