The condition of white labor in South Africa is well set forth by the
Transvaal Indigency Commission: "We have taken evidence on the question of
the effect of the presence of the native (Negro) on the habits and institutions
of the white population from all parts of South Africa. It is a subject which
it is impossible to neglect. It enters into every aspect of the social,
political and economic life of the country, and no problem such as that with
which we are dealing (the problem of destitution among whites of South Africa) can
be properly understood until the bearing of the native question upon it is
taken into account. We have found that in all parts of South Africa it
exercises a dominant influence on the life and habits of the white
population...colored labor, inefficient though it is, is cheaper to the
employer for unskilled work than white labor...When the white man does,
therefore, get unskilled labor to do, he is paid a wage based on Kaffir
standards of work, which is barely sufficient to keep body and soul together. The
native can...subsist on a far lower wage than the white man...the wages of the
white man cannot permanently fall below the average amount it costs to maintain
himself and his family at a minimum level of subsistence required of a member
of civilized society. The native, on the other hand, need not earn sufficient
wages with which to pay for even these modest requirements, because he has a
subsidiary source of livelihood in the produce of his tribal lands and the
labor of his women and children." (Extracts from Part II of the Transvall
Indigency Commission's Report, 1912.) (The male native practices plural
marriage in South Africa. His wives and children support him, enabling him to
work for a remuneration impossible to the white man.)
As a result of widespread miscegenation, there are now almost half as many
mixbreeds as whites in the Union of South Africa. South Africa has difficulty
enough in dealing with the full black, but the mongrel constitutes a problem
seemingly beyond the powers of the civilization. The native problem is
talked of by all. In pulpit, press and private intercourse it is the foremost
question, but miscegenation has qualified the purity of so many South African
families that there is a general disinclination to treat the near-white
problem with frankness. The pure whites do not relish the incoming of
mulattoes, but they have no social or political machinery by which they may
effectively exclude them. So the mixbreeds enter white circles -- enter to
stay.
The mixbreeds, by unions with the whites, are eliminating the pure Caucasian
element upon which civilization depends. The Negroes are so numerous,
constituting four-fifths of the population, that their numbers appall the
whites. But the Negro as Negro is not the immediate peril. It is not the
"assagai," but the "tar brush," that imperils the
civilization. (The "assagai" is the spear used by the African negro.
"Tar brush" -- a popular term used to indicate the strain of black
blood that qualifies the race purity of many so-called Caucasians.) If South
Africa remains white, the civilization implanted by three hundred years of
arduous toil will endure, the reins of government will be retained by Caucasian
hands, even thought he Negro increase a hundred fold. It is not black warriors,
but colored brothers-in-law who will eventually submerge the Caucasian culture.
Sixty centuries of racial intermingling have given evidence that the white man
rules in his racial purity and that chaos reigns when he become a hybrid.
If the white man is "unjust" to the black, he may become just. If
he has not used his personal influence for the good of the Negro, he may yet do
so. If the white man does not effect the segregation of the Negro in this
generation, he will have opportunity in the next, but the white man become
hybrid will not have opportunity of regaining racial status. All other
requirements are incidental or temporary -- race purity is fundamental.
In South Africa, the mulatto question is a part, and that the most dangerous
part, of the "native question," though South Africa, for reasons
mentioned, does not treat it as such. The Negro has driven the white from the
field of unskilled labor, the half-caste is driving the white from the skilled
trades. The Negro has pauperized the "poor whites;" the mulatto and
the coolie are pauperizing the middle-class whites, making the country possible
for land baron and mine magnate only. The economic problem, including that felt
by the smaller merchants, is further complicated by the presence of more than a
hundred thousand Indians form Asia, who were encouraged to come to the country
by the propertied class of colonials. Their standards of living are far beneath
those of the Caucasian, and they furnish a very difficult problem, for they are
more capable than the Negroids and they constantly threaten to involve the
British Empire in discord by demanding equalization with the whites.
South Africa is the wealthiest country in the world in proportion to white
population, and three-fourths of the white population are the poorest in the
world in proportion to the national wealth. But the Negro problem there differs
only in degree from the Negro problem in the Southern States, and what the
Negro problem is in South Africa today it will be in certain of the Southern
States tomorrow. The white man is hardest pressed in South Africa, and it is
here that the difficulties confronting the white race in contact with the Negro
can best be seen; however, the tendency of the Negro to concentrate in
"the black belt" of the United States, if it continues, will render
the position of white labor as difficult in this portion of the nation as white
labor in South Africa.
Contract labor, which is in effect a modified form of slavery, prevails in
South Africa and in certain other British colonies, and this institution, like
slavery, has its tap root in economy. Negroes are taxed to make them work.
