Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Daisy Lampkin and US Political Realignment, Part I

Among my goals for this blog is not merely to introduce the world to the tragically underappreciated Daisy Lampkin, but also to demystify for lay readers and novice historians what historical research looks like and how judgments and reasonable historical interpretations are made. In this post I give some indication how new research discoveries can combine with that we already know (i.e., the “historiography”), to produce new interpretations. What follows is somewhat speculative, but that is the nature of historical hypotheses. Further research will either confirm my propositions or falsify them.

Daisy Lampkin (9th from left) and Robert Vann (15th from left) in Washington, DC, in 1928 at a meeting of the Republican National Committee's newly formed Colored Voters Division.

The little research that has been published on Lampkin never fails to note that she staked a reputation as a leading suffrage activist in the 1910s and then became an important official within the NAACP in the 1930s. Most accounts also note that she was an executive with the Pittsburgh Courier, and some occasionally note that she was also a leading clubwoman.
 
Her activities in the 1920s, however, are often glossed, except to observe that she served as an at-large alternate delegate to the Republican nominating convention in Kansas City in 1928. She was the first African American woman from Pennsylvania so honored. But no account that I have yet seen explains how or why she was nominated to that position.
 
The answer, as I have recently discovered, is that she was a significant political operative in the 1920s, stumping and organizing endlessly for Republican candidates at both the local and the national level, as I’ll summarize in a moment. These are new discoveries, which add much more complexity and dimension to Lampkin's life. And therein lies the possibility of a new way to understand a key moment in twentieth century political history.
 
A bit of historiography: Many historians have written about the central political shift of the twentieth century, the gradual (and partial) embrace of a civil rights agenda by the Democratic party beginning in the 1930s and the subsequent abandonment, mostly complete by the 1970s and 80s, by the Republicans of that same agenda. Thus the “Party of Lincoln” has, over the course of my lifetime, become the party of neo-segregation.
 
Central to that political shift has been a no-less important revolution in African American voting loyalties. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries completely loyal to the Republican party, beginning in the 1930s black Americans began to defect to the Democratic party, first slowly and then in floods. By the end of the 1930s, black voting loyalties had transferred almost entirely to the Democrats, where they have more or less remained until today.
 
Back in grad school I read several accounts of this shift in black voting patterns. Those authors attributed much to the appeal of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Growing dissatisfied with the do-nothingism of the Hoover administration, some black leaders, such as the Pittsburgh Courier’s Robert Vann, famously advised that black voters abandon their long-held loyalties to the Republicans and embrace the Democratic New Deal. In a 1932 editorial Vann famously counseled that it was time to “turn the pictures of Abraham Lincoln to the wall.” For the first time in history, the 1932 Democratic candidate (FDR) enjoyed a surprising infusion of support from black voters, in a trend that became an avalanche in 1936.
 
But does the appeal of the New Deal suffice to explain this shift in black voter loyalties? Undoubtedly there is always a measure of fickleness in any American voter, and many of us are inclined to vote our pocketbooks first, party loyalty second. Maybe that’s what happened here. But Americans also tend to be loyal to their party. No doubt this is much more true today than in the past. But even in the 1920s and 30s, it’s no small thing to abandon one’s party. Moreover, in 1932, the New Deal was only a hypothetical. It hadn’t accomplished anything for anybody, black or white.
 
Enter Daisy Lampkin’s story. Her absence from the historiography, I think I can argue, has tended to downplay the depth and extent of black political commitments to the Republican party throughout the 1920s. My research into Lampkin’s life has revealed a mass ecosystem of black political operations that felt it had a bill to present to the victorious Hoover administration. When Hoover defaulted on that bill, the sense of betrayal was substantial.
 
As a suffrage activist in the 1910s Lampkin was a political force in potential. But once the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote throughout the nation, she became a political powerhouse and a powerbroker in her own right.
 
Not resting on the suffrage victory, Lampkin formed a new organization out of her suffrage work to galvanize and mobilize Pittsburgh-area women’s newly won political power, the Negro Women’s Republican League of Allegheny County. In this capacity she stumped tirelessly throughout Pittsburgh campaigning, organizing, and giving speeches on behalf of William Magee, Republican candidate for mayor. When Magee won, Lampkin had no qualms about demanding patronage recognition from the new administration by appointing an African American police matron. “We have been faithful and honest in our political dealings,” Lampkin insisted, “and are thus able to demand such tangible results.”
 
At the same time she remained heavily active in club work, becoming first the elected state organizer for the Pennsylvania State Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs, and then, while maintaining her local and state commitments, national organizer for the National Association of Colored Women. The intensifying club activity at the state and national level backstopped her elevating political profile.
 
In 1924 the Republican National Committee (RNC) asked Lampkin and Julia Bumry Jones, a notable Pittsburgh-area reporter in the black press, to serve on its Advisory Board. Lampkin campaigned heavily for the Coolidge/Dawes ticket in 1924, telling audiences “It is hard to understand how an American Negro could even consider voting any other than the Republican ticket, considering what that party has done for our race. The Republican party gave us the very amendments to the constitution that gave us our rights as human beings, that made it possible for the Negro to vote.” When Coolidge cruised to victory, the Courier reprinted rumors of a patronage offer to Lampkin in gratitude for her efforts, but nothing came of it.
 
