Favorite Books from June 2022
Reviews of George Henry White and By Executive Order.
I ended June 2022 by reading two great books. Check out my reviews of each below.
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George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life by Benjamin R. Justesen
“This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heartbroken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people-rising people, full of potential force.” -George Henry White, Farewell Address to Congress, January 29, 1901
I first learned of George Henry White in high school. We learned he was the only Black Congressman from the late 1890s to the turn of the 20th Century, the next Black Member of Congress from NC (Eva Clayton) would be elected 91 years later. We also learned of White’s notable 1901 farewell address to Congress, the passage above is White’s most memorable line. Outside of that, that is all that we knew of White. Recently I read books such as Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, The Negro And Fusion Politics In North Carolina, 1894–1901, and The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson which all mentioned White but none of them gave full coverage of his life and times. Benjamin Justesen’s book does just that.
Justesen wrote a great book about White, beginning with his upbringing in the turpentine woods of NC to his death in PA. White was a Black man who also had white and Indigenous ancestry. He served in local, state, and federal government representing the state of North Carolina as well as its Black citizens. Before he became a politician he was a school principal and a lawyer.
One of the interesting stories that Justesen tells is of White’s long battle with his brother-in-law Henry Cheatam to obtain the Republican nomination of NC’s Second Congressional District, NC’s majority Black district. Its a story of contested conventions, cheating, disappointment, and triumph.
White arrived in Congress in 1897, as a member of the 357 seat House of Representatives, but he is the only Black member over his four year career, representing, at the time, 10,000,000 Black citizens, millions of whom did not reside in his district. White was an example of what the political scientist Jane Mansbridge called “surrogate representation” defined as when politicians also represent the interest of citizens outside of their district, in White’s case it was the millions of Black people in the US.
Justesen writes on White’s sponsorship of the first anti-lynching bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime punishable by death/execution. It was never seriously considered at the time. An anti-lynching bill was finally enacted into law in 2022, 122 years later.
This is a book about relationships as well. White was contemporaries of Black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, T. Thomas Fortune, and others. He was cordial with President William McKinley and was adversaries with Josephus Daniels the editor of the News and Observer and other white supremacists in NC and beyond.
It was the fruit of the NC white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900 that pushed White out of Congress, but Justesen says that is not the end of the story. White was a strong advocate for Black empowerment until his final days. He created a Black bank, a Black town, led a local NAACP chapter and had one more chance to serve the public in city of Philadelphia, PA.
According to Justesen, White’s death in 1918 was barely covered in the press and overtime this one time national figure has largely been forgotten. Justesen’s biography of White brings him back to the forefront and tells the story of one NC Black man who fought so that his people could have “an even chance in the race of life”.
If you are curious about how executive orders are created and formulated before they are signed and issued by the president, then this one is for you. This story is told through case studies, data analysis, interviews, and archival documents. I learned that the executive order creation and formulation process is much more complex than we first realized and believed. Rudalevige reveals the steps an executive order goes through from draft submission to order issuance. The only thing I wished was that there was a Schoolhouse Rock! song to accompany it (a la I’m Just A Bill). One of the interesting facts that I learned in the book was that over 60% of EOs are decentralized, meaning departments and agencies created them, not the the White House. Through statistical analysis, Rudalevige shows which types of orders will be decentralized and centralized. The remaining chapters cover how long it takes for EOs to be issued, the answer is that it is much slower than you probably expected, and why some EOs go unissued. Overall a very impressive book on a topic that is seldom studied. Looking forward to his next study, hopefully he will examine the EO implementation piece he mentioned in the conclusion of this book.
