Rising Tide. Part 6

When a labor agent tried to help some unhappy Sunnyside tenants relocate, Percy warned him "an unfriendly att.i.tude on my part would be an injury to you." And when Percy learned some Sunnyside Italians were at the Greenville train depot, he told other planters not to take them on and sent a manager to intimidate them into returning.

Federal law prohibited "debt peonage," forcing people to work to pay off debts. Percy was pus.h.i.+ng against the edge of the law. Federal law also prohibited advancing travel expenses and bringing in foreign workers under contract. Percy believed he had found a loophole in this law; more likely he had violated it.

Then Percy's partner Crittenden pushed beyond the edge of the law. Two Italian tenants walked into his office, announced they were leaving for jobs in Alabama coal mines, and promised to repay money owed. They walked out, but Crittenden followed with a Greenville policeman and forcibly pulled them off a train and returned them to Sunnyside.

In the spring of 1907, complaints from the Italians reached Italian Amba.s.sador Baron Edmondo Des Planches. To co-opt him and regain their customary control of the situation, Percy, Charles Scott, Stuyvesant Fish, and others invited Des Planches to tour the plantation. Percy showed off the families whose acreage was highly profitable, pointed out the modern cotton gin, the railroad, the office for the doctor who was on call, the place reserved for Catholic services. Others tactfully let Des Planches know that Percy's wife, Camille, was Catholic. Afterward in Greenville, already a city with a sophistication beyond its small size, Percy hosted a dinner for the group at the Mirror Restaurant, an opulent restaurant run by two Italians that resembled Antoine's in New Orleans. Percy, an engaging and cultured host, entertained with grace and elegance and seemed to win Des Planches over. As Des Planches was leaving, he clasped Percy's hand and said, "Mr. Percy, I a.s.sure you we will send you Italians, who not only will make good farmers but will make good first cla.s.s American citizens."

Des Planches had shown Percy his diplomatic face. There was another. He had a keen eye and saw deeply. He had seen the shacks in which many of the sharecroppers lived and the long rows of cotton a.s.signed to each family, and he had stopped to try almost undrinkable water. He understood enough. Back in Was.h.i.+ngton he reported: "The Italian immigrant at Sunnyside is a human production machine. He is better off than the black man, more perfect than the black man, but like the black man still a machine." He demanded a Justice Department investigation, and specifically asked that Mary Grace Quackenbos conduct it.

MARY Q QUACKENBOS was strong, tough even, yet oddly naive and vulnerable. Heiress to a modest fortune, she had founded the People's Law Firm in New York to protect immigrants. As a private individual and at considerable personal risk, she had uncovered conditions of virtual slavery in turpentine and timber camps in Florida and handed over the evidence to the Justice Department, which prosecuted, then hired her as the first female U.S. attorney. Her contest with LeRoy would pit federal law against both Percy's friends.h.i.+p with Roosevelt and, in effect, all southern society. was strong, tough even, yet oddly naive and vulnerable. Heiress to a modest fortune, she had founded the People's Law Firm in New York to protect immigrants. As a private individual and at considerable personal risk, she had uncovered conditions of virtual slavery in turpentine and timber camps in Florida and handed over the evidence to the Justice Department, which prosecuted, then hired her as the first female U.S. attorney. Her contest with LeRoy would pit federal law against both Percy's friends.h.i.+p with Roosevelt and, in effect, all southern society.

From the first their relations.h.i.+p was one of mutual charm, mutual deceit, mutual determination, and, perhaps, even mutual respect. Upon her arrival in Greenville in July 1907, Percy seemed to extend both personal and professional courtesy to her. He hosted a dinner in her honor and gave her warm letters of introduction to X. O. Pindall, governor of Arkansas, and Charles Scott. But Percy also wrote a private letter warning Scott that her queries would be "endless and tedious" and wondering how to prevent her from "convers[ing] freely with the Italians."

She too operated with guile at dinner, playing the disarmed and disarming guest, saying she so enjoyed Mrs. Percy that she wondered if Mrs. Percy could accompany them on a tour of Sunnyside. Yet she had already dispatched an undercover agent to the plantation to seek evidence against her host. (The investigator was arrested for trespa.s.sing.) Soon she went to the plantation herself, slept in a sharecropper's shack with no screens on windows or doors, was besieged by mosquitoes, and drank the red, iron-laden water.

She returned with accusations of wrongdoing, yet still told her superiors, "Mr. Percy appears to be a man of common sense." She asked him to improve plantation conditions and rewrite tenant contracts, and he agreed to some changes. But when she pushed for more, he refused. Meanwhile, she had threatened one of Percy's labor agents with a long jail sentence for violating contract labor laws unless he confessed and helped her. She broke him, and his confession implicated Percy himself.

Percy reacted immediately. Her notes, including those of interviews with potential witnesses, disappeared from her room at the Cowan Hotel in Greenville. They were then "recovered" (Percy's mocking word) and returned to her by Thomas Catchings, a retired congressman and a close Percy a.s.sociate. Percy seemed to be telling her she could not touch him, that she was powerless, not only in the Delta but in Was.h.i.+ngton.

