Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  Washington was forced to investigate and reply with some embarrassment that if Jones had never actively “supported” the Commoner, he had cast a vote for him in 1900.

  Scott delivered the telegram to Roosevelt. Surprise and chagrin struggled on the President’s face. He paced up and down. “Well I guess I’ll have to appoint him, but I am awfully sorry he voted for Bryan.”

  So was Mark Hanna, when the appointment was announced on 7 October. He heard the news at home in Ohio, and demanded to know why Roosevelt had acted without consulting him. The President replied frankly: “Because my experience has taught me that in such a case a quick decision really prevents bitterness.”

  Hanna wrote back in the tones of a patient, but miffed, mentor. Roosevelt must “go slow” until he got back to town. There were bound to be many applicants for federal favor in the weeks ahead. “Reserve your decision—unless in cases which may require immediate attention. Then if my advice is of importance, Cortelyou can reach me over the ‘long distance.’ ”

  Despite Hanna’s concern, praise for the appointment of Judge Jones was both loud and bipartisan. The Atlanta Constitution proclaimed itself “electrified … with hope of a new day.” Three wealthy young white Republicans in Montgomery, Alabama, announced that they were forming a “Roosevelt Club,” to “revolutionize and revitalize” GOP politics. Review of Reviews declared that Roosevelt had “immensely strengthened the real and permanent interests” of his party.

  Encouraged, the President began to indulge some official vanities. He ordered three glossy carriages and five new horses, and commissioned a patriotic new livery, consisting of blue coat, white doeskin trousers, high boots, and top hat with tricolor cockade. He scrapped the old “Executive Mansion” letterhead, with its Gothic curlicues, and replaced it with stationery proclaiming THE WHITE HOUSE in plain sans serif. He made free use of his power of summons. John Hay, hobbling over daily from the State Department, complained that one interview a month had been enough for McKinley.

  Roosevelt in any case did not seem to need much help with foreign policy. He was already formulating it. His first diplomatic document was a three-thousand-word set of instructions for delegates to the International Conference of American States.

  Behind the show, and the energy, Hay detected incipient signs of noblesse oblige. “Stay away if you want to be amused,” he wrote Henry Adams in Europe.

  Teddy said the other day, “I am not going to be the slave of tradition that forbids Presidents from seeing friends. I am going to dine with you and Henry Adams and Cabot whenever I like.” But (here the shadow of the crown sobered him a little), “of course I must preserve the prerogative of the initiative.”

  Most observers felt that Roosevelt had exercised the prerogative wisely during his first month in office. He had consoled and inspired a stricken country, steadied the stock market, established decent standards of patronage, and tempered the mutual hatreds of race and party. While doing these things in the name of continuity, he had somehow managed to hint at a future bright with possibilities of reform. It remained to be seen whether he was not, perhaps, enjoying too much success too soon.

  “For the moment all America praises the new President,” a British correspondent wrote. “But trouble is bound to come.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Most Damnable Outrage

  Thousand’s iv men who wudden’t have voted f’r him undher anny circumstances has declared that undher no circumstances wud they vote f’r him now.

  ON 16 OCTOBER 1901, the President heard that Booker T. Washington was back in town, and invited him to dinner that night. Roosevelt had a momentary qualm about being the first President ever to entertain a black man in the White House. His hesitancy made him ashamed of himself, and all the more determined to break more than a century of precedent. He received Washington at 7:30 P.M. and introduced him to Edith. The only other non-family guest was Philip B. Stewart, a friend from Colorado.

  Dinner proceeded behind closed doors, under the disapproving gaze of a Negro butler. Southern politics was the main topic of conversation. Washington’s aloofness precluded friendly chat, as did Edith Roosevelt’s sweet uninterest in anyone—black or white—who was not, as she put it, “de nôtre monde.”

  The President felt entirely at ease. It seemed “so natural and so proper” to have Washington wield his silver. Here, dark and dignified among the paler company, was living proof of what he had always preached: that Negroes could rise to the social heights, at least on an individual basis. Collective equality was clearly out of the question, given their “natural limitations” in the evolutionary scheme of things. But a black man who advanced faster than his fellows should be rewarded with every privilege that democracy could bestow. Booker T. Washington qualified honoris causa in the “aristocracy of worth.”

  For those blacks who did not, Roosevelt had little political sympathy. The Georgian blood of his unreconstructed mother persuaded him that the Fifteenth Amendment had been “a mistake,” and that, in nine cases out of ten, disfranchisement was justified. Blacks were better suited for service than suffrage; on the whole, they were “altogether inferior to the whites.”

  “DARK AND DIGNIFIED AMONG THE PALER COMPANY.”

  Booker T. Washington, 1901 (photo credit 2.1)

  Yet Roosevelt believed (as most Americans did not) that this inferiority was temporary. The arguments of Charles Darwin, Jean Lamarck, and Gustave Le Bon convinced him that Washington’s race was merely adolescent, as his own had been in the seventeenth century. Negro advancement must “necessarily be painful”—witness the scars on Washington’s face, his air of swarthy suffering—but equality would come, as black Americans, generation by generation, acquired the civilized characteristics of whites. It was crucial that these voteless millions should begin to feel working for them “those often unseen forces in the national life which are greater than all legislation.”