She continued to deepen her club activities in the middle twenties, like her peers Nannie Burroughs, Hallie Brown, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, increasingly linking club work to political activism. The NACW would form political study groups, for example, to help mobilize black women behind Republican candidacies. In 1925 Lampkin would become chairman of the board of the National League of Republican Colored Women.
 
But she was just getting started. In 1925, the founder of the National Colored Republican Conference (NCRC), Dr. George E. Cannon, died suddenly. This was a new group, having formed only in 1922. But as its vice president, Lampkin was now thrust into yet another national leadership position. During Lampkin’s tenure the NCRC made a number of demands of the Coolidge administration, including proposals to limit Southern representation in Congress so long as black votes were suppressed in the region, and demands for fuller enforcement of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. (The same amendments under attack by the Trump administration in our day.)
 
Lampkin continued both her local advocacy and her national leadership through the latter half of the second Coolidge administration, which now also included the vice chairmanship of the Pennsylvania League of Colored Voters. In 1928, state party chairman W. L. Mellon named her an at-large alternate delegate to the 1928 nominating convention in Kansas City, the first African American women sent to a political convention by Pennsylvania. But the national party had uses for her as well: After the nomination, in 1928, the Republican National Committee appointed a “Colored Voters Division” (CVD) to lead the fight for Hoover among African American voters. John R. Hawkins, who had seconded Hoover’s nomination in Kansas City, was made chairman of this unit.
 
Lampkin became vice chairman of the CVD’s Eastern Bureau. As such, she also sat on the executive committee. Further, she chaired a special advisory body of some 200 prominent African American community and business leaders that advised the CVD on its black outreach strategy. It is relevant to note that Robert Vann was also closely connected to the CVD, chairing the publicity committee on which nearly every important black publisher and editor sat. Pittsburgh's prominent black Republicans were all in for Hoover in 1928, it seems.
 
Lampkin traveled extensively stumping for Hoover, combining her club organizing work with her political oratory. When Hoover won in 1928, there was again talk of patronage appointments for Lampkin, Vann, and others. However—and here is where I am obliged to get a little speculative pending further research—when patronage appointments were not in fact forthcoming, coupled with the administration’s perceived inaction during the depression, the high hopes and expectations which Lampkin and Vann and their colleagues had invested in the Hoover administration were dashed.
 
Then came the blow, in September 1932. In emotional cadences that not only charged the Hoover administration with economic mismanagement and financial malfeasance (along with political corruption), but embedded those charges within a much longer 80-year history of Republican lies and exploitation, Vann urged his readers to turn their pictures of Lincoln to the wall and vote for the Democrats. Vann’s editorial was not a measured political analysis, and it was certainly not a piece of standard political oratory that paid lip service to the writer’s objectivity. Vann wrote as a jilted lover or betrayed spouse. His editorial was a piece of political, and indeed historical, diatribe, though rhetorically powerful. A fuller analysis will have to wait my book, but for now I note that his focus was almost entirely Hoover’s misdeeds, and hardly a word of endorsement of the New Deal as a political program.
 
It is entirely possible that Vann’s attack—in which Lampkin must have concurred, as she was a vice president of the Courier at this time—was based on kitchen table issues and the hope that a Roosevelt administration could do better than Hoover. That is plausible, though again I note that at this time the New Deal was scarcely more than a vague campaign promise. To my mind, however, it is at least equally plausible that the speed and intensity with which Vann and Lampkin and many other African American voters reversed their loyalties to the Republican party in favor of taking a flyer on the Democratic party—whose southern wing, as they well knew, had made it abundantly clear that they did not care to address African American concerns—suggests something more personal and more emotional was at play.
 
To shift from exhaustive support in 1928 to utter contempt in 1932 is a striking political adjustment for any individual, and certainly for Lampkin who had carefully built a GOP-oriented political powerbase for more than a decade. I think it’s quite likely that the extent to which the Hoover administration took black voters for granted, ignored their economic concerns, disregarded their political appeals, and left unrewarded the efforts of a whole generation of activists, may have soured these black supporters much more than the New Deal attracted them, and very quickly. The Hoover administration, in other words, squandered some seventy years’ worth of black loyalties within presidential term.
 
This interpretation may be reading too much into the state of affairs, but it’s given further fuel by observing that Vann soured on Roosevelt less than a decade later, dissatisfied by the patronage he had been given and throwing his support back to the Republicans in 1940. Perhaps my understanding of the historiography is a bit dated; perhaps newer authors have proposed a more Hoover-centric explanation for the mass defection of black voters in the 1930s. But the suddenness of that shift for many black voters in 1932 is given much fuller context by the discovery of the depth and profound levels of energy to which Lampkin devoted herself to Republican party politics throughout the 1920s. In that sense, her support in the 1930s of the Democrats cost her a great deal politically. While she would go on to even greater prominence with the NAACP in that decade, she would lose the formal political influence that she had enjoyed with the national GOP in the 1920s.
 
—David J. Snyder