by Jon Meacham
Before he was done—after the police posting, after the governorship, after the vice presidency, after the presidency, and after his unsuccessful 1912 campaign to reclaim the White House on a third-party Progressive ticket—TR would fight against corrupt machine politics, against great business monopolies, and against abysmal working conditions. He would crusade, sometimes effectively, sometimes less so, for conservation of natural resources, for government regulation of railroads, for food safety, for women’s suffrage, and for political reform.
A pioneering investigative urban journalist, Jacob Riis photographed tenement and sweatshop life. Riis’s book How the Other Half Lives profoundly influenced Roosevelt.
In all of this TR anticipated the work of his cousin, Franklin, and of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. “The Nation and Government,” TR wrote, “within the range of fair play and a just administration of the law, must inevitably sympathize with the men who have nothing but their wages, with the men who are struggling for a decent life, as opposed to men, however honorable, who are merely fighting for larger profits and autocratic control of big business.”
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Immigration, a dominant issue for TR’s America, was an enduring source of political discontent. In 1798, John Adams, amid war fever about France, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts to protect, in his view, the national interest against internal dissent and outside agitation. Passed by a Federalist-controlled Congress, the legislation, among other things, increased the number of years applicants for citizenship had to wait and authorized the president to deport any foreigner he deemed dangerous to the country. “The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must for ever disgrace its parents,” James Madison wrote Thomas Jefferson in the spring of 1798. Madison was right: Adams’s historical legacy has been tarnished by this un-republican grab for power. And in the short term, the acts had the unintended consequence of giving new force to Adams’s opposition, led by Jefferson and Madison, who went on to defeat the Federalists in the 1800 election.
Writing in 1783, George Washington had articulated what we like to think of as the American way on such things: “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions.” Yet fears about indiscriminate immigration are coeval with the Founding and the early republic. In 1802, Alexander Hamilton—himself an immigrant and, in the twenty-first century, an emblem of American mobility—had reservations: “The influx of foreigners must…tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities.” We’ve never been as open as we’d like to think, but at our best we’ve managed to remain truer to the spirit Washington expressed than to the one Hamilton did.
Anxiety about refugees and immigrants and the related desire of presidents to quell that unease were then—and have always been—an element in the American experience. The country often limited immigration in moments of fear, only to have those fears dissipate amid cooling emotions and a reinvigorated opposition. It had happened in 1798. It had happened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Know-Nothings had sprung up in reaction to a wave of European immigration in the wake of the revolutions of 1848. And it had happened with the Chinese Exclusion Act under Chester Arthur, which was passed in reaction to fears of competing labor coming in from the Far East.
“Whatever business or trade they entered was, and is yet, absolutely doomed for the white laborer, as competition is simply impossible,” the labor leaders Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt wrote in a pamphlet entitled Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive? “Not that the Chinese would not rather work for high wages than low, but in order to gain control he will work so cheaply as to bar all efforts of his competitor.” The anxiety was pitched. “The negro slave of the South was housed and fed,” Gompers and Gutstadt wrote, “but the white trash of California is placed beneath the Mongolian.”
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TR’s era was imbued with ideas both of reform and of racial superiority. The movement for economic justice and improving workplace conditions, among other causes, was roughly simultaneous with the spread of eugenics and quasi-Darwinian notions, influenced by the work of Herbert Spencer, about white hegemony. (Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”) And there was a concomitant sense of destiny about Anglo-Saxon civilization. Captured in lectures such as John Fiske’s 1879 “Manifest Destiny of the English Race” and Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” the latter composed in honor of the American imperial enterprise in the Philippines, the ethos of the age celebrated the muscular virtues of those whom Winston Churchill later popularized as “the English-speaking peoples.” Kipling sent TR a pre-publication text of “The White Man’s Burden,” which Roosevelt passed along to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge with this note: “I send you an advance copy of a poem by Kipling which is rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist viewpoint.”
In his “Manifest Destiny” lecture, Fiske, a Harvard-educated historian and philosopher, spoke to the ambition of those who prayed that, in his phrase, “the language of Shakespeare may ultimately become the language of mankind.” In this view, the march of white Anglo-Saxon civilization was inevitable, inevitably good, and universal. “Who can doubt,” Fiske asked, “that within two or three centuries the African continent will be occupied by a mighty nation of English descent, and covered with populous cities and flourishing farms, with railroads and telegraphs and other devices of civilization as yet undreamed of?”
In his The Winning of the West, TR surveyed with pride the three hundred or so years that had elapsed between the reign of Elizabeth I and his own time. “During the past three centuries,” he wrote, “the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its importance.”
Such views were in keeping with the thought of the time. The eugenist and white supremacist Madison Grant worried that the rise of “the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian, and the Jew” would soon displace what he argued had been the American strain from the “Teutonic part of the British Isles” that was “almost purely Nordic.” According to Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, as well as from the Middle East, threatened to rise from the melting pot to new dominance. “The ‘survival of the fittest,’ ” Grant wrote, “means the survival of the type best adapted to existing conditions of environment, which to-day are the tenement and factory, as in Colonial times they were the clearing of forests, fighting Indians, farming the fields, and sailing the Seven Seas.”
