Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  From October 22, the date of the Garlington Report, until the end of the month, Roosevelt had almost-daily conferences and meetings with Republican politicians and officeholders about the campaign. In a letter to his daughter Alice, newlywed wife of Republican of Cincinnati Congressman Nicholas Longworth, he added a handwritten note, “I hear that Nick is all right and will win hands down.”81 Nick did win, but by fewer votes than in 1904.82 In another letter to Alice, Roosevelt congratulated husband and wife “upon the successful way in which both of you have run your campaign.”83 Enough other Republicans joined Longworth in the House of Representatives to keep the Republican majority, but it was down from 251 seats to 223. In the Senate, happy Republicans would have 61, up from 59.

  There had never been anything to worry about.

  MEANWHILE, THERE WERE PERSONAL distractions, one of which would become an embarrassment when critics of his Brownsville actions saw hypocrisy in Roosevelt. In Cambridge, his son Ted Jr. got into a scrape with the police when he and two Harvard friends were “in town together at the theater” and one of the friends “got a little drunk.” In an undated letter to his father, young Ted described how the two friends had a “disagreement” that quickly became a scuffle. Two plainclothes policemen thought they had witnessed an assault. One tried to collar the drunk friend, who, again according to young Ted, now thought he was the victim of an assault, and he knocked down the plainclothes policeman and ran. At the station house, the police wanted Ted Jr. to identify the friend who ran away. He would not. According to the New York Times, a policeman suggested his father would have advised him to give the name, “But [Ted Jr.] said, ‘I don't think he would.’”84

  The incident became grist to be ground for a news cycle, and the blessing Ted Jr. thought his father would give to his “conspiracy of silence,” so at odds with what his father later would punish the black soldiers for doing, was noted and commented upon.85

  ANOTHER INTERRUPTION WAS LESS aggravating to Roosevelt. He received notice he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Russo-Japanese War, and he had to decide what to do with the $40,000 prize money that went with it (worth more than $1 million today). He used it to establish a committee for industrial peace in Washington.86

  DID ROOSEVELT'S DELAY AFFECT the elections? Any answer is speculative. As we shall see, a year later, the 1907 off-year elections were inconclusive. In the presidential election of 1908, Negro emigration from the Republicans was not a factor at all. Still, in 1906, when Roosevelt's discharge order was made public, black reaction was white-hot. That might have affected an election here and there, but as the resounding Republican triumph that year showed, overall it would have had little impact. (Though Nicholas Longworth won his race for reelection to Congress in Cincinnati, the voting patterns in his district worried him. It was possible he would have lost enough otherwise-expected Negro votes to keep him home in Cincinnati. Had he been unlucky enough to lose the election, he would have needed better luck to keep his wife, Alice, there with him. She was bored to tears by her in-laws and loathed Cincinnati.87) Senator Joseph Foraker thought Roosevelt's delay had little importance and made no difference. He devoted ninety-six pages in his memoirs to Brownsville and another twenty-seven to his differences with Roosevelt. He never mentioned the delay. 88

  Would Roosevelt, whom Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon called “first, last, and all the time, a politician, one of the greatest of them all,” who unduly focused on elections and always felt stress and pessimism before polling day, have taken the risk of an earlier announcement?89 Of course not. That's why he waited.90

  “These [racial] prejudices are something that it does not pay to disturb. It is best ‘to let sleeping dogs lie.’”

  Booker T. Washington,

  The Story of My Life and Work

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT WAS FROM New York, came from a family of wealth and position, as a young boy traveled with his family to Europe and Africa in style, and knew and loved his father and credited him with much of his success.1 Booker T. Washington lived his whole life in the rural South, he and his family were slaves, he never knew his father's name or who he was, and when his siblings left where they had been born, they walked several hundred miles to their new home.2 Roosevelt knew tragedy when his first wife, Alice, died in childbirth. Overcome with grief, he never spoke in public or wrote of her again. He was so emotionally lost, he gave their baby, also named Alice, to his sister to raise until he married Edith Carow and had a wife who could be her mother. Washington also was a widower, twice actually, and just as Edith raised Theodore's baby Alice, Fanny Washington raised Booker's baby Portia. Washington already knew how tragic life could be, and he bore his losses stoically.

  Both men achieved much while they were young. Neither lived to see old age (Washington died at fifty-nine; Roosevelt barely two months after he turned sixty). Both men knew how to get what they wanted and, for a time, defend what they had. Both died with their influence a thing of the past.