At the time, Percy himself was with President Roosevelt in Memphis, at the largest river convention ever held. More than 10,000 attended. Boosters in every town along every river in the upper Mississippi valley, antic.i.p.ating the opening of the Panama Ca.n.a.l, were dreaming of direct s.h.i.+pments to South America and the Orient. Roosevelt's high-pitched voice had pierced the hall. He approved the building of empires and called for great ma.s.sive dams to generate hydroelectric power, irrigation projects to reclaim the dry West, and flood control too. Roosevelt proclaimed, "The whole future of the nation is directly at stake." The crowd cheered and cheered, although Roosevelt's own Army Corps of Engineers was trying to-and would-kill the legislation to carry out his plan.

Roosevelt then spent a week on Parker's plantation relaxing, hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, and talking politics. Percy was with him for much of that time too.

Quackenbos knew of Percy's friends.h.i.+p with Roosevelt. It put enormous pressure on her. It drove her forward. She would not be intimidated. Instead, she showed her own power. Earlier she had written Attorney General Charles Bonaparte that the situation "at Sunnyside is not exactly peonage as I understand it." The settlers were making profits, often substantial profits. An a.s.sistant attorney general had also visited Sunnyside and found none of the systematic brutality and viciousness "we have seen in cases found in other states."

Now she returned to Sunnyside to spend another night with a tenant family. A foreman ordered her off the property. She refused to obey unless Percy himself told her to leave in writing. Before sunrise the next day a young black man delivered her a note from Percy doing so.

She left but sent Percy a note accusing him of "untrustworthiness and ungentlemanly behavior." They were two accusations that would have most enraged him, and also revealed the delicate balance between her feminine and professional roles. But she also declared, "I have a perfect right to go upon the Sunnyside property, at any time," and warned him not to interfere "with my duty as a government official."

Nine days later she sent an even stronger response, contained in a wire on October 25, 1907, to Attorney General Charles Bonaparte: "O. B. Crittenden arrested for peonage."

EARLIER THAT YEAR the Delta had survived a major flood of the Mississippi River. Although tens of thousands of acres had gone under, by and large the levees had held. Percy had worked hard in confronting that enemy at his front. He understood now that Quackenbos was an enemy at his rear, capable of threatening not only him personally but the relations.h.i.+p of the entire Delta with the financial markets and Was.h.i.+ngton. the Delta had survived a major flood of the Mississippi River. Although tens of thousands of acres had gone under, by and large the levees had held. Percy had worked hard in confronting that enemy at his front. He understood now that Quackenbos was an enemy at his rear, capable of threatening not only him personally but the relations.h.i.+p of the entire Delta with the financial markets and Was.h.i.+ngton.

She was proving a powerful adversary. Not satisfied with the weight of the Justice Department, she also used the press. Northern and Was.h.i.+ngton newspapers were sensationalizing what were plainly leaks from her. It was the age of muckraking and, like all ages, of scandalmongering, of exposing evil, of bringing down the mighty. It worried him.

But Mary Quackenbos was attacking only a wrong, and a relatively small one at that. To block her attack, Percy would use something far larger as a s.h.i.+eld. The s.h.i.+eld was the lot of the Negro in Mississippi, an evil that was to the wrong she accused him of as a supernova is to a streetlight.

Percy was no crusader on race. The preceding Christmas, when sharecroppers were signing contracts for 1907, he had warned his foreman that blacks considered him "rough with labor.... A difficulty at this time would be fatal to filling the place up.... [T]ake now what you would not be willing to do after." He had excepted "a negro named Toler [who] is doing the place a great deal of injury. I don't mind your being rough with Toler if you find him on the place." And Percy, like other planters, virtually bought and sold black sharecroppers, paying off their debts as the price of acquiring them as tenants. Typically, he wrote one fellow planter: "I would be willing to pay his account if you are willing for him to leave. I would not even write you about the matter, but he says it is your custom to let them leave whenever they are dissatisfied. If you care to turn him loose, call me over the phone."

And like many men of his cla.s.s and time, he fully embraced Social Darwinism and considered blacks unable to compete with whites. He noted, "Those negroes who do receive higher education...in course of time, under the inexorable working out of the 'survival of the fittest' they will have to go to the wall."

This put him squarely in the mainstream of contemporary thought. Roosevelt tempered Social Darwinism with the Social Gospel-decrying "cutthroat compet.i.tion" and embracing social work-but still used compet.i.tion to define even friends.h.i.+p. Of a tennis partner Roosevelt said, "If conditions were such that only one could live he knows that I should possibly kill him as the weaker of the two and he, therefore, wors.h.i.+ps this in me." Although he dined with Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton in the White House, arousing a fury of outrage in the South, he also said he wanted to "see the South back in full communion" with the rest of the nation, adding that in keeping with Social Darwinism, "The Negro...must take his chances like the rest."

