When Bigots Become Reformers
当顽固派变成改革者
The Progressive Era’s shameful record on race.
进步时代在种族问题上的黑记录
The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1977, by David W. Southern, Wheeling, W.V.: Harlan Davidson, 240 pages, $15.95
《进步时代与种族问题：改革与反动，1900-1977》，作者 David W. Southern
THE PROGRESSIVE movement swept America from roughly the early 1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular consensus that government should be the primary agent of social change.
大概从1890年代早期开始，直到1920年代早期，进步主义运动席卷美国，催生了一个广泛的民众共识，即政府应当是推动社会变化的首要主体。
To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders, operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women’s suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else.
为实现那一目的，一大批年轻的理想主义斗士活跃在地方、各州直至联邦政府层面，掌握并运用手中势不可挡的权力，制定了成堆的新法律，涉及最低工资和最长工时法、反托拉斯法、酒精出售与消费限制、对数百英里道路与高速路的征用、对新移民及穷人的补助、妇女投票权和选举改革，等等。
Today many on the liberal left would like to revive that movement and its aura of social justice. Journalist Bill Moyers, speaking at a conference sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future, described Progressivism as “one of the country’s great traditions.” Progressives, he told the crowd, “exalted and extended the original American Revolution. They spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most prosperous decades in modern history.”
今天，许多自由左派人士希望复兴这一运动以及它带来的社会正义氛围。在一场由左翼团体“美国的未来运动”举办的会议上，记者Bill Moyers称进步主义是“美国的伟大传统之一”。他向与会者说，进步派“提升并拓展了原本的美国革命。他们阐明了人民与统治者之间合作关系的新条件。他们所点燃的火焰，照亮了现代历史上最为繁荣昌盛的年代之一。”
Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow.
然而，进步时代也是一个种族主义得到国家支持、极为严重的时代。事实上，从非裔美国人历史的角度来看，进步时代可以说是自黑奴解放以来最为黑暗的一段时间。南方黑人选民的公民权遭到大规模剥夺，就发生于这段时间，Jim Crow法【译注：指南方各州通过的在公共设施使用上实行种族隔离的法律】也是在此期间出现并流行。
Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1917, the very worst of it-disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching-“went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism.” Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today’s activist left.
另外，正如威斯敏斯特学院的历史学家Daivd W. Southern在其新书《进步时代与种族问题：改革与反动，1900-1917》中所提到的那样，其中最糟糕的情形——剥夺选举权、种族隔离、种族羞辱和对黑人实施私刑——“与南方进步运动的最先进活动是携手并进的。”正是在那些被今天的左派活动家浪漫化的斗士中，种族主义是种常态，而非例外。
At the heart of Southern’s flawed but useful study is a deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century.
Southern的研究不无瑕疵，但非常有用，其核心是一个看似简单的问题：那些心中充满崇高理念的改革者们怎么会有这样恶劣的偏执言行？他的回答始于一种以种族为基础的伪科学，这种伪科学在19和20世纪之交时曾在知识人的观念中占据主导地位。
“At college,” Southern notes, “budding progressives not only read exposés of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science.”
“学院里头，”Southern提到，“崭露头角的进步派不仅阅读调查记者所写的揭批资本主义大亨、攻击自由放任经济学的东西，他们也阅读那些征引最新的人类学、生物学、心理学、社会学、优生学和医学研究的种族主义小册子。”
Popular titles included Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900) and R.W. Shufeldt’s The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of “race suicide,” the theory that inferior races were outbreeding their betters.
当时流行的作品包括Charles Carroll的《黑人是野兽》（1900）和R. W. Shufeldt的《黑人对美国文明的威胁》（1907）。Madison Grant所写的畅销书，《伟大种族的消逝》，讨论了“种族自杀”这一概念，该理论认为卑贱种族已然比优等种族繁殖得更快。
President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its adolescence.