  BOOKER T. WASHINGTON WAS for a while the most famous black man in the world, the greatest black leader in America before Martin Luther King Jr. He abjured any role as a politician, but he hobnobbed with those who were and used their methods to keep running smoothly what was called the “Tuskegee Machine,” a tight web of Washington lieutenants supporting and supported by him. Through it he dispensed favors, secured federal appointments and other jobs for Negroes, backed their businesses and other ventures (especially influential black newspapers) with loans and capital, marginalized those who opposed him, and—always important—ensured no one could challenge him as the black leader. During his lifetime, his critics, mostly confrontational blacks in the North looking to snatch some of his influence for themselves and chip away at his leadership and ideas, derisively called him “the Wizard.”3 Much of the Negro philanthropy of men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jacob Schiff, and Sears, Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald passed through Tuskegee.4 The Wizard knew how to handle these titans. When a new dormitory at Tuskegee built with Rockefeller money cost $249 less than expected, Washington returned it to the man worth more than a billion dollars. Rockefeller, surprised at this gesture and impressed that Washington's sharp eye on the bottom line brought the project in under budget, sent it back with his congratulations.5 If Rockefeller was not the richest man in the world, then Andrew Carnegie was, and he donated even more to Tuskegee. His first donation was a modest (for Carnegie) $20,000 for a library. He thereafter annually donated $10,000 to the school, and in 1903 he gave its endowment fund $600,000 (an astonishing $15 million in today's dollars). Only Booker T. Washington, Carnegie believed, could solve the race problem in the South.6

  It was not only the superrich Washington could handle. He possessed remarkable people skills. When he went North seeking donations for Tuskegee, aware of the suspicions of potential white donors, he brought with him letters of introduction from trustworthy whites. He also secured a written promise from the Alabama state school superintendent that the state would allow any money he raised to stay with Tuskegee, and to make sure that is what would happen, he asked the Alabama governor to endorse the letter. As donors gave him money, he would ask them for letters of introduction that he would use with others.7

  IN 1903 BOOKER T. Washington's leadership was beginning to be questioned publicly. W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of fourteen essays on being Negro in America. The open and determined assault on what had been Washington's impregnable position began with an essay in this book. Du Bois started softly. “Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. One hesitates, therefore, to criticize such a life which, beginning with so little, has done so much…. The time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career, as well as his triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier to do ill then well
in the world.”8 The shiv has to be teased out of these exquisitely equivocal sentences: However did we allow such a thing to happen?

  Du Bois was right. Washington started life with “so little.” Born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, he never knew for sure when he was born, but when the Civil War ended and he was free, he was about seven years old. In his influential autobiography, Washington tells of the degradations of slavery as experienced by a young boy. He remembered those days and understood as well as any man how awful they were, but for him there were better times ahead. In his autobiography's title, Up from Slavery, the emphasis he intends is on his passage “up.”

  His mother's husband, who was not young Booker's father, had escaped the plantation before emancipation and sent word to his mother that she and the children were to join him in West Virginia. Booker's stepfather, as the man now became, took Booker and his brother to work with him as salt packers. The observant young boy noticed the supervisor scrawled something on the barrels they packed that he could not read (it was the number “18” and identified the barrels they would be paid for), but he copied it over and over to practice writing until he could do it legibly. He was teaching himself to write. He asked his mother to see if she could secure a book for him, and she got a spelling book.9 From it, Booker taught himself how to read. Another step “up.”

  Booker's stepfather did not permit him to leave his work for school. He needed the boy's diligence, youthful strength, and energy for the hard labor of packing salt, and he needed the money Booker earned. When Booker said he would go to school only at night, the man said go ahead. Eventually, he was able to spend less time at the salt furnace so he could attend the day school. On the first day, he faced an unexpected problem. The school required a last name, which he did not have. He had only a few minutes to think of one. With the bold confidence that would be his as an adult, when he was asked, he calmly said, “‘Booker Washington,’ as if I had been called by that name all my life.”10 Not surprisingly, Booker wanted a way out of the salt mines. The mine owner's wife, Mrs. Viola Ruffner, needed someone to help in her home, and he applied for the job and got it. (The five dollars a month he earned went to his stepfather.) To please Mrs. Ruffner, he had to go about his responsibilities “promptly and systematically…. Nothing must be sloven or slipshod; every door, every fence, must be kept in repair.”11 That is precisely how he went about his work for her. Above all else, she wanted “absolute honesty and frankness.” He gave her that, too, and she soon trusted him implicitly. Booker did more than please Mrs. Ruffner; he became just like her. As an adult, scattered papers around the house or even in the street triggered an impulse to clean them up. A dirty yard had to be cleaned; an unpainted fence had to be whitewashed. A missing button or a spot of grease required attention.12 These lessons were for him as valuable as any education he got anywhere else. In the more casual and forgiving twenty-first century, such habits might be called obsessive-compulsive; for an ex-slave in the nineteenth century determined to make something of himself, they were essential, and the grown man would always impress this point on others seeking their own way “up.”

  ACQUIRING THIS STRONG WORK ethic was an important step in the development of Booker T. Washington, but he knew he also had to be educated. He made up his mind to go to a school in Virginia and, unaware of just how far it was from his home in West Virginia—he later recalled it was about five hundred miles—Booker started walking.13 When he realized his mistake, he continued on anyway, begging rides and working odd jobs to earn food and pocket money. He would not be denied this chance. He reached Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute with “exactly fifty cents with which to begin my education.”14 The teacher in charge of admissions kept putting him off. After a few days she told him the next room needed to be swept clean and he should take the broom and get to it. With the thoroughness of a boy trained by Mrs. Ruffner, Booker did more than he was asked. He moved tables and chairs and anything else on the floor to get to hard-to-reach places. He dusted the furniture and woodwork and cleaned the closets. When he finished, the head teacher inspected the room and found no dirt or dust. Booker knew he had passed his entrance exam. This reaffirmed to him that skills and personal habits unrelated to book learning were also an important part of a person's education.