Percy agreed with that sentiment. But if the idea of social equality with blacks was as abhorrent to him as it was to others of his cla.s.s, and if he expected blacks to lose a compet.i.tion, he also believed that each man had to join in that compet.i.tion. And he viewed a black man as just that, a man man.

This set him apart. When a dispute erupted on his Trail Lake Plantation between the white manager and black tenants, it was the black tenant Lewis Levi whom Percy addressed as a man of honor and trust: "I am counting on you to use your influence with the hands for the benefit of the place, as you said you would do. I hope that I will find things straightened out when I get back.... I believe I can rely upon you to do what is right." And it was the white manager whom Percy patronized and instructed: "You want to get as many of the hands satisfied as you can.... Treat Levi and the other negroes you think are against you exactly like you do the others, give them an equal chance to do day work, etc."

Such an insistence on fair play was rapidly losing favor. In 1903, Mississippi had elected James K. Vardaman, "the Great White Chief," governor. He was the first man in Mississippi to realize, in the sense of "making real," the politics of race hatred. Tall, with a ma.s.sive head and long black hair draped like a cape over his shoulders, he always wore an immaculate white suit, mastered every stage, was charismatic and demagogic to all, and was demonic and frightening to his many rivals and enemies.

As governor, Vardaman raised expenditures on white education and regulated railroads and corporations, Percy's clients, but Percy initially supported him because they agreed on levee board appointments. But he also patronized him. Percy told a friend: "The fundamental trouble with Vardaman is that he honestly believes money is an evil to be guarded against...that Spartan simplicity, virtue and poverty are the virtues which should be emulated. It all comes of an untrained mind grappling with economic questions and trying to be original.... Between barbarism and Wall Street I believe he rather leans toward barbarism."

But then Vardaman began to exhibit a truly barbaric side. He denounced the education of blacks as "a positive unkindness because it renders him unfit for the work which the white man has prescribed and which he will be forced to perform." Besides, it made no sense to have education "dissatisfy [the Negro] and then kill him if he undertakes to enjoy the prerogatives of citizens.h.i.+p." He called blacks "lazy lying l.u.s.tful animal[s] which no amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen."

Appalled not only by Vardaman's comments but by the support they engendered, Percy believed that the time had come to respond. At a meeting of the Mississippi Bar a.s.sociation in Vicksburg he made a remarkable speech. In it, he was very consciously preparing the ground for what would become a long war over race, a war that would last until the end of his life and beyond. He believed that his position represented civilization and decency, that Vardaman's represented evil. If his position also represented self-interest-even if the experiment with Italian sharecroppers proved successful, the Delta would still need black labor and Vardaman was threatening to drive blacks away-he considered that perfectly consistent with morality.

Ultimately, the Mississippi River would show that in race matters Percy's self-interest was not consistent with morality, and the river would force him to choose. In the meantime, his views on race were as progressive as those of any mainstream figure in the nation.

Percy began his speech with the observation "[t]hat man is a lover of his country, and a true patriot, who humbly strives to do his duty and to discharge the obligations of citizens.h.i.+p in that locality to which Fate may have a.s.signed him." It therefore behooved him to act. He continued: "An erroneous statement, oft repeated by those high in place, if permitted for long to go uncontradicted, soon pa.s.ses current as axiomatic truth.... Such an erroneous statement has come much into vogue in the South, and especially in Mississippi in regard to the negro and education.... The statement is daily heard that education ruins the negro.... I deny that any man is rendered worse by having his intelligence quickened, his mental horizon widened." It was a long speech. It affirmed the moral reasons for educating blacks and treating them fairly and honestly, including the fact that abusing blacks corrupted whites. Another reason for education was money. "The negro must be educated," he concluded. "But not as a matter of justice to him alone is his education necessary, but because the industrial development of the South demands it."

His speech would have impact. Jacob d.i.c.kinson, a former a.s.sistant U.S. attorney general and general counsel of the Illinois Central, a man Percy described as "an intense southerner," sent a copy of the speech to Roosevelt.

Roosevelt already trusted Percy and respected him. He also liked him. Only a few weeks earlier Percy had stopped at the White House to say h.e.l.lo. Roosevelt had greeted him cordially and urged him to return for lunch the next day, when he had talked of hunting and his fight with Edward Harriman, whom Percy knew well from Harriman's days as vice president of the Illinois Central. Finally the president had laughed: "Percy, by George, I like the Kaiser, he is a fine fellow. If you would put him down in Chicago he would carry his ward but the Czar would not. He would be president of the Mugwump Society." Now, Roosevelt, fully understanding the political forces at work in the South and understanding the storm Percy was calling down upon his own head, forwarded Percy's speech to the Outlook Outlook, the country's leading Progressive magazine, which published it. On August 11, 1907, he sent Percy a note saying, "I hailed that article of yours with genuine delight. I have long since become convinced that while in each section of the country there are wrongs to be remedied,...the only effective way to remedy them...[is] to back the man on the ground who is acting well and wisely. My dear sir, as an American I felt I owed you a debt of grat.i.tude."

