“The Father of Segregation”: The Wilson Administration's Segregation of the Federal Departments and Its Meanings

“The South is in the saddle,”  announced the Washington Post in early 1913.  Woodrow Wilson was the first southern-born president since the Civil War, the newspaper pointed out, and fully half of his Cabinet hailed from below the Mason-Dixon line.  These men entered office promising a New Freedom to the American people, a program of national banking, tariff, and business reform.  Their progressivism, however, was a southern progressivism that was rooted in white supremacy. Within weeks of taking office Secretary of Treasury William McAdoo and Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, along with their appointed southern underlings, began a reign of segregation within their respective departments.  They saw segregation as essential to progressivism—it ensured a racially frictionless, and thus efficient, society.  Their policies affected thousands of black Washingtonians who worked for the federal government, for, in effect, the Wilson administration freed racism in the nation’s capital: emboldened by the presence of a southern administration, Congressmen introduced bills to segregate streetcars and prevent interracial marriage while white federal workers found ways to discriminate beyond separate workstations. But what happened in Washington, D.C., did not stay in Washington, D.C.  The federal sanction of segregation set a racial example for the nation, and trickle-down discrimination became the law of the land.  The white men in the Wilson administration had perfected their methods in the South.  Now Washington, D.C. became their blueprint for a Jim Crow nation.  In race matters, lamented the Milwaukee Free Press, Wilson and his Cabinet “gave the cue.”