  Just how “unseen” should Washington be in his new role as presidential adviser? Even now the secretive Tuskegean was preparing to slip out of town on a midnight train. Could Roosevelt rely on him to spread the word to Negroes that the federal government was on their side?

  Sometime during the last moments of the day, after Washington had left and before Roosevelt went to bed, an Associated Press reporter stopped by the White House to ask, routinely, about the day’s guest list. By 2:00 A.M. a one-sentence dispatch was humming round the country: “Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, Alabama, dined with the President last evening.”

  NEITHER ROOSEVELT NOR Washington could complain about Negro reactions to this release when it appeared in the morning newspapers. Untimely congratulations warmed them, like sunbeams before a storm. “Greatest step for the race in a generation,” a black man telegraphed from Nashville. “The hour is at hand,” another rejoiced, “to make the beginning of a new order.” A third, who remembered young Theodore Roosevelt, skinny and shaky, seconding the nomination of a Negro to chair the 1884 Republican convention, told him, “Your act in honoring [Washington] was a masterly stroke of statesmanship—worthy of the best minds this country has produced.” And at a humbler level of black opinion, federal messenger boys discussed the dinner in excited whispers.

  Whites, too, reacted favorably, at least those of liberal instinct. But during the afternoon, distant rumblings warned that a political hurricane was on its way up from the South. An early thunderclap was sounded by the Memphis Scimitar:

  The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House. It would not be worth more than a passing notice if Theodore Roosevelt had sat down to dinner in his own home with a Pullman car porter, but Roosevelt the individual and Roosevelt the President are not to be viewed in the same light.

  It is only very recently that President Roosevelt boasted that his mother was a Southern woman, and that he is half Southern by reason of that f
act. By inviting a nigger to his table he pays his mother small duty.… No Southern woman with a proper self-respect would now accept an invitation to the White House, nor would President Roosevelt be welcomed today in Southern homes. He has not inflamed the anger of the Southern people; he has excited their disgust.

  The word nigger had not been seen in print for years. Its sudden reappearance had the force of an obscenity. Within hours, newspapers from the Piedmont to the Yazoo were raining it and other racial epithets on the President’s head.

  ROOSEVELT DINES A DARKEY

  A RANK NEGROPHILIST

  OUR COON-FLAVORED PRESIDENT

  ROOSEVELT PROPOSES TO CODDLE THE SONS OF HAM

  Some of the more sensational sheets expressed sexual disgust at the idea of Edith Roosevelt and Washington touching thighs, so to speak, under the table. The President was accused of promoting a “mingling and mongrelization” of the Anglo-Saxon race. Booker T. Washington was sarcastically advised to send his daughter to the White House for Christmas: “Maybe Roosevelt’s son will fall in love with her and marry her.”

  The storm squalled louder when reporters discovered that Roosevelt had entertained blacks before, in the gubernatorial mansion at Albany and at Sagamore Hill. Hate mail and death threats swamped the White House and the Tuskegee Institute. In Richmond, Virginia, a transparency of the President’s face was hissed off the Bijou screen. In Charleston, South Carolina, Senator Benjamin R. Tillman endorsed remedial genocide: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”

  Roosevelt was dumbfounded by the violence his invitation had provoked. At first he blamed Bourbon extremists. Yet even the most temperate Southern opinion held him in reproof. “At one stroke, and by one act,” the Richmond News declared, “he has destroyed the kindly, warm regard and personal affection for him which were growing up fast in the South. Hereafter … it will be impossible to feel, as we were beginning to feel, that he is one of us.”

  BY TACIT AGREEMENT, Roosevelt and Washington refused to discuss their dinner with reporters. The President sent private word to Tuskegee that he “did not care … what anybody thought or said about it.” Both men were buoyed, however, by the continuing support of Northern newspapers. The Springfield Republican remarked that while Roosevelt’s gesture “may have been an indiscretion,” it was “splendid in its recognition of the essential character of the presidential office.”

  ON 21 OCTOBER, another lightning report flashed through the South. The President and Booker T. Washington were to dine together again, at Yale University’s bicentennial. What was more, Miss Alice Roosevelt would probably join them. Yale issued a denial—Dr. Washington was merely scheduled to march behind Roosevelt in the academic procession—but too late to still the uproar in Dixie. “The whole South,” a nervous white minister wrote, “has not been so deeply moved in twenty years.”

  Roosevelt looked calm and purposeful as he traveled through Connecticut on 23 October. The Secret Service, however, was noticeably apprehensive when he reached the Yale campus. In view of what had happened the last time a President had accepted public handshakes, he was forbidden to work the crowd.

  Shocked by this restriction, Roosevelt seemed to realize his personal and political danger for the first time. He averted his eyes from Washington during their march to Hyperion Theater. A revised security plan seated them far apart, with the Negro in the audience and Roosevelt himself on the stage. No reference to their dinner was made during the ensuing speeches. But cheers filled the hall when Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer invoked the Father of the Nation and remarked, “Thank God, there have always been in this country college men able to recognize a true Washington, though his first name be not George.”