It was into that relations.h.i.+p that the arrest of Percy's partner intruded.

SOON AFTER his partner's arrest Percy left for Was.h.i.+ngton. When he needed action there, he usually relied upon either his own congressional delegation, which included the House Democratic leader, or Speaker Cannon. But Congress could not help in this matter. Only two men, the attorney general or the president, could. his partner's arrest Percy left for Was.h.i.+ngton. When he needed action there, he usually relied upon either his own congressional delegation, which included the House Democratic leader, or Speaker Cannon. But Congress could not help in this matter. Only two men, the attorney general or the president, could.

So Percy met first with Attorney General Charles Bonaparte. The meeting went badly. He wrote home, "I believe he will give what trouble he can in the premises." Only Roosevelt remained.

Percy had never asked a favor of the president, refusing, as he told one man who sought his help, to make a "social acquaintance the basis of a request for political favors." But he did not hesitate to discuss policy with Roosevelt. Only days earlier Percy had urged Parker to join him in asking Roosevelt to help southern banks through the Panic of 1907. Whether because of them or not, Roosevelt did move $50 million of federal deposits into those banks.

Now Percy called at the White House. Roosevelt knew the subject of the visit and saw him at once. Percy had prepared for this meeting as thoroughly as for any court appearance. He would not confuse business with friends.h.i.+p and refrained from any talk of hunting or mutual friends. Instead, he presented his brief, explaining, "You are fully aware of the absolute necessity for immigration to the Delta section of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, that the country is less than one-third developed and its development absolutely arrested for lack of labor."

Mary Quackenbos was threatening this immigration despite, he charged, her "most profound and remarkable ignorance.... There was not a condition, a custom, a form of contract, or a crop raised about which she had the slightest information." Percy cited specific errors she had made, including a grossly overestimated calculation of Sunnyside's profits based on her stunningly mistaken belief that the plantation produced two cotton crops a year.

He did not ask the president to quash the grand jury that would consider indicting his partner. He did not fear the law, he said, nor did Quackenbos care about the law. Indeed, he argued, "Her manner was that of a 'Lady Bountiful' dispensing alms, a philanthropic humanitarian, a doctrinaire, seeking to remove poverty wherever she finds it...without discrimination as to whether that poverty is due to unjust treatment or oppression, or is the result of necessary conditions and environment." It was simply the world, a hard world, which caused the immigrants' pain, he argued. Not even the South. The world. The fitter survive.

But if the legal process did not worry him, he continued, the press did. Quackenbos was leaking her report in bits and pieces to the press. Was.h.i.+ngton papers were suggesting that charges of "sensational character" would be made, and the southern press was reprinting the stories.

He then made three requests. First, believing that "the publication at this time of an unfavorable Government report would be absolutely fatal to any chance of securing immigration," he asked that "no publicity be given [her report] and no action be taken on it by the government until it be verified." Second, he asked that an investigation by "men of practical understanding" be conducted, and, third, that she not be sent south again. of practical understanding" be conducted, and, third, that she not be sent south again.

Roosevelt listened closely. He approved of Quackenbos. When Florida congressmen had earlier erupted in outrage over her investigation of turpentine camps, Roosevelt had backed her absolutely. Just recently, he had sent a newspaper clipping about her offending southern timber interests to Bonaparte with the notation "very amusing." But Roosevelt trusted Percy. That was not something easily achieved or discounted.

After a moment he gave Percy the answers he wanted. Quackenbos would be removed from the investigation. There would be no publication of her report unless it was verified.

Then the president invited Percy to dinner. Percy declined. Few people would decline an invitation to dinner with the president, fewer still who had just won a favor from him. It was part of what Roosevelt liked about Percy.

IN A NARROW SENSE Percy had succeeded. A federal grand jury in Jackson, Mississippi, refused to indict Crittenden, despite a charge from the judge almost requiring them to do so. Quackenbos was rea.s.signed, and all copies of her report were removed from Justice Department files. Percy had succeeded. A federal grand jury in Jackson, Mississippi, refused to indict Crittenden, despite a charge from the judge almost requiring them to do so. Quackenbos was rea.s.signed, and all copies of her report were removed from Justice Department files.

A few weeks later Percy invited Stuyvesant Fish and Jacob d.i.c.kinson to join him at Sunnyside. "Fish are biting, Mint is growing, soft breezes blowing," he beckoned.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt asked Harvard historian Albert Bush nell Hart to investigate Sunnyside. In a letter expressing simultaneously doubts about feminism, concerns about having removed Quackenbos, and the limits of his own power, he wrote, "I am very uneasy about...[her] unsoundness of judgment which is both hysterical and sentimental.... The fact is that on these southern plantations we are faced with a condition of things that is very puzzling. Infamous outrages are perpetrated-outrages that would warrant radical action if they took place in Oyster Bay or Cambridge; but where they actually do occur, the surroundings, the habits of life, the sentiments of the people, are so absolutely different that we are in reality living in a different age, and we simply have to take this into account in endeavoring to enforce laws which cannot be enforced save by juries." Hart investigated and exonerated Percy.