Pressed from his home to the white man's labor market in order to secure money
with which to pay the tax judiciously imposed for this purpose, the Negro comes
under the terms of the contract labor regulations, the penalties of which, like
those of slavery, are administered by criminal not civil jurisprudence. The
scheme is devised by the land and mine owners to insure a supply of cheap
colored labor. The influence of these two cliques is all powerful in political
circles, and hence the unlikeliness of a change such as will benefit the white
laboring class. Contract labor, without which the Negro workman would be
uncontrollable and hence unprofitable, is the corner-stone of South African
capitalism, and capitalism, as the expression of the prevailing economic
theory, may be examined as an anti-racial element tending to eliminate the
white race and its institutions There is no purpose to question the
economics of capitalism save as their application threatens the permanency of
the white race when in contact with the colored. It will be seen in the
succeeding chapter that the socialism of Germany is as reprehensible as the
capitalism of the British colonies and the United States in effecting a
reduction of the Caucasian to the economic status of the Negro.
A white civilization cannot be maintained without a white population, a
white population cannot permanently exist without a white laboring class, and a
white laboring class cannot continue under conditions which prevent white men
from maintaining themselves and families. The white race, imperiled on the one
side by the economic greed of the white man. Both the genetic and the economic
perils are of such grave proportions that they must be remedied radically if
the white race is to survive in South Africa. The greatest difficulty in the
way of such radical remedy is that the white laboring classes, though greatly
outnumbering the international capitalistic element which dominates them, are
but dimly aware that the dangers that threaten are man-made dangers and can be
removed by human agency. Negrophilism and ruthless capitalism have reduced the
civilization to feebleness, and the white laboring classes, the hope of every
civilization, have somehow accepted their present state as God-ordained and
immutable. It will be necessary for them to analyze social control and
understand why politics, religion and capitalism seek to maintain the present
social equilibrium. (Read Social Control, by Edward Alsworth Ross, of
the University of Wisconsin.)
Hitherto white labor has been allowed that which is popularly known as
"white men's jobs," but the present epoch marks the emergence of the
mixbred and Kaffir into this realm. Not only is the white failing to extend his
field of labor, but he is actually being routed from his erstwhile position of
skilled artisan and boss over native laborers. In the commercial realm, the
Indian, imported from India at the behest of capitalism, is ousting the white
man from the retail trade and from clerical positions.
It does not require a close analysis to determine the reason for the rise of
the colored, the economy of the phenomenon being evident. It is not because the
colored do the work as well or better than the white, but because they are
cheaper than the white. Men may learn the use of tools by virtue of being human
merely, and are not conditioned to an extraction from any specific sub-species
of humanity. The Negro may learn to wield the axe, adz, saw, chisel, trowel,
plane and rule with sufficient dexterity to perform the greater amount of
service required of these implements. He does not have to rise to technical
equalization with the white in order to dominate the labor market. His victory
is not traced to superiority in design or energy in execution, for his
unwarranted ascendency over the white is solely by reason of his hatless head
and bootless foot; his loin cloth and his "mealy pap." (The African
negro, unless he has attempted to assimilate Caucasian ideals, wears neither
hat nor shoes, his sole apparel being a loin cloth that may be purchased for a
small sum. Corn (Indian maize), introduced into South Africa by the Dutch and
Portuguese, has become the chief food of the native, "Mealy pap" is a
mush made of corn meal.) He dominates South Africa by reason of the same low
economic standards that cause the Asiatic to imperil the Western Coast.
The tools of the white man are not only an aid to civilization but are an
expression of the ingenuity inhering within the creators of civilization.
Steel, steam, and electricity are not to be compared to that exalted spiritual
salvation that comes to the colored as to white "without money and without
price." Inventions are the produce of race, not the gift of God. White
labor, then, shall assert prior right to the products of white ingenuity. The
implements of industrial activity are the just heritage of the white laborer,
and white labor should see that they are not used by the selfish few of his
race to eliminate the white man and his civilization.
The Negro invents nothing, neither does he perfect a crude invention; yet,
under the present scheme of things, the white man must surrender his inventions
into the Negro's hands, and the white man himself become a pauper and an
outcast. Greedy capitalism takes the products of the white man's brain, places
them at the disposal of its black servants, sees the white inventor reduced to
the economic level of the black non-inventor, and goes forth to justify its
right to rule as proceeding from the capitalist's superior ability. Capitalism
holds that the glaring inequality between the multi-millionaire and pauper
white results from the millionaire's superiority. It intrenches itself behind
the sacred bulwark of individual ability.
