University men, social science, and white supremacy in North Carolina.(Viewpoint essay)

IN NOVEMBER 1898, AS NORTH CAROLINA'S DEMOCRATS COMPLETED their violent campaign against African American Republicans and white Populists, a young Carolinian mischievously asked if white supremacy leaders were happier that the "Democrats won in the election" or that "Chapel Hill beat Virginia" in a football game. In a similarly lighthearted moment, newly elected legislator Henry G. Connor, already at work on the state constitutional amendment that would disenfranchise African Americans, teased his son Robert, a senior at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill, that university president Edwin A. Alderman "had better be good to you" now that the father was on the winning side. Their joking references to the overlap between the campus and the white supremacy campaign touched on a connection that went well beyond social networks and into the world of ideas. Alderman called Henry Connor's white supremacy leadership "an act of citizenship not less heroic than going to war," and the president worked for months to lure the self-educated Henry Connor to Chapel Hill, first to give a commencement address and then, in an effort that failed, to convince him to accept a new professorship in law and political economy. In the spring of 1899, UNC's University Magazine published an essay titled "The Negro in the South" that used history and anthropology to justify the state's movement on the grounds that Anglo-Saxons were a "predominant race wherever they have gone." At the end of the school year, Robert Connor and his classmates on the school yearbook signaled the interaction between campus and state by dedicating the Hellenian to Frank Winston, an alumnus and trustee who in 1898 had directed the state's white supremacy clubs, helped Henry Connor author the disenfranchisement amendment, and "by loyal service to his State and University ... shown himself to be a statesman and alumnus worthy of our esteem." (1)

It was no wonder that a white supremacy legislator claimed, "I owe all that I have in this world to the University and to the Democratic Party." For many white supremacy leaders in North Carolina, their effort to topple the South's strongest biracial political movement was as much a social and intellectual effort as a political one. Despite scholarly portrayals of its roots in crass ambition or personal neuroses, North Carolina's white supremacy was in fact a mandarin moment led by a newly self-conscious group of public intellectuals. These men were participants, if not leading or systematic ones, in a global project, one in which social scientific theories of progress, race, reproduction, and degeneration inspired new waves of statist reform programs across Europe and the United States. Although their ideas were colored by their particular experiences in North Carolina, they were part of a broad current of what sociologist Edward A. Ross called "selectionist" thought. This statist approach to governance celebrated the role of educated leaders in selecting the proper aspects of society to reproduce in order to drive the nation toward progress and away from degeneration. By placing these intellectual networks at the center of the formation and dissemination of North Carolina white supremacy, this article traces the roles of ideas and of the University of North Carolina in the formation of this thinking class. (2)

Viewing white supremacy from the realm of campus debates seems peculiar next to the now-iconic images of the campaign drawn by scholars like Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Eric Anderson, and Helen G. Edmonds: jostling and then bloodshed on the streets of Wilmington, violent attacks at campaign canvasses in the eastern Second Congressional District (the so-called Black Second), and lurid and invented stories of rape in Josephus Daniels's newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer. From Edmonds's pathbreaking 1951 The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894-1901, through works by H. Leon Prather St., Eric Anderson, Janette Thomas Greenwood, Kent Redding, Paul D. Escott, Dwight B. Billings Jr., and especially Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, scholars have authoritatively replaced older, heroic accounts of white supremacy with increasingly nuanced narratives of its leaders' tactics. Although Gilmore connects white supremacy to broad, if vaguely defined, intellectual trends, scholars have at times lost track of John W. Cell's comparatively driven insight that the state's segregationist movement was deeply modern and even liberal. Too easily, in less-nuanced accounts, white supremacy leaders become carriers of cultural prejudice or warriors for thwarted ambition. This personalizing historiographical strand reaches all the way back to the same Robert D. W. Connor who exchanged congratulatory letters with his legislator-lather in November 1898. Robert Connor, who studied under William A. Dunning at Columbia University, served as a professor of history and government at the University of North Carolina until 1934, when Franklin D. Roosevelt named him the first archivist of the United States. Connor's 1929 book North Carolina: Rebuilding an Ancient Commonwealth, 1584-1925 described white supremacy through emphasis on a "small group" of leaders tied together by a "high civic duty" to drive the state toward their shared vision of its future. In overturning that judgment, and treating white supremacy not as honorable but as monstrous, scholars from Edmonds on have found themselves partly trapped in Robert Connor's own analysis, reversing his lens instead of replacing it. Instead of personal honor, white supremacy became in large part a story of personal failings. The role of ideas and of the campus as the center of many of the social networks is largely absent; without analyzing those ideas and networks, scholars have oddly defanged North Carolina's white supremacy, transforming a sweeping (and hardly anomalous) program for overhauling state and society into a vehicle for twisted or crass individuals. (3)