Yet Percy actually had failed. The State Department forwarded Quackenbos' report to the Italian government in confidence. Throughout Italy the government put up signs in railroad depots warning emigrants away from the Delta. The Austrian government simply forbade emigration there.

Of 8 million people entering the United States from foreign countries between 1892 and 1906, only 2,697 claimed Mississippi as their destination. Most were Italians brought over for Percy's experiment. There would be few more.

There was something dark about Mississippi, darker even than the rest of the South. And it would grow darker still.

Percy concluded, "Italian immigration has not been a success...princ.i.p.ally because the people of the Delta accustomed for a good many years to handling negro laborers are not fit to handle any other."

But the Delta was still starved for labor. In 1907 the boll weevil crossed the Mississippi River. The Delta suffered, but not as much as elsewhere; its climate and soil gave its cotton some resistance to the weevil. Demand for Delta cotton only increased. Percy observed wryly: "There is no labor...with which to develop [the state]. Mississippians have no idea of doing any work themselves and n.o.body else on G.o.d's green earth is thinking about coming here or can be made to contemplate such a dire possibility."

To seize land from the river, to build his society, more than ever Percy needed labor. In the South labor had always, one way or another, come down to race. Percy had tried to escape that tar pit. He had failed, both in recruiting independent white farmers from the Midwest and white sharecroppers from Europe. The future of the Delta and of whites like Percy was wedded to the black race more than ever, however much men of either race resisted.

CHAPTER NINE.

IN 1903, THE YEAR Vardaman was elected governor, even W. E. B. Du Bois, the great black leader who was then considered a radical, commended "the representatives of the best white Southern public opinion," adding "[A] partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start and fight the world's battles alone." Vardaman was elected governor, even W. E. B. Du Bois, the great black leader who was then considered a radical, commended "the representatives of the best white Southern public opinion," adding "[A] partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start and fight the world's battles alone."

In effect, Du Bois was calling upon men like LeRoy Percy to protect the Negro from emerging southern demagogues and the mob. In order to attract labor to build his society, Percy was doing just that, with some success. Percy's friend Alfred Stone told the American Economic a.s.sociation: "If I were asked what one factor makes most for the amicable relations between the races in the delta I should say without hesitation the absence of a white laboring cla.s.s, particularly of field laborers.... There were no small [white-owned] farms, no towns, no manufacturing enterprises, no foothold for the poor white, who is here a negligible, if not an absolutely unknown quant.i.ty."

This did not make the Delta the promised land. Lynchings did occur there-one occurred even in Percy's own Was.h.i.+ngton County-and they reverberated through the region's overwhelmingly black population, which in some areas exceeded 90 percent of the total. And, few places in the South saw more brutality than Delta levee camps. The camps were often isolated, surrounded by jungle, where one or two white men controlled a hundred "of the most reckless meanest n.i.g.g.e.rs in the world," according to William Hemphill, a young engineer from the North who worked above Greenville and who also worked on the Panama Ca.n.a.l. He found the camps h.e.l.lish. "You have seen a swarm of gnats bunched together. You can form some idea of how thick the mosquitoes are here...I killed a bluestriped scorpion which I found in my bedclothes." But mostly he found violence: "The way these levee n.i.g.g.e.rs shoot one another is something fearful. One got shot in a c.r.a.p game last night. It didn't even stop the game. If one of the white foremen shoots a couple of n.i.g.g.e.rs on the works and it is by no means an unheard of or infrequent thing the work is not stopped.... The long arm of the law does not reach [here]." Once a levee contractor even murdered "the Mercy Man," a white man who issued fines for mistreating mules. On the levees mules were worth more than blacks. Black levee workers recited a saying, "Kill a mule, buy another. Kill a n.i.g.g.e.r, hire another."

Yet the Delta did offer blacks at least relative promise. Judge Robert R. Taylor of Indiana, a member of the Mississippi River Commission, pointed out that levees, by allowing the mining of the river's wealth, also allowed "the negro to better his condition.... In considerable and increasing numbers he is buying land and becoming an independent cultivator.... Nowhere else in the South are as favorable opportunities offered to the black man as in the reclaimed Mississippi lowlands, and nowhere else is he doing as much for his own up-lifting."

Percy and the men with whom he dominated the region, and particularly Was.h.i.+ngton County, did create something special-at least given the times. Largely because of Percy, who was on the board of one bank and influenced others, lenders did not hesitate to offer blacks mortgages. In 1900 blacks owned two-thirds of all Delta farms, probably the highest proportion of black land owners.h.i.+p in the country. Also largely because of Percy, Greenville had black policemen, a black justice of the peace, and every mailman in the city was black. In 1913 the Census Bureau concluded that the plantation organization was "more firmly fixed in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta than in any other area of the South." But even sharecropping could offer opportunity. Alfred Stone founded an agricultural experiment station to develop better cotton and, as a social scientist, kept meticulous records of his settlements with sharecroppers. (He would also later make Mississippi the first state to enact a sales tax.) In 1901 the average family on his plantation cleared $1,000 after all expenses were deducted, and in 1903 they cleared roughly $700.