The time is at hand when the white laborer in contact with colored races
will intrench behind the bulwark of race ability and claim for himself, as
against the colored, the prior right to survive. Such will not be a war of
conquest. It will not be a war of injustice. Giving to the Negro the privilege
of living by the use of the white man's inventions, while the white man is
eliminated from the population, is an injustice which even the negrophilist
will hardly condone, though it is put into practical application by the less
emotional capitalist. South Africa is not the black man's home. He came as much
an invader of the Hottentot's land as did the European. The black man succumbed
to the European by might of arms and, in turn, is subduing the European by the
arts of peace which have proceeded from and are dependent upon the European.
At first, the wealthy whites sought to utilize the cheap black as unskilled
laborers merely; but now, triumphant, they seek the white man only to train the
colored for the skilled trades. Having trained the understudy, the white man is
dismissed and the understudy employed. There is a tendency to keep just enough
white men to control the industries and prevent the destruction of costly
machinery.
Capitalism must be racilaized! It must not be allowed to employ Negro
labor to the exclusion of needy white workmen. Such a necessity is as
obvious in the United States as in South Africa. Thousands of employers in
America have utilized colored labor to the exclusion of white, because the
colored man works for less pay than the white. In the Southern States, the
mulatto invaded certain of the skilled trades, and within a generation drove
the white man from the field, working for less than half the remuneration paid
to white men, even when the South was suffering from economic depression.
Northern labor excluded the Negro from labor unions, making the Negro's living
there uncertain and difficult. This exclusion was for the purpose of preserving
the North as a field for white labor. The preventing of the ingress of the
Negro into the North and West left those sections free for the development of
the white race.
Before the World War we were receiving immigrants at an average of almost a
million a year. The sudden cessation of immigration, together with the great
demands made upon America to supply commodities to the warring nations, created
a scarcity of labor. The United States entered the world struggle, thereby
drawing some five million of men from industries. The position of the Negro
immediately changed. Even in the North, heretofore closed to him, he became in
great demand. Many thousands of blacks from the South answered the call for
labor in the North, going there to make their homes.
The presence of these Negroes in the Northern cities created difficult
economic and social problems, soon evidenced by racial rioting, and later by
economic opposition on the part of the Northern white laborer. Union labor was
compelled to take notice of the tens of thousands of newly arrived Negroes.
Unable to prevent the incoming of the Negro, the white workman, to protect
himself in his difficult economic position, sought to unionize the Negro.
But the white laborer will soon understand that not the Negro's standard of
remuneration, but the Negro's physical presence, is the source of the Negro
problem. The physical presence of the Negro limits the growth of the whites. A
million Negro labor-unionists will mean a million jobs denied to white men, a
million white homes lost to the North.
Organized labor is confronted by alternatives, neither of which is
satisfactory. It may leave the Negro unorganized and permit his competition to
lower the union scale, or it may unionize the Negro to avoid competing with the
Negro standards of remuneration.
If the Negro is not unionized he will lower the white man's standard of
living. If he is unionized, in possession of the white race's standard of
remuneration and the Negro's standard of living, he will have equal, if not
better, opportunity than the white man to establish his race in America. But
civilization proceeds from the white race, not the black.
If the white man pursues a policy which establishes and perpetuates colored
races upon this continent, it is merely a question of time when his
civilization will suffer irreparable loss, for the presence of the colored will
limit the increase of the white. Progress in civilization will be conditioned
upon the limits placed upon the increase of the white population.
The Caucasian in America has won a continent from the red race and lost a
fourth of it to the black. The question before the white man is whether this
loss is to be final. Is the white man, who has conquered a continent from the
red man and excluded the yellow man, to share the continent with the black man?
The white man, whether or not he wishes, must recognize racial problems as well
as economic problems, for when races are in contact the two problems are
inseparable.
The economic problem is to prevent the black man's standards from replacing
those of the white. The racial problem is to prevent the black man from
replacing the white. To prevent the black man from lowering the economic
standards of the white, the latter may prove a uniform scale of wages for both
races. But by providing equal wages for both races the lower race will have in
reality a better chance to sustain itself and increase its kind. The higher
race, by saving itself racially it must have economic advantage. The loss to
one race will carry with it a corresponding success to the other. It is just as
true that the success of the one will entail a relative loss to the other.
These are results of racial competition from which there can be no escape.
The economic equalization of black and white will be an artificial
equalization (for civilization proceeds from the white man), and its
institution on the part of organized labor should be considered as a temporary
expedient. This artificial equalization of black and white will in come measure
answer its purpose; the avoidance of competition with cheap colored labor, but
at the same time it will give advantage tot he colored, providing that race
with the opportunity to increase at the expense of the white.