  General Samuel C. Armstrong, who founded and operated Hampton Institute, was a Civil War veteran. In 1863, after fighting for the Union at Gettysburg, he was assigned to command the Ninth Regiment, US Colored Troops. While still in the army, he formed a school to educate his black soldiers and, after the army, founded Hampton Institute to educate Negroes.

  Before emancipation, Southern states made it illegal to educate slaves, and, when freed, there were millions of liberated blacks still chained to ignorance and illiteracy. How were they supposed to become productive, learn what it was to be citizens and active in the nation's democracy, and, not incidentally, compete with educated and skilled whites? Unskilled and uneducated as many were, the reality was that manual labor was the only kind of work they could do. Anything above it required technical skills, working with numbers, reading, an ability to start and continue a task, a persistence in working at it, a patience to stay with it until completion, a desire to do it right, and a sense of pride in a finished job well done. Rarely was this part of a slave's work; a slave was just supposed to follow someone else's orders. From Hampton, Washington learned and then taught at Tuskegee that to move up, a free man needed to know the three Rs, but just as crucial, he had to understand the moral value of physical labor and the skills needed to do it. Once learned, these values had to be taught to others, who, in turn, would replicate the Hampton style at schools elsewhere, and their students then could go out and teach others.

  Booker T. Washington came to believe in Hampton's education and its emphasis on industrial training as the way to advance the black race. Industrial education was a program of self-improvement that would allow poor youths to work their way through school and learn a trade. The Hampton idea was not so much polytechnic training as the inculcation of virtues such as hard work and thrift, the so-called Puritan work ethic. At Hampton this was “a quasi-religious principle, for the salvation of the Negro race.”15 Washington believed in this with every fiber of his soul. Not only would industrial education give Negroes skills for themselves as individuals and as a race, just as important, it would make them useful to their communities and thereby improve relations between the races. For himself, and by extension for the Negro race, such an education was superior to that of an Ivy League school.16 When he left Hampton, he transplanted the Hampton idea to Alabama at the Tuskegee Institute, where he became the principal.17

  TUSKEGEE BECAME THE TOUCHSTONE of what his biographer Louis R. Harlan called his “phenomenal energy,” his ability to roll up his sleeves and work hard to get an impossible job done and done right, his sure understanding of people and what motivated them, and his genius for visualizing and then implementing solutions acceptable to people with antagonistic goals.18 Arriving in the spring of 1881, the new principal was astonished to see there was nothing there. There were no buildings, no land to build them on, and no students. He, his school, and his students would have to create what they would need to take themselves up from slavery. That is just what they did.19 Independence Day 1881 was the day the school would open. A chicken coop and a church would be its first buildings, and Booker T. Washington its first and only teacher. Prospective students applied and were accepted. Slowly, more teachers were added. (The first, Olivia A. Davidson, later became Mrs. Booker T. Washington.) Washington knew he would not get all the money he needed from Alabama public officials, so he and Miss Davidson raised it from donors.20 Using Mrs. Ruffner's principles of “promptly and systematically,” Tuskegee's students first learned how to make their own bricks, which they then used to build their own classrooms. This combination of donor money and student labor became the pattern for the school's expansion.21 By July 1884 Tuskegee was an up-and-running s
chool, and Washington was an up-and-coming man.

  WITH PEACE AT APPOMATTOX, the federal government governed the South as if it were a foreign conquest, which in a sense it was. It was called Reconstruction, and it included enacting and implementing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.22 Reconstruction protected newly freed slaves, made an effort to educate and otherwise help them through the Freedman's Bureau, and was enforced by federal soldiers. Southern whites didn't like any of it. From their point of view it was as if the North saw itself as Rome and the Civil War as the Punic Wars. “To the South lay Carthage.”23 Short of resuming the war, there was nothing Southerners could do about it.

  In the presidential election of 1876, neither party won a clear majority of electoral votes, which meant the House of Representatives would decide the new president. This reshaped an electoral contest into a political tussle, and the House considered it the same way it dealt with legislation—by horse trading. Southern Democrats saw their opportunity to rid themselves of Northern occupation, Northern soldiers, and Northern ideas, and they agreed to support the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in return for an end to Reconstruction. The deal was made, and the era of Jim Crow began. Named after a Negro character in a minstrel show, Jim Crow laws imposed a society rigidly segregated by race and denied Negroes the rights acquired during Reconstruction, everything from the right to vote to the ability to get an education to the freedom to mingle with whites in public places.24 (Although not codified by statute as much outside the South, the discrimination these laws enforced was not “limited by latitude” and existed throughout the country.25) No part of everyday life was untouched.