Mississippi outside the Delta contrasted sharply with this picture. There, whites were driving blacks off the land, burning down their barns, whipping them, forcing them to sell at a loss, murdering them. In one Mississippi county 309 men, including the sheriff, were indicted; some towns bragged that they were "n.i.g.g.e.r-free." More important was an outbreak of lynchings of almost incomprehensible viciousness. Ho Chi Minh, then a French journalist, collected clippings that included headlines such as, from the New Orleans States New Orleans States, "Today a Negro Will Be Burned by 3,000 Citizens," and from the Jackson Jackson (Mississippi) (Mississippi) Daily News Daily News, "Negro J.H. to Be Burnt by the Crowd at Ellistown This Afternoon at 5 P.M. P.M." The Vicksburg Evening-Post Vicksburg Evening-Post reported the lynching of a black husband and wife accused of murdering a white man: "The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murders [ reported the lynching of a black husband and wife accused of murdering a white man: "The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murders [sic] were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket....[A] large corkscrew.... was bored into the man and woman...and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh." Then the crowd burned them at the stake, after partially filling their mouths and nostrils with mud to prevent a fast death from smoke inhalation.

Vardaman, the governor, fed on, and fed, the hatred. Although he sent troops to prevent one lynching, he also said it did not matter whether innocent blacks were lynched since "[t]he good [Negroes] are few, the bad are many, and it is impossible to tell what ones are...dangerous to the honor of the dominant race until the damage is done." Once he stated, "We would be justified in slaughtering every Ethiop on the earth to preserve unsullied the honor of one Caucasian home." Another time he said, "If it is necessary every Negro in the State will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy."

Percy had already attacked Vardaman's race-baiting, most publicly in the speech that Roosevelt had so liked. Since then Vardaman's rhetoric had only grown more barbaric. When Vardaman began pursuing a seat in the United States Senate, Percy moved to block him, denouncing his racial views as "infamous," condemning his willingness to use race "to inflame the pa.s.sions and hatred of his audience, hoping out of it to gain a few paltry votes."

At first, Vardaman tried to conciliate Percy, writing: "My dear Percy,...I believe I can be elected by a handsome majority and do not want to be cut out of the opportunity.... I wish you would come down to see me."

Instead, Percy devoted himself to helping John Sharp Williams defeat Vardaman in 1908. Williams was Democratic leader of the U.S. House and had given the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. He could move crowds too. Yet he won by only 648 votes out of 118,344 cast. The Delta alone then had a black population of at least 171,209, and a white population of 24,137, but of course only a few hundred blacks-if that many-still voted.

But Vardaman, despite his loss, had changed the equation of power in Mississippi. The change was not wholly obvious. In the Delta and in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., Percy's might was still tangible, like a hard muscle one could touch. In the Delta even Williams, himself owner of a Delta plantation, paid homage. When his son, an engineer with a degree from MIT, needed business introductions, Williams thought his own influence insufficient and wrote Percy, "I wish you would give [my son] some letters to Delta people...so he may have a fair opportunity to present his proposition." In Was.h.i.+ngton, Anselm McLaurin, the other Mississippi senator, asked Percy to intervene with Roosevelt on a personal matter. Percy was happy to have the president do a kindness for the senator. Nor did Roosevelt's departure end Percy's influence. Despite opposition from the Army Corps of Engineers, he still arranged the appointment of Charles West, engineer of the Greenville Levee Board, as one of the five members of the Mississippi River Commission. And Speaker Cannon and Senator Allison continued to listen to him, especially on levees. Once, at Percy's request and to protect levees, Cannon had even, in violation of the seniority principle, removed a congressman from one committee and replaced him with another.

Yet paradoxically, in between the Delta and Was.h.i.+ngton, in the state capital of Jackson, Percy's power was becoming circ.u.mscribed. In the hill country of eastern Mississippi, in the piney woods of the southeast corner of the state, in the central and southwestern parts of the state, small white farmers who scratched a living from hill-country farms that took twice the effort to produce half the cotton as Delta soil resented his client corporations, resented the big Delta planters and the foreign and northern investors who owned tens of thousands of alluvial acres, resented the planters also for drinking-Mississippi pa.s.sed prohibition in 1908-gambling, a general lack of G.o.d-fearingness, and because, the poorer whites well knew, the planters had contempt for them. Governors elected with their votes rarely allied with Percy. One governor was advised upon taking office to "whip" Percy and his friends: "You cannot conciliate them and retain your self-respect. They demand nothing short of the earth."

