Looking closely at a man on a pedestal

The crowd in downtown Raleigh’s Nash Square this afternoon will consist largely of people (me included) who take some sort of weird pleasure in the pain of running 6.2 miles as fast as they can. They’ll loop over through Mordecai and then down Hillsborough Street in the annual edition of The Old Reliable Run, sponsored by The News &’ Observer. But one wonders if this year’s gathering might put a few goosebumps of alarm on the statue of N&0 patriarch Josephus Daniels, which stands in the square across from the newspaper’s McDowell Street headquarters. You can almost imagine the old fellow on his pedestal thinking: “Good gracious.. have they come to tear me down?”

Josephus Daniels’ record has drawn scrutiny of late from a decidedly unflattering perspective. No surprise there, considering his role in what has to be one of the all-time low points of North Carolina history, the malevolent white supremacy campaign that peaked with the elections of 1898 and that helped lay the tinder for the deadly anti-black uprising in Wilmington. The 100th anniversary of that foul episode was the focus of a recent symposium there.

It’s hard not to take a more than passing interest in the achievements, laudable or lamentable, of a man under whose philosophical flag one labors for one’s paycheck. So spurred by the anniversary coincidence, I’ve been doing a little reading. When it comes to the sorry goings-on of 1898, there’s no denying that the man whom we honor daily on this editorial page ought to have turned his head in shame.

The context, of course, was a political environment still toxic from Civil War fallout. Daniels’ Democratic Party was trying to regain power from a coalition of Republicans and Populists that included a number of black officeholders. As Joseph L. Morrison, author of a 1966 Daniels biography, put it, those black officials “came to be the prime political and emotional issue. Every educational and other reform in which Daniels was interested had to wait its turn while the racist campaign, in which he himself served as Democratic spokesman, ran its bitter course.”

Morrison didn’t shrink from the ugliness: “As the election of Nov. 8, 1898, approached, the Democratic press, Daniels’ paper included, stirred up the race issue to fever pitch by reporting conditions of ‘Negro rule’ in the Eastern North Carolina Black Belt.” The upshot was a tide of victories by white supremacist candidates. “And the floodlight of fevered journalism which The News & Observer cast on conditions in the state’s chief seaport, where a sinister ‘Negro rule’ supposedly held sway, did its unworthy part in paving the way for that stepchild of sensationalism, the Wilmington race riot.”

It gets worse. Essentially, as historian Glenda E. Gilmore recounted in her 1996 book, “Gender and Jim Crow,” the strategy seized upon by the Democratic brain trust, led by future U.S. Sen. Furnifold M. Simmons, was to provoke whites’ fear and hatred of blacks as a sexual threat.

“By emphasizing sexuality, the Democrats placed race over class and spun a yarn in which white women of all classes highly prized their chastity and black men of all classes barely controlled their sexuality,” Gilmore wrote. “The political machine exaggerated a series of sex crimes and allegations in order to strike terror into the hearts of white voters. It is difficult to determine how many of these incidents were actual crimes and how many sprang from collective fantasies inspired by Josephus Daniels’ powerful manipulation of the media. The evidence suggests that the Democratic propaganda planted seeds of hysteria that ripened in the minds of an economically threatened people.”

In November of 1898, Josephus Daniels was 36 years old. Even though he’d been editing a newspaper since he was 20, his career was still in its early stages. That career was to take him to Washington, where he became a national figure as Navy secretary under Woodrow Wilson, and to Mexico City, where he served as ambassador at the behest of his former Navy Department second-in-command, FDR. When not in government service, he returned to Raleigh, where from the editor’s chair of the paper he owned he fought for a host of progressive causes – better schools and universities, fair tax policies, adequate regulation of powerful railroads. He kept it up virtually until his death in 1948, 50 years ago and 50 years after the campaign that besmirched his memory.

A fairy-tale ending would have found him in full repentance for the error of his earlier ways. Biographer Morrison notes Daniels’ acknowledgment, in his memoirs, that The N&O during its white supremacy crusading had been “cruel in its flagella-tions” of blacks; “In the perspective of time,” the editor allowed, “I think it was too cruel.” Whether or not he might have gone further than that elsewhere, he seems to have held to a belief that whites and blacks both benefitted from steering separate social courses. It was left to his successor at The N&O’s editorial helm, his son Jonathan, to bring the paper forthrightly into the Southern liberal mainstream with respect to race relations.

So does the statue deserve to retain its place? The answer has to lie in our understanding of how Daniels — even after he stooped to fanning racial hatred —nevertheless became a constructive force, helping through his blend of journalism and politics to improve the lives of ordinary North Carolinians both black and white. His noble words comprising The N&O’s editorial credo ring hollow if one imagines them as meant to apply to whites only. Yet seen through the lens of Josephus Daniels’ full life and career, these words, I’m prepared to believe, mean just what they say. And if they do, that ought to allow his statue to rest easy.