White supremacy was broader than the university, but the Chapel Hill campus offers a useful window into the doctrine's intellectual roots and branches. Examining the ties between classroom discussions and legislative debates casts the movement in a new light, even if it does not sum up the movement, which drew on a wide range of ideas circulating back and forth across the Atlantic. University men did not have a monopoly on the language of selectionist white supremacy, although they did have a disproportionate impact on its implementation. The movement gained power from its general association with an intelligent class, rather than parochial associations with Chapel Hill. Aside from the university, Carolinians could catch hold of the currents of selectionist white supremacy through expatriates in the North, especially in articles and reviews written by former Wilmington resident Woodrow Wilson, who described Darwinian organic metaphors as the "formula of the dominant thought of the age." Wilson published his articles in magazines like the Forum and the Atlantic Monthly, edited by Cary native Walter Hines Page, who in his autobiographical novel The Southerner described his evolution-inspired determination to organize "society to train a scientifically high-bred race." Some ideas circulated through the progressive pulpit, including widely reprinted sermons by Shelby native Thomas Dixon Jr., then preaching in New York City, on the "Anglo-Saxon race" as the "higher zoological period of the development of man." These swirling notions of progress, race, and social evolution caught on many branches, including some not affiliated with the university at all. Nevertheless, three core political leaders were classmates and close friends at the university in the late 1870s--future governors Charles B. Aycock (the movement's lead orator) and Locke Craig (the chief speaker in the mostly white, western part of the state) and future lieutenant governor Francis D. "Frank" Winston (the organizer of the white supremacy clubs). Other adherents included Harvard University graduate George Rountree, self-taught lawyer Henry Groves Connor, and mostly self-taught editor Josephus Daniels, who were not at first intimately connected with the University of North Carolina but were over time drawn into its orbit of alumni and supporters. Not all white supremacy leaders were progressive or affiliated with the university. The titular head of white supremacy, reactionary future U.S. senator Furnifold M. Simmons, was a graduate of Trinity College (now Duke University); other orators, including future governor Robert B. Glenn, had attended Davidson College, and organizers like Congressmen Claude and William W. Kitchin had degrees from Wake Forest College. Without the influence of the UNC men, some form of white supremacy would still have prevailed in North Carolina. Probably, however, that white supremacy would have been a reactionary (and anti-state university) movement like Benjamin R. Tillman's across the border in South Carolina, which Simmons and the Kitchins seemed to take as a model and the university men as a warning. (4)

Scholars underestimated the intellectual connections between the university and the white supremacy movement partly because a central connector was far offstage in November 1898. George Tayloe Winston, older brother of white supremacy club organizer Frank Winston, had taught his brother and their friends the first modern sociology and ethnology at the university in the late 1870s, worked with them as young graduates to transform the college's alumni networks, and then rode their support into the presidency of the university in 1891. After a short, successful tenure as UNC president, George Winston decamped in 1896 for the University of Texas, which doubled his salary in making him its first president. He left Chapel Hill to his former protege Edwin Alderman. Ironically, white supremacy's success would bring George Winston back to Carolina, as in 1899 he slunk away from a disastrous stint in Texas to assume, with the help of his brothers and of Connor, the presidency of the college that would become North Carolina State University. Overwhelmed by family crises, including the illness of his daughter and the near-insanity of his wife, George Winston by the early 1900s was a shell of his former self. If he was irrelevant in 1898, his influence nonetheless had been massively important in training young men in the application of Darwinian ideas and cultural anthropology to the problems of North Carolina. (5)

Winston and his progressive ideas came to the University of North Carolina during one of its most regressive moments, the 1875 meeting of trustees to reopen a university that had been shuttered to keep it from Republican hands during Reconstruction. As the trustees appointed new professors, they followed the hoary tradition of appeasing Baptists and Methodists by naming men who belonged to those sects. Near the end of the meeting, joking that they would now appease the "heathen[s]," they appointed freethinking yoking Cornell University graduate George Winston to a lectureship in Latin. George Winston was well known to the college, having attended it immediately after the Civil War. Like most of his peers, he withdrew when Republicans took control of the state in 1868. George Winston moved first to the U.S. Naval Academy and then to ultramodern Cornell, where he served as a lecturer alter graduating. In part George Winston's return to Chapel Hill was a restoration of the old order. A Winston served on every board of trustees but one from 1807 to 1941. His brother Frank Winston was by legend the first student to arrive at the university following its reopening, and he would serve fifty-four consecutive years as trustee (believed to be a modern record) at the university their brother Robert called "the Mecca of our family." (6)

George Winston returned with his two younger brothers to a different university than he and his ancestors had attended. Prior to the Civil War, the university had drawn large numbers of students from across the South, but its first post-Reconstruction classes were tiny (ten other students graduated with Frank and Robert Winston in 1879) and composed almost exclusively of North Carolina natives. In the first classes at the reopened university, George Winston lived alongside the students in the South Building, driving them hard and also earning their respect. The group came to include his brothers Frank and Robert, as well as their cohort of lifelong friends, including future governor Aycock, future governor Craig (who graduated with Aycock and thirteen others in 1880), future state schools superintendent James Y. Joyner, future university president Charles D. McIver (who graduated with Joyner and twenty-nine others in 1881), future university president Edwin Alderman (who graduated with thirteen others in 1882), and, eventually, future philosophy professor Henry Horace Williams (who graduated with fourteen others in 1883). The ties between these boys were intense and long-lasting. (7)