西奥多·罗斯福总统就是诸多被这一概念俘获的进步人士之一。他反对非裔美国男性获得由宪法第15修正案保障的投票权，理由就是黑人种族尚未成年。
Such thinking, which emphasized “expert” opinion and advocated sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in mind that when a racist Progressive championed “the working man,” “the common man,” or “the people,” he typically prefixed the silent adjective white.
这类理论强调“专家”观点，主张扩大政府权力，与进步主义的世界观严丝合缝，后者就欣赏大而有为、实施专家治理和家长式计划的政府。至于在白人至上与民主平等之间如何调和，你只要记住，当一个种族主义的进步派拥护“劳动群体”、“普通人”或“人民”时，他总是会加上一个不说出声的形容词前缀，“白人”。
For a good illustration, consider Carter Glass of Virginia. Glass was a Progressive state and U.S. senator and, as chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, one of the major architects of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of his state’s massive effort to disfranchise black voters.
这里有个很好的例证，就是弗吉尼亚州的Carter Glass。Glass是个进步派，既是州参议员也是国会参议员，他曾任国会银行与货币委员会主席，是1913年《联邦储备法》的主要缔造者之一。他也是弗吉尼亚州大规模剥夺黑人选民公民权行动的热情支持者。
“Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose,” he declared to one journalist. “To remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”
“歧视！为什么这恰恰就是我们所提倡的，”他对某记者宣称，“为了合法地移除每一个可以甩掉的黑人投票人，避免极大地削弱白人选民的数量优势。”
Then there was political scientist John R. Commons, an adviser to the Progressive Wisconsin governor and senator Robert M. LaFollette and a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s Immigration Commission. Commons, the author of Races and Immigrants in America (1907), criticized immigration on both protectionist grounds (he believed immigrants depressed wages and weakened labor unions) and racist ones (he wrote that the so-called tropical races were “indolent and fickle”).
然后还有政治科学家John R. Commons，他曾是威斯康辛州进步派州长和参议员Robert M. LaFollette的顾问，还曾是西奥多·罗斯福的“移民委员会”成员。Commons著有《美国的种族与移民》（1907），同时从贸易保护主义立场（他相信移民压低了工资、削弱了工会）和种族主义立场（他写道，所谓的热带种族都“懒惰而善变”）出发批评外来移民。
Woodrow Wilson, whose Progressive presidential legacy includes the Federal Reserve System, a federal loan program for farmers, and an eight-hour workday for railroad employees, segregated the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. “I have recently spent several days in Washington,” the black leader Booker T. Washington wrote during Wilson’s first term, “and I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”
伍德罗·威尔逊，这位进步派总统的遗产包括联邦储备体系、一项针对农民的联邦贷款计划和铁路工人八小时工作日制度，对华盛顿的联邦机构实施了种族隔离。“最近我在华盛顿呆了几天”，黑人领袖Booker T. Washington在威尔逊的第一个任期写道，“我从没见过有色人种像今天这样气馁心酸。”
Perhaps the most notorious figure of the era was Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, a leading Southern Progressive and inveterate white supremacist. As senator from South Carolina from 1895 to 1918, Tillman stumped for “Free Silver,” the economic panacea of the agrarian populist (and future secretary of state) William Jennings Bryan, whom Tillman repeatedly supported for president.
或许这一时代最为臭名昭著的人物应数“干草叉”Benjamin Tillman，南方进步派领袖，同时也是冥顽不灵的白人至上主义者。Tillman从1895年至1918年一直是南卡罗来纳州的参议员，一直为William Jennings Bryan这位土地民粹主义者（后曾出任国务卿）的经济万灵药——“自由银币”——而奔走鼓呼，并反复支持后者出任总统。
“Pitchfork” Tillman favored such Progressive staples as antitrust laws, railroad regulations, and public education, but felt the latter was fit only for whites. “When you educate a negro,” he brayed, “you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”
“干草叉”Tillman对反托拉斯法、铁路管制、公共教育等进步主义产品均表支持，但他觉得公共教育这种东西只适用于白人。“你要是教育黑人”，他干嚎道，“那就相当于为监狱教育出一个后备分子，或说是糟蹋了一个农活好手。”
Nor did African Americans always fare better among those radicals situated entirely to the left of the Progressives. Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, though personally sympathetic to blacks, declared during his 1912 campaign for the presidency, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro.”