As a result, Percy was forced to retreat to the Delta, where he still had the votes to humble any adversary. He wanted only one thing from these governors: they appointed the levee board, and he wanted a say in those appointments. Usually, he got a say, even if he had to go through a third party to do so.

But the river was not the only rising force that threatened to inundate Percy's Delta. And Percy, not levees, would have to hold this new force back.

In 1910, Senator McLaurin died in office, leaving two years of his term unfilled. The state legislature would choose his successor. The leading candidate, by far, was Vardaman.

Percy again threw everything he had into preventing Vardaman's elevation to the Senate. Everything he had tried to build was at stake. Vardaman threatened "the welfare of the state and the peaceful relations.h.i.+p existing between the races," Percy protested. Defeating him would be "a life and death struggle." And this time Percy decided to run himself.

THE CONTEST was one in which backroom deals and maneuvers, not popular vote, would decide the winner. To counter Vardaman's overwhelming lead, Percy joined with his rivals and enemies to settle on a common strategy. First, they decided that, although the state legislature did not contain a single Republican, and although the legislators would be using the legislative chamber for votes, the legislators would meet formally as a party caucus to choose a Democratic nominee. This allowed secret balloting, so a legislator could vote against Vardaman without risking his const.i.tuents' wrath. Only for the formal election of the senator-ratifying a selection already made-would they legally convene as a legislature. Vardaman supporters immediately condemned this stratagem as "the Secret Caucus." Second, to dilute Vardaman's strength they encouraged favorite-son candidates to run. Third, they agreed that candidates who dropped out should urge their supporters not to switch to Vardaman but instead to rally around whatever opponent seemed strongest. was one in which backroom deals and maneuvers, not popular vote, would decide the winner. To counter Vardaman's overwhelming lead, Percy joined with his rivals and enemies to settle on a common strategy. First, they decided that, although the state legislature did not contain a single Republican, and although the legislators would be using the legislative chamber for votes, the legislators would meet formally as a party caucus to choose a Democratic nominee. This allowed secret balloting, so a legislator could vote against Vardaman without risking his const.i.tuents' wrath. Only for the formal election of the senator-ratifying a selection already made-would they legally convene as a legislature. Vardaman supporters immediately condemned this stratagem as "the Secret Caucus." Second, to dilute Vardaman's strength they encouraged favorite-son candidates to run. Third, they agreed that candidates who dropped out should urge their supporters not to switch to Vardaman but instead to rally around whatever opponent seemed strongest.

On the first vote Vardaman received 71 votes, more than double his closest rival. Percy received 13. But Vardaman's opponents totaled 99 votes. Vardaman fell short of a majority. The fight had begun.

It became a grand show for Jackson, the state capital that had only just become a city. In 1900 its population had been 7,000; in 1910 it was 21,000. Although streets were unpaved, streetcars ran throughout it. Automobiles were so common they no longer frightened horses and mules. There were wooden sidewalks that lasted for several years before they rotted. Great stone buildings were rising. Department stores sold suits for $125-the annual salary of most Mississippi teachers. The Edwards House charged $2 a night, an enormous sum; there the large Percy party took suites of rooms. Despite a state prohibition law, whiskey flowed freely both in the Percy headquarters and in the Lemon Hotel, which Vardaman, a prohibitionist, used for his headquarters. But only Percy had real money. He and his brothers Walker and Willie, prominent attorneys in Birmingham and Memphis who came to Jackson to help, represented many of the major corporations doing business in the South.

There was business to do. The Mississippi legislature was a swamp, "timid and third-rate," thick with petty men greedy for small things. But the pettiness and greed kept the anti-Vardaman coalition together over an amazing six weeks, with votes taken, on the average, more than once each day. It was six weeks of chicanery, drinking, prost.i.tution, deal-making, vote-peddling, and corruption. The legislature adjourned for Mardi Gras, as dozens of members took the Illinois Central to New Orleans, some no doubt on Percy-supplied but illegal railroad pa.s.ses. At one point the members adjourned the caucus, convened as the legislature, pa.s.sed a law creating seventy-nine new county attorneys so that the anti-Vardaman governor had more offices with which to buy votes, then adjourned as a legislature and reconvened as a caucus.

Vardaman never received less than 65 votes nor more than 79. But gradually, support began to coalesce around Percy. One after another, other contenders dropped out while still opposing Vardaman. After fifty-seven ballots the coalition agreed to support Percy, who would face Vardaman alone. Sitting on the floor of the legislature, Percy leaned over to his campaign manager and said, "Crump, let's just put it to the touch."

Percy won, 87 to 82. Vardaman ran back and forth around the rostrum, screaming that his opponents were "black as the night that covers me!"

The caucus then convened as the legislature and officially elected Percy 157 votes to 1. The one went to John C. Kyle, not Vardaman, who would set no precedent of splitting the Democratic Party.