  Degrees were awarded to a distinguished list of honorees, including John Hay, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, and the white-suited Mark Twain. “One name yet remains—” President Arthur Hadley intoned, and was unable to continue, so loud was the roar for Theodore Roosevelt.

  Notwithstanding this expression of support, Roosevelt declined to see Washington later in the day. At a public reception that evening, he sat aloof, kneading his silk hat. He seized on Twain and asked whether it had been “right” to invite a Negro to the White House. The novelist, speaking carefully, said that a President was perhaps not as free as an ordinary citizen to entertain whomever he liked.

  Twain’s private opinion was that Roosevelt should “refrain from offending the nation merely to advertise himself and make a noise.”

  A LARGE CROWD awaited the arrival of the presidential train in Washington the next morning. Few eyes followed Roosevelt as he stepped down to the platform; attention was riveted on Alice, pausing prettily behind him. The rumor, false or not, that she had been willing to eat with a Negro was scandalous, and the slenderness of her body, in its wine-colored traveling dress, sent agreeable signals of sex. Newsmen ogled her with pleased anticipation as she followed her father out of the station, a bunch of violets nodding in her belt. Here, manifestly, was copy for many seasons.

  ROOSEVELT’S QUERULOUSNESS about his dinner invitation did not abate in the days ahead. While maintaining a public silence, he admitted to friends that he was puzzled and depressed. He had only wanted to show “some little respect” to an esteemed fellow American. White Southerners could abuse him if they chose. “I regard their attacks with the most contemptuous indifference, but I am very melancholy that such a feeling should exist in such bitterly aggravated form.” As for Booker T. Washington, “I shall have him to dine just as often as I please.”

  Some of these remarks may have reached Washington’s ears, for a polite letter came from Tuskegee:

  My dear Mr. President: I have refrained writing you regarding the now famous dinner which both of [us] ate so innocently until I could get to the South and study the situation at first hand. Since coming here and getting into real contact with the white people I am convinced of three things: In the first place, I believe that a great deal is being made of the incident because of the elections which are now pending in several of the Southern states; and in the second place, I do not believe the matter is felt as seriously as the newspapers try to make it appear; and in the third place I am more than ever convinced that the wise course is to pursue exactly the policy which you mapped out in the beginning; not many moons will pass before you will find the South in the same attitude toward you that it was a few years ago.

  That attitude, however, had always been skeptical. Sensing Roosevelt’s need for reassurance, Washington wrote again to say that the controversy was “providential,” even therapeutic. “I cannot help but feel … that good is going to come out of it.”

  Some good, certainly, accrued to himself. His reception by the President had transformed him into a political force of the first magnitude. Booker T. Washington now commanded the fear, as well as the love, of black Americans. Eventually the former emotion might qualify the latter, but for the time being he was “King of a captive people.”

  Roosevelt’s gains were more negative. He had learned the evanescence of presidential popularity, the complexity of race prejudice, and “the infinite capacity of the newspaper press to manufacture sensations.” He had to accept that he had no real constituency in the South, and stood little chance of assembling one, so united were Democrats against him. Perhaps his dream of bipartisan reform had always been quixotic. The most he could hope was that Southern blacks would reward his goodwill at the next national convention.

  The summer of 1904, however, seemed far away in the fall of 1901. Roosevelt could only lament his sudden misfortune, and the revival of old doubts about his maturity. A forty-third candle on his birthday cake on 27 October did not console him, nor the gift of a possum from some black admirers. He dutifully announced that he would wait until “the first frosty day” before eating his critter, “well browned, and with sweet potatoes on the side.” But his priv
ate melancholy persisted through the first week of November:

  I have not been able to think out any solution of the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent, but of one thing I am sure, and that is that in as much as he is here and can neither be killed nor driven away, the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man.… Of course I know that we see through a glass dimly, and, after all, it may be that I am wrong; but if I am, then all my thoughts and beliefs are wrong, and my whole way of looking at life is wrong. At any rate, while I am in public life, however short a time it may be, I am in honor bound to act up to my beliefs and convictions.

  As the famous dinner receded into memory and mythology, Roosevelt grew more conciliatory toward his critics, admitting that he might, just possibly, have made a mistake. But only in the political sense: morally speaking, “my action was absolutely proper.”

  He kept his vow to consult Booker T. Washington on matters of race and patronage, but never again asked him to dinner. And when Washington next visited the White House, George Cortelyou was careful to schedule the appointment at ten o’clock on a regular business morning.

  CHAPTER 3

  One Vast, Smoothly Running Machine

  MR. DOOLEY A hard time th’ rich have injyin’ life.

  MR. HENNESSY I’d thrade with them.

  MR. DOOLEY I wud not. ’Tis too much like hard work.

  THE NIGHT OF MONDAY, 11 November 1901, was moonless, and shadows drowned the canyons of downtown New York City. Wall Street, darkest canyon of all, was deserted except for a group of carriages waiting outside the House of Morgan. Midnight struck, then one o’clock.