Race conflict is regrettable and disagreeable, but when races dwell together
it cannot be avoided. When races are in contact and civilization arises from
and is sustained by one and not another, a policy on the part of the higher
race, which in order to save itself economically endangers itself racially, is
not satisfactory. Such policy implies that economics is superior to race. But
the white man who organizes the Negro to save himself economically, at the same
time excludes the yellow man, whether the latter be organized or not. By so
doing, the white man recognizes that race, not economics, is the superior
value. It is not true that, if the black man were not in America, organized
labor would oppose his coming to America, though each African immigrant brought
with him his union card?
A policy, temporarily satisfactory for the white man of the South, is to
take the more desirable occupations which his numbers enable him to dominate,
exclude the colored, and secure satisfactory remuneration. As the whites of the
South increase by natural growth in numbers and receive additional whites from
without, they should extend their fields of labor gradually until they dominate
the desirable occupations. This process was in actual operation in the South
when the influx of Negroes into the North caused organized labor to attempt the
unionization of the Negro. Now in many parts of the South the Negro has an
actual economic advantage, for his standards of living are lower than those of
the Caucasian. With the spreading of the new economic ideal the white man of
the South will enter a new phase of competition with the black in the effort to
claim the South for the Caucasian and his posterity.
Many will say that it is impossible for the white man to pursue a policy
whereby white labor will dominate the economic activities of the South; that
the South is too big, and the Caucasians too few, for the economics of the
white race to prevail there save by sharing both present and future with the
black race and its increasing millions. It will be difficult, but it is
necessary, and the white man will find a way out. Northern white men are
gradually extending their labor unions to the South. Northern laborers are
going to the South and strengthening these unions.
The white laborers of America have it in their power to redeem the South
from the Negro standards of efficiency and bring it to white standards of pay
without endangering race and institutions. This can be done by the white man's
claiming those occupations which he desires most and which he is able, by
reason of his numbers to fill. At the same time the white man of the south
should make great efforts to increase the coming of white men of the North,
receiving them as his natural allies in the effort to make the South a white
man's land. The economic struggle is severe in the Northern States. Beyond an
imaginary line, there is a continent of possibilities awaiting the man from the
North. The South, with its mild climate and incalculable natural resources,
beckons the white man from the congested centers of the North. So let him come
and take part with those of his race in their endeavor to establish the white
man and his culture in the South, even as these are established elsewhere in
the Union.
To abandon the South to the Negro is to place in peril the nation itself. If
the South is to remain a brood land for blacks, a racial appanage of Africa,
its present millions and its future increase will overflow the nation, leaving
no section free to express the genius of the white race unhampered by the
presence of a colored.
Students of American history will see in the efforts to establish the white
race in the Southern States a purpose kindred to that ideal which created the
Republican Party. Northern men formed the Republican Party to keep the slave
and slave standards out of the Northwest. In this it was successful. Had the
men who formed this party been quiescent, permitting the spread of the Negro,
much of America that is now white would be burdened by the presence of the
Negro.
Slavery was mistaken for the Negro problem. The nation hoped that is
abolition would settle the problem. Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln and other great
Americans knew that slavery was but a phase of the Negro problem, and that the
problem would exist and grow greater as long as the races continued to dwell
together.
The Republicans kept the institution of slavery from the Northwest and made
it clear that they did not wish the free Negro there. Lincoln and men of his
belief were the most far-seeing statesmen of their day. Their policy was to
exclude the Negro from the great territory which was to become the home of the
white race. Lincoln, who understood the Negro problem better than most of his
followers, supplemented the ideal of a white North and West by plans to make
the entire nation white. By the side of this great man, slave owner and
negrophilist sink into an unenviable equality. The one sought to implant into
unsettled America a race that would forever imperil civilization; the other,
overwhelmed with sympathy for those enslaved, became unbalanced and sought to
co-ordinate control of civilization with a people who have not produced a
civilized culture and have not maintained such culture when imparted to them.
The slave owner would have imposed the South's immense burden upon the
entire nation, leaving no spot free for the increase of the white race and the
unhindered development of white culture. The negrophilist developed into an
advocate of equalization and miscegenation. Between these two fanatical
factions, which eventually led the nation into civil war, there stood Lincoln
with his followers in the North and his sympathizers in the South, who sought
to preserve the Northwest for the Caucasian and who never dreamed of giving the
Negro a share in directing the destinies of a white man's civilization.
For several years prior to 1835, abolition received its chief support in the
South. The first abolitionist newspaper was established in Tennessee. In 1832,
the legislature of the State of Virginia lacked but a few votes to enact a law
freeing all the slaves of the State. Slavery had become unprofitable.
