Whatever will happen tomorrow, this year?s election won?t be as bloody as in 1895.
In keeping with political tradition that had earned Baltimore the nickname “Mobtown,” Democrats 111 years ago imported “hundreds of rough-looking strangers” to commit election fraud, according to newspapers of the day.
One tough broke the jaw of a Johns Hopkins University physics professor, a poll watcher for the Reform League.
The “strangers” aimed the brunt of their violence at blacks to scare them away from the polls. One black was reported shot and killed and two others injured as gangs of whites jerked blacks out of ballot lines, with the police doing little to stop the violence.
The 1895 election produced the biggest political earthquake in Maryland?s history so far. Great numbers of rank-and-file Democrats abandoned their party to vote for Republicans ? out of power since the Civil War.
Voters swept Republicans into the governor?s, attorney general?s and comptroller?s offices. With black votes providing the decisive edge, Republicans captured an overwhelming majority in the lower house of the General Assembly.
And in a feat not duplicated since, a Republican alliance, bolstered by the bipartisan Reform League that had become an important agent for change, won the mayor?s office in Baltimore and took control of the City Council. Nineteen of the state?s 23 counties fell to Republicans.
The Republican triumph did not last long. Four years later, Baltimore Democrats regrouped. Their influence wasfar greater then than it is now, and they selected a campaign slogan that left no doubts about how they felt. “This Is A White Man?s City,” the slogan declared.
Back in power, Democrats unleashed a ferocious campaign to strengthen white supremacy in Maryland.
They sponsored three referendums between 1905 and 1911 to disfranchise black voters. In the middle of this agitation, in 1910, the Baltimore City Council enacted a law requiring the segregation of each residential block according to the race of its majority residents. Other cities in the United States scrambled to copy Baltimore?s segregation law, and U.S. occupation authorities in faraway Philippines wrote to the city to ask how to copy their success.
This period became a watershed in race relations. It happened at the time when overall segregation intensified throughout the nation, helped by theories promoting Anglo Saxons as the most desirable racial group and blacks as the least. In Baltimore, except for public transit, almost everything was segregated ? from public restrooms at Lexington Market to a separate park band for blacks.
Baltimore politics in those days were run by a gaggle of white Democratic bosses.
There was also a black boss, Tom Smith, dubbed the “Black King” because of his power. With most blacks voting for the Party of Lincoln, Smith mastered suppressing GOP strength. He ferried Republican voters to all-day picnics that returned well after the polls closed. He also paid off prospective voters.
On one election day Smith and two white ward bosses were caught amid ballot boxes in the back room of the election board. Charges were made that they tried to rig the vote. Smith?s defenders contended that the hotel owner was only checking the names off the registration books so he could pay blacks who had not voted.
Whatever the truth, the white Democratic establishment appreciated Smith. He was given theright to operate illegal lotteries. And when he died in 1938, thousands of people paid homage, including the white leadership of the Democratic Party.
Antero Pietila is writing a book about how bigotry shaped the Baltimore metropolitan area. He can be reached at [email protected].