The next day, February 25, 1910, Percy returned to Greenville at 7:05 P.M. P.M. Two bra.s.s bands met the train, men and women shook cowbells, fireworks exploded. A parade began, led by torch-carrying men, then the bands, then a procession of all the twenty-six automobiles in Greenville, then marchers. Thousands of people lined the streets; it seemed the entire Delta had gathered, many more than the population of Greenville. The parade ended at the Opera House. It was chaos. "Swinging perilously from the railing around the balcony was a perfect sea of shouting men yelling for Greenville's favorite son," reported the Two bra.s.s bands met the train, men and women shook cowbells, fireworks exploded. A parade began, led by torch-carrying men, then the bands, then a procession of all the twenty-six automobiles in Greenville, then marchers. Thousands of people lined the streets; it seemed the entire Delta had gathered, many more than the population of Greenville. The parade ended at the Opera House. It was chaos. "Swinging perilously from the railing around the balcony was a perfect sea of shouting men yelling for Greenville's favorite son," reported the Memphis Commercial-Appeal Memphis Commercial-Appeal. A dozen men spoke, but none could be heard. Strangely, the excitement did not energize Percy, who had stood in the car so exhausted that friends worried he might fall out. When he rose, a roar shook the hall. Quieting the bedlam, he held up his hands and said, "I am not going to make a political speech tonight-not because I am tired-but because I don't have to. I'm among friends at home. I have been away from you for seven weeks, and those weeks seem like so many years, and tonight I know as I have never known before, as I never realized how I could know, the full meaning of 'home sweet home.'"

IN W WAs.h.i.+NGTON not only John Sharp Williams but Roosevelt, Jacob d.i.c.kinson, the former Illinois Central counsel who was now secretary of war, and Edward White, the chief justice of the Supreme Court-Percy and he were frequent poker players at the exclusive Boston Club in New Orleans-made Percy at home. not only John Sharp Williams but Roosevelt, Jacob d.i.c.kinson, the former Illinois Central counsel who was now secretary of war, and Edward White, the chief justice of the Supreme Court-Percy and he were frequent poker players at the exclusive Boston Club in New Orleans-made Percy at home.

But he had won little respite for the Delta. In a year and a half he would have to face Vardaman again, this time in a statewide primary.

While Percy began making himself at home in Was.h.i.+ngton, Vardaman began campaigning before huge, frightening crowds. Vardaman declared: "This is a contest for supremacy between the man whose toil produces the wealth of this country, and the favored few who reap the products of that toil. I expect to win by the largest margin ever received in Mississippi."

Meanwhile, the Jackson Democrat-Star Jackson Democrat-Star called "the Secret Caucus...the most disgraceful political farce ever enacted at our state capital." The called "the Secret Caucus...the most disgraceful political farce ever enacted at our state capital." The Columbus Dispatch Columbus Dispatch avowed, rightly, that Vardaman's defeat "was brought about by a hundred men, representing...the corporations of the state,...the money of the state." The avowed, rightly, that Vardaman's defeat "was brought about by a hundred men, representing...the corporations of the state,...the money of the state." The Laurel Ledger Laurel Ledger denounced "the multiplicity of influences that culminated in [Vardaman's] defeat." denounced "the multiplicity of influences that culminated in [Vardaman's] defeat."

Then Theodore Bilbo, a state senator, emerged. A hater who would later, as a U.S. senator, publicly use words like "kikes," "dagos," and "n.i.g.g.e.rs" (in 1995 at the Million Man March, Louis Farrakhan invoked Bilbo's name as a symbol of racism), Bilbo accused a Percy supporter of having attempted to bribe him to vote for Percy. The accused man won easy acquittal-the jury stayed out eighteen minutes. But the charges compounded the public revulsion over the caucus. And Bilbo announced his own candidacy for lieutenant governor. The campaign had begun.

Underneath lay the issue of race. And Percy, who had sought a Senate seat tenaciously, seemed diffident. For months he delayed putting together a campaign organization and constantly displayed political insensitivity. A New York Times New York Times reporter described him as "suave and dignifiedly courteous" to his equals, "condescending but still affable" to those beneath "his estimate of himself on birth or money," but "overbearing toward the hoi-polloi beneath his alt.i.tudinous...o...b..t." Far worse, in one speech, LeRoy equated Negroes and poor whites: "They say I'm a big Greenville aristocrat, and don't care anything about the common man. There are people on my place, white and dark, who have lived there all their lives. I've taken care of them, and I'll continue to take care of them." reporter described him as "suave and dignifiedly courteous" to his equals, "condescending but still affable" to those beneath "his estimate of himself on birth or money," but "overbearing toward the hoi-polloi beneath his alt.i.tudinous...o...b..t." Far worse, in one speech, LeRoy equated Negroes and poor whites: "They say I'm a big Greenville aristocrat, and don't care anything about the common man. There are people on my place, white and dark, who have lived there all their lives. I've taken care of them, and I'll continue to take care of them."

Outside the Delta, angry crowds heckled him. They wanted to know about his black servants, about his hunting on the Sabbath, about his churchgoing, about his drinking, about his wife's Catholicism.