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[Presidential Campaign Broadside for George Edwin Taylor].

[National Liberty Party, 1904]. [National Liberty Party, 1904]. Broadside on cardstock, 11.125” x 8.125”, with facsimile signature and standing portrait of George Edwin Taylor. CONDITION: Good, wear and soiling to margins, one stain and .25” chip to image.

Rare campaign broadside advertising the “The only negro who ever made the race for President.”

George Edwin Taylor, the son of an enslaved father and a free mother, was a journalist and labor-oriented political activist who made the first African American bid for the presidency. Taylor ran on the National Liberty Party ticket, the first political party founded by and for African Americans. This broadside shows Taylor standing with a scroll of paper in his right hand and a top hat on his head, looking slightly to his left. A facsimile of his signature appears on the right in the lower margin: “Very Truly, Geo. E. Taylor.”

Unusual for having participated in both the Republican and Democratic parties at a time when many African Americans remained loyal to the Republicans for their support of abolition, Taylor eventually lost faith in both majority parties to uphold the legal equality of people of color. In his letter of acceptance for the 1904 NLP nomination, he wrote:

The only difference I am able to discern between the [Senator Benjamin] Tillman [of South Carolina] and [James] Vardaman [governor of Mississippi] school of democrats, and the present administration of [Theodore Roosevelt] republicans, as to the subject of disfranchisement is that the former are scrupulously honest in expressing their determination to defeat the evolution and progress of the Negro, law or no law, constitutional amendments to the contrary notwithstanding, while the latter are most unscrupulously dishonest—trying to run with the hounds, but sop with the coons (Labor, p. 118).

Calling these two modes of disenfranchisement “the most stupendous citizenship steal known to modern history,” Taylor considered his campaign “a creature of necessity” (Labor, p. 118). Not everyone agreed. Many, Black and white alike, considered it a joke—or worse, a threat to the productive goodwill towards Black advancement already existing within parties in power. Booker T. Washington, for instance, “opposed all third-party efforts, believing that such action would…detract from his educational agenda” (Labor, p. 122).

Taylor’s campaign promoted a progressive “national agenda: universal suffrage regardless of race; Federal protection of the rights of all citizens; Federal anti-lynching laws; additional black regiments in the U.S. Army; Federal pensions for all former slaves; government ownership and control of all public carriers to ensure equal accommodations for all citizens; and home rule for the District of Columbia” (Wintz). Ultimately, he garnered fewer than 2,000 votes. His brand of labor populism and “aggressive political agitation” (Labor, p. 132)—which grew from the mixed-race agrarian communities of his upbringing—was not persuasive in comparison to its two major (and also feuding) rivals: the education and entrepreneurship approach pursued by Booker T. Washington and his adherents, and the elitist and litigation-forward approach of W.E.B. DuBois and the Niagara Movement.

Taylor’s failed presidential candidacy, combined with his weak health, brought the end of his political career. His story, however, is a remarkable one: born in Arkansas in 1857, he was brought to Illinois by his mother, Amanda Hines, following Arkansas’s 1859 Free Negro Expulsion Act. She died just a few years later, and after spending several years sleeping in dry goods boxes, the young Taylor made his way up the Mississippi River to La Crosse, Wisconsin, and then to West Salem. There he was taken in by Nathan and Sarah Smith, politically active Black farmers who had migrated north during the Civil War. After attending Wayland University, Taylor worked in journalism in La Crosse, for both the Democratic Morning Chronicle and the Republican and Leader. In 1885, employed by the Evening Star, Taylor found himself not only the editor but also the campaign manager of the paper’s principal investor, Frank Powell, in his independent, labor-oriented bid for mayor. From there Taylor went on to hold state level offices in Wisconsin’s People’s Party and its Union Labor Party, and operate his own newspaper, the Wisconsin Labor Advocate. Alarmed by the increasing erosion of Blacks’ civil rights in the north, however, in the late 1880s he shifted his focus from labor to race, and in 1891 moved to Iowa. There, he owned and edited the Negro Solicitor and served as president of both the National Colored Men’s Protective Association and the National Negro Democratic League before forming his conviction that “the colored man…has got to take care of his own interests, and what’s more…he has the power to do it” (Labor, p. ix). Campaigning as the hopes of the reconstruction era were disintegrating and racial and economic advancement movements were reinventing themselves, Taylor was at once “the last of his class” and “a man before his time” (Labor, p. 149).

A rare artifact of Taylor’s pioneering presidential candidacy.

REFERENCES: “George Edwin Taylor: Campaigning Against White Supremacy,” the Mattatuck Museum online; Mouser, Bruce. For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, and the Making of Independent Black Politics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011); Wintz, Cary. “George Edwin Taylor (1857-1925),” BlackPast online.

Item #7542

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