在完全处于进步派最左端的激进分子面前，非裔美国人也并不总是能讨得了好。美国社会党领袖Eugene V. Debs尽管私底下同情黑人，但在1912年总统竞选活动中仍宣称：“我们不能向黑人提供什么特殊对待”。
Other leading radicals offered even less. Writing in the Socialist Democratic Herald, Victor Berger, the leader of the party’s right wing, declared that “there can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race-that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many years.”
其他激进分子领袖愿意付出的甚至比这还少。社会党右翼领袖Victor Berger在为社会主义刊物《民主先驱报》所写文章中宣称，“毫无疑问，黑人和黑白混血是一个低等种族，白人甚至蒙古人都在文明程度上领先他们许多年。”
The celebrated left-wing novelist Jack London, covering the 1908 heavyweight title bout between black challenger Jack Johnson and white boxing champ Tommy Burns, filled his New York Herald story with lurid ethnic caricatures and incessant race baiting. “Though he was a committed socialist,” observed Jack Johnson biographer Geoffrey C. Ward, London’s “solidarity with the working class did not extend to black people.”
著名左翼小说家杰克·伦敦曾报道过黑人挑战者Jack Johnson和白人拳击冠军Tommy Burns于1908年进行的重量级拳王争霸赛，在为《纽约先驱报》采编的故事中，他用尽了各种夸张的族裔讽刺和层出不穷的种族羞辱。“尽管伦敦是个坚定的社会主义者，”Jack Johnson的传记作家Geoffrey C. Ward说道，但他“并没有将其与劳动阶级的团结延伸到黑人身上。”
As Southern thoroughly documents, these examples just begin to scratch the surface. Progressivism was infested with the most repugnant strains of racism. But was there something more, something inherent in Progressivism itself that facilitated the era’s harsh treatment of blacks?
正如Southern的详尽描绘所示，以上例证只是浮光掠影。种种令人心生厌恶的种族主义性质在进步主义之中泛滥成灾。但是，这一时代对于黑人的残酷态度，是否出于进步主义本身所具有的某种内在特质？
According to Southern, who repeatedly maintains that racism derailed “the great promise” of Progressivism, the answer is no. “The ideas of race and color were powerful, controlling elements in progressive social and political thinking,” he argues. “And this fixation on race explains how democratic reform and racism went hand-in-hand.”
Southern的回答是“并非如此”。他反复强调，种族主义偏离了进步主义的“伟大愿景”。“种族观念和肤色观念强大无比，控制了进步主义的社会与政治思想元素，”他论证道，“而这种对于种族的关注，解释了为何民主改革会与种族主义并驾齐驱。”
That is surely correct, but is it the whole story? As the legal scholar Richard Epstein has noted, “the sad but simple truth is that the Jim Crow resegregation of America depended on a conception of constitutional law that gave property rights short shrift, and showed broad deference to state action under the police power.”
这当然是对的，但这就是事情的全部面目吗？正如法学家Richard Epstein所说，“真相虽然可悲，但很简单：美国的Jim Crow种族隔离法案奠基于一种宪法理念，这种理念漠视财产权，并对国家依据治安权实施的行动表现出最大程度的顺从。”
Progressivism itself, in other words, granted the state vast new authority to manage all walks of American life while at the same time weakening traditional checks on government power, including property rights and liberty of contract. Such a mixture was ripe for the racist abuse that occurred.