Along with the abolition movement of these days there was an accompanying
purpose to repatriate the Negro. Every American of note, North as well as
South, advocated the removing of the Negro to Africa. Had it not been for
the invention of the cotton gin, it is quite likely that the United States now
would be a white nation. The opposition to slavery was so strong in the
south, less than on-fifth of the Southerners owning slaves, that more than two
hundred thousand Sourhterners fought in the armies of the Union, though the
right of secession had been taught in the South as it had been in the North.
The Republican Party, in 1856, made its campaign, stressing the immorality
of slavery. By 1860, its astute leaders had injected a new vigor into the party
by stressing the ill economy of slavery. The Northerner was made to see that
there was an irreconcilable economic warfare between the white and the black;
that the introduction of the Negro into the territories would close these lands
for the free development of the institutions of the white man; that the
Northern non-slave-owner in his movement westward would be in economic
competition with the slaves whom the slave owner proposed to introduce into the
new lands of the West.
The Republican leaders, without knowing as we know the results upon the
white race of its historic and world-wide contact with the colored, but by
analyzing local conditions merely, sought to preserve as much of America as
possible for the unhindered development of civilization. The economic
inequalities between the North and the South were as glaring in 1860 as they
are at present. That backwardness in civilization is in direct relation to the
numerical proportion of Negroes in the population was as well known to Lincoln
as it is to ourselves. Economics conditioned upon Negro labor, in contrast to
those expressed by white standards, was the burden of that famous volume by
Hinton Helper, The Impending Crisis. Helper made the mistake of
believing that slavery was the cause of the inequalities between the
North and South. It was not slavery, but the Negro, whether slave or
free. The Negro is at the present time not held in slavery, but wherever he is
in contact with civilization his presence is reflected in that the civilization
is inferior to those cultures of the whites which are free from the Negro.
The early Republicans, in their attempt to save the West for race and
culture, were actuated by motives identical with those of the Caucasians of the
Pacific States, who refuse to permit the Asiatic to inundate their soul and rob
them of their rightful heritage. In both instances it is the white man who sees
the future clouded and made impossible by competition with colored peoples, who
would reduce the white man to their cultural level.
One consideration concerning the economic phase of the color problem should
not escape our attention. It is that the Negro may be eliminated from politics
and from white social circles in all countries, but that he cannot be fully
eliminated from economic competition with the whites. The economic phase of the
problem is always evident, even though the social and political phases are
temporarily non-evident. The white man may avoid marrying the Negro's sister
and may refuse the Negro the privilege of determining the limits of political
activities, but he cannot avoid the depressing influence of the Negro's lower
cultural standards. As long as the races dwell together there will be a race
problem; its political and social phases may be held in abeyance, but the
economic phase of the problem will be constantly evident.
We keep out the Asiatic with a strong right arm and at the same time
establish and perpetuate the African within our midst. If this is not to be the
white man's country, with the white man's standards of efficiency and
remuneration, why not lower the bars and let the yellow man come in?
Consciously we assert the standards of the white race upon this continent. It
crops up whenever there is danger of Asiatic immigration, however meager and
peaceful. Asiatic standards are higher than African, and it is needless to
exclude the Asiatic if our standards are to be lowered by the African. We have
extirpated the red race, we exclude the yellow; shall we be content to perpetuate
the ever increasing black in our midst?
Our economics cannot continue half Negro and half Caucasian. If the Negro
standards win in the South, their triumph there will be reflected in the North.
Often have the Northern capitalists sent to the lands of inferior economic
standards for forces to combat the rise of wages of the Northern white laborer.
(Read John R. Commons' Races and Immigrants in America.) Against the
incoming of these inferiors the American labor unions secured the enactment of
the alien contract labor law, which prevents foreign laborers coming to this
country under contract for employment. But in the south there are millions of
low cultural standards against whom the North cannot erect a prohibition of
ingress. These are "Americans," and move at will.
We are one people; a nation. That which injures one section will eventually
qualify the standards of the other. Asiatic exclusion and the contract labor
law will not save the West and the North. Within our midst there are a people
who, in their future massed millions, are to mongrelize the labor market as
they are to mongrelize race and government.
The future is before us! Our children will see twenty millions of Negroes
and mixbreeds in America. Our children's children will compete with a greater
number and the future be yet before them.
We may save our descendants or we may bequeath to them a burden which they
cannot bear. What answer shall the white laborer give when asked to repatriate
the black as he has segregated the red and excluded the yellow; by law? When
the white man sees his position as it is, and the position of his children as
it is to become, there is no doubt what his answer will be.