The IRS’s precursor segregated its workforce under Woodrow Wilson

Evidence

The Revenue Act was passed by a Congress without a single black member and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, whose cabinet implemented (some historians say continued) racial segregation in the federal civil service. By the summer of 1913, Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo, who oversaw the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the precursor to the Internal Revenue Service, had segregated toilets, lunchrooms, and working areas. In defending the Jim Crow practices, McAdoo said, “There has been an effort in the Department to remove the causes of complaint and irritation where white women have been forced unnecessarily to sit at desks with colored men.” — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 45

Categorization

• XREF: McAdoo’s quoted justification echoes the moral-panic framing of interracial proximity seen in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — cross-cultural anxieties about who is ‘forced’ into contact with whom.