换句话说，进步主义本身就把广泛的新权限赋予国家，使之能够管理美国人生活的方方面面，同时又削弱了传统上对于政府权力的各种制衡，包括财产权和契约自由。这种组合对于所发生的种族主义虐待而言，正是水到渠成。
Take the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that has rightly come to symbolize the South’s Jim Crow regime. In Plessy, the Court considered a Louisiana statute forbidding railroads from selling first-class tickets to blacks, a clear violation of economic liberty.
以最高法院在“普莱西诉弗格森案”（1896）中臭名昭著的判决为例，这个案子自此已经恰如其分地成为南方种族隔离体制的象征。在普莱西案中，最高法细致考察了路易斯安那州一条禁止铁路公司将头等票卖给黑人的法令——这是一条明显违反经济自由的法令。
In its 7-1 ruling, the Court upheld segregation in public accommodations so long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided for each race, setting off an orgy of legislation throughout the old Confederacy. South Carolina, for example, segregated trains two years after Plessy. Streetcars followed in 1905, train depots and restaurants in 1906, textile plants in 1915-16, circuses in 1917, pool halls in 1924, and beaches in 1934.
在其7-1的判决中，最高法院认可在公共设施中实施种族隔离，只需每个种族都获得“隔离但平等”的设施。这一判决在整个过去的南部邦联地区引爆了一轮立法高潮。比如，普莱西案两年后，南卡罗来纳州就在火车上实行了种族隔离。1905年是有轨电车，1906年是火车站和餐厅，1915-1916是纺织厂，1917年是马戏团，1924年是台球厅，1934年则是海滩。
No doubt many of those businesses would have excluded or mistreated black customers whatever the law. But in a market free from Jim Crow regulations, other businesses would have welcomed blacks, or at least black dollars, forcing racist enterprises to bear the full cost of excluding or mistreating all those potential paying customers. (This was one of the chief reasons the segregationists pushed for those laws in the first place.)
毫无疑问，不管法律如何规定，许多上述企业还是会排斥或歧视黑人顾客。但是，如果某个市场没有受到种族隔离法规的限制，其他企业就可能欢迎黑人，或至少是黑人身上的美金，那些排斥或歧视此类潜在付费顾客的种族主义企业就会被迫承受由此产生的全部成本。（这就是隔离主义者一开始推动此类立法的最主要原因之一。）
The state, in the eloquent words of the historian C. Vann Woodward, granted “free rein and the majesty of the law to mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted, or deflected.”
用历史学家C. Vann Woodward文辞华美的话来说，各州把“完全的自由和法律的庄严认可”赋予了“大规模的侵害行为，而这本来是可以有所限制、有所缓和或有所修正的。”
Furthermore, this tangled web of regulations, ordinances, codes, and controls was spun during the heyday of Progressivism, precisely when such official actions were least likely to receive any meaningful scrutiny. Southern, despite his otherwise close attention to the many permutations of race and racism, fails to recognize this major defect in the Progressive worldview.
另外，这一团由各种规章、条例、法令和控制组成的乱麻是在进步主义的鼎盛时期编织出来的，而当时恰恰就是这种官方行为最不可能受到任何有意义的细致审查的时候。尽管Southern在其他地方考察种族和种族主义的各种不同组合时细致绵密，在这里却没有注意到进步主义世界观的这一巨大缺陷。
A similar failure handicaps his treatment of one of the era’s rare victories for African Americans. In Buchanan v. Warley(1917), the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Louisville ordinance segregating residential housing blocks by race. The case involved a voluntary contract between a white seller and a black buyer for a housing lot located in a majority-white neighborhood. Under the law, the new black owner could not live on the property he had just purchased.
