Reforming the World by Tyrrell Ian

Author:Tyrrell, Ian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Chapter 8

IDA WELLS AND OTHERS: RADICAL PROTEST AND THE NETWORKS OF AMERICAN EXPANSION

THE LYNCHING VIOLENCE OF THE 1890s was a dark passage in the history of American race relations. Despite the fierce terror of the Ku Klux Klan, the 1870s was not the peak of racial mayhem against the newly freed African American people. That came in the decade of American cultural expansion abroad of the 1890s, when lynching reached historic heights. Was there a connection between this internal oppression and the external projection of American power? An intrepid English Quaker, Catherine Impey, could detect such links, but she did not limit her attack to lynching. Impey targeted all forms of discrimination against African Americans that flourished in late nineteenth-century America. She saw African Americans as a prime example of a worldwide principle exhibited in the British colonial regimes in India, South Africa, and the Pacific. With three trips to the United States and meetings with many African Americans to back her claims, caste was the name she gave to the racial discrimination she witnessed: “Caste is indeed no other than slavery under a new name” and, “as such,” people “should be prepared to meet it.”1 In her periodical, Anti-Caste, she pronounced in 1889: “Of all oppressions this is the most grinding, the most terrible, the foulest of all we know.” That African Americans faced “Intimidation—lynching—terrorising” indicated the thorough dimensions of the problem. Not deterred by the enormity of the prejudice she unearthed, Impey observed consciences stirring among people “whose numbers will grow, for Truth is on their side.” One of those spurring change would be the well-known anti-lynching campaigner, the African American Ida Wells (later Wells-Barnett). Wells was one of several activists who probed the networks of Anglo-American reform in order to transform the patterns of American race relations and cultural expansion abroad. Wells and others like her wished to puncture the sometimes self-congratulatory tone of “humanitarianism” and turn the task of social reform inward toward changing the budding American empire at its source.2

Criticism of the racial and socioeconomic order was a common thread within the moral reform coalition. Many mainstream reformers were uncomfortable with imperialist schemes and with racial discrimination. Women were prominent among the dissenters in proclaiming a sisterhood of women, but some took the point further to proclaim a brotherhood of humankind. Anti-imperialist and peace campaigner Mary Alderman Garbutt exhibited such tendencies in the WCTU. She served a term as president of the southern California WCTU, was state organizer in the 1890s, and sat on the executive continuously from 1887 until 1924.3 Garbutt bemoaned workers and other ordinary people who were “crushed” by the capitalist system, and campaigned for the Socialist Party in the 1912 presidential election. A thoroughgoing internationalist, she commended arbitration between nations and advocated building an International Peace Statue at the entrance to the Panama Canal, in order to assert the true message of the canal as “bringing the earth together in closer bands of brotherhood and goodwill.” Garbutt also headed the Los

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