Southern还有一个不足之处，导致他未能很好地处理非裔美国人在这一时期所取得的罕见胜利之一。在“布坎南诉沃利案”（1917）中，最高法院一致判决推翻路易斯维尔市依据种族来隔离居民住宅街区的法令。在该案中，黑人买方和白人卖方自由订立合同，购买一套位于以白人居民为主的街区的住宅。按照上述法律，这位黑人新房主不能在他刚刚购买的房产内居住。
Writing for the Court, Justice William Rufus Day held that “this attempt to prevent the alienation of the property in question to a person of color…is in direct violation of the fundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution preventing state interference with property rights except by due process of law.”
大法官William Rufus Day代表最高法院写道，“企图阻止涉案房产转让给有色人……这是对于宪法第十四修正案关于各州不经正当法律程序不得干涉财产权的基本法则的直接违反。”
Yet Southern dismisses this rare and important victory as “hollow” and incorrectly asserts that it “was decided not on the grounds of human rights, but on those of white property rights.” In fact, the judicial recognition of black rights stood at the very center of the decision. Justice Day’s opinion clearly states that the Fourteenth Amendment “operate[s] to qualify and entitle a colored man to acquire property without state legislation discriminating against him solely because of color.”
然而，Southern却称这一罕见且重要的胜利“意义不大”，并且错误地断言其“并非基于人权所作出的判决，而是基于白人的财产权。”事实上，法院对黑人权利的承认正处于上述判决的核心。大法官Day在其意见中清晰阐明，第十四修正案“的作用是，准予并授权有色人获得财产，不受各州仅仅因为其肤色而针对他的立法歧视。”
Nor should Southern’s characterization of this victory as “hollow” pass unchallenged. As the legal scholars David Bernstein and Ilya Somin have argued, the Buchanan ruling played a major though sadly underappreciated role in the burgeoning fight for civil rights.
Southern对这一胜利“意义不大”的描述也不应该轻轻揭过。正如法学家David Bernstein和Ilya Somin论证到的，布坎南案判决在风生水起的公民权斗争中发挥了重要作用，很遗憾没有获得应得的承认。
“Buchanan could not force whites to live in the same neighborhood as blacks,” Bernstein and Somin write, “but it did prevent cities from stifling black migration by creating de jure and inflexible boundaries for black neighborhoods, and may have prevented even more damaging legislation.” It is well worth noting, they continue, that the South did not adopt South African-style apartheid at this time, despite widespread white support for such measures.
“布坎南案无法强迫白人和黑人住到同一个街区去，”Bernstein和Somin写道，“但它对各市通过为黑人街区制造法定且固定的边界以限制黑人迁徙的做法发挥了阻止效果，并且可能阻止了其他伤害性更大的立法。”他们接着说，特别值得注意的是，美国南方当时并没有采取一种南非式的种族隔离，尽管当时白人普遍支持此类举措。
In addition, Buchanan was the first major Supreme Court victory for the four-year-old National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a huge boon for the organization that would go on to win the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954), overturning Plessy. W.E.B Du Bois, an NAACP founder and longtime editor of its newsletter, The Crisis, gave Buchanan credit for “the breaking of the backbone of segregation.”
此外，布坎南案是当时成立仅4年的“全国有色人种协进会”在最高法院所取得的第一次重要胜利，这为该组织带来了极大的好处，此后它将赢得里程碑式的“布朗诉教育委员会案”（1954），从而推翻普莱西案。该组织的创始人之一、长期为会刊《危机》担任编辑的W. E. B. Du Bois赞扬布坎南案“打断了种族隔离制度的脊柱”。
Despite these significant shortcomings, The Progressive Era and Race deserves careful attention. The Progressive movement unleashed, aided, and abetted some of the most destructive forces in 20th-century America. The better we understand this history, the less likely we are to repeat it.
尽管存在这些重大缺陷，《进步时代与种族问题》仍值得细心阅读。进步运动解放、助推和煽动了在20世纪美国历史上最具破坏性的一些力量。我们对这段历史了解越多，重复犯错的可能性就越小。
翻译：沈沉（@你在何地-sxy）
校对：Whig Zhou（@whigzhou）
编辑：辉格@whigzhou