New York was a source of particular concern to nativists. “Now we confront the melancholy spectacle of this pioneer breed being swamped and submerged by an overwhelming tide of latecomers from the old-world hive,” the sociologist E. A. Ross wrote in 1914. He then italicized his alarm: “Certainly never since the colonial era have the foreign-born and their children formed so large a proportion of the American people as at the present moment.” From observation in New York’s Union Square, Ross reported that he’d “scanned 368 persons as they passed me…at a time when the garment-workers of the Fifth Avenue lofts were returning to their homes. Only thirty-eight of these passers-by had the type of face one would find at a county fair in the West or the South.”
That was a persistent view in the East. In the West, the fear of being overrun and outworked by the Chinese was a consuming one from the 1870s forward. “Either the Anglo-Saxon race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolians will possess it,” Senator James G. Blaine of Maine said in February 1879. “You give them the start to-day…and it is entirely inevitable, if not demonstrable, that they will occupy that grea
t space of country between the Sierras and the Pacific coast.” Lest anyone miss his point, Blaine alliteratively added: “We have this day to choose whether we will have for the Pacific coast the civilization of Christ or the civilization of Confucius.”
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Roosevelt shared the dream of Anglo-Saxon imperialism; Longfellow’s Nordic Saga of King Olaf was among his favorite poems. TR was redeemed to some extent, however, by a basic aversion to nativism. An emblem of a bustling, growing country that was open to those willing to adopt a creed of “Americanism,” Roosevelt partially widened the understanding of the mainstream. “We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good-fellowship to every man, no matter what his creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good United States citizen like the rest of us,” Roosevelt said in 1894, adding:
Americanism is a question of spirit, conviction, and purpose, not of creed or birthplace. The politician who bids for the Irish or German vote, or the Irishman or German who votes as an Irishman or German, is despicable, for all citizens of this commonwealth should vote solely as Americans; but he is not a whit less despicable than the voter who votes against a good American, merely because that American happens to have been born in Ireland or Germany….A Scandinavian, a German, or an Irishman who has really become an American has the right to stand on exactly the same footing as any native-born citizen in the land, and is just as much entitled to the friendship and support, social and political, of his neighbors.
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Dinner was called for seven-thirty on the evening of Wednesday, October 16, 1901. The invitation to Booker T. Washington, the founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been dispatched that very day. Born a slave in 1856, Washington had risen to prominence in the long decades since. Now, at the beginning of a new century, a new president—Theodore Roosevelt had assumed the office after the assassination of William McKinley barely a month before, in September 1901—had asked Washington to become the first African American in history to dine formally at the White House.
In October 1901, Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, provoking white outrage. In the next image, Washington is also pictured speaking at a Lincoln commemoration in 1906; Mark Twain is seated behind him.
TR knew Washington, and, according to his own recollection, had not given “very much thought” to the invitation. It seemed, Roosevelt said, “natural to ask him to dinner to talk over [his] work.” Yet the president understood the implications of the evening, recalling, “the very fact that I felt a moment’s qualm on inviting him because of his color made me ashamed of myself and made me hasten to send the invitation.”
Reaction among white Southerners was swift. “There is a feeling of indignation among southern men, generally, that the President should, in the face of his declaration of friendliness toward the people of the south, take this early opportunity to show such a marked courtesy and distinction to a negro,” The Atlanta Constitution wrote. The Memphis Commercial Appeal said, “President Roosevelt has committed a blunder that is worse than a crime, and no atonement or future act of his can remove the self-imprinted stigma.” Alabama’s Geneva Reaper was especially harsh. “Poor Roosevelt!” the paper wrote. “He might now just as well sleep with Booker Washington, for the scent of that coon will follow him to the grave as far as the South is concerned.”
Roosevelt knew the notices were rough. “As things have turned out I am very glad that I asked him,” he wrote a correspondent after the Washington dinner, “for the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary.” TR’s reflections on the invitation tell us much about the era. Though asking Washington to dine was a pioneering act, the president was not a civil rights pioneer in the ways we, from a different century and in a different context, might hope to find. For his time, however, Roosevelt was closer to the side of the angels than many other Americans were. “I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the negro on this continent,” he wrote, “but of one thing I am sure, and that is that inasmuch 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, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have,” continuing:
I say that I am “sure” this is the right solution. 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 that may be, I am in honor bound to act up to my beliefs and convictions.
As a young political figure, Roosevelt had supported the nomination of an African American, John R. Lynch of Mississippi, to serve as temporary chair of the Republican National Convention in 1884. In a seconding speech, TR said that it was a “fitting thing for us to choose to preside over this convention one of that race whose right to sit within these walls is due to the blood and treasure so lavishly spent by the founders of the Republican Party.”
In the White House, he backed Minnie M. Cox, the African American postmaster of Indianola, Mississippi, when whites demanded her removal in favor of a white candidate. He also refused to give in to opposition to his appointment of another African American, Dr. William Crum, as head of the customs house in Charleston, South Carolina. “I know of no people in the North so slavishly conventional, so slavishly afraid of expressing any opinion hostile to or different from that held by their neighbors, as is true of the southerners, and most especially of the Charleston aristocrats, on all vital questions.” To a correspondent in South Carolina, Roosevelt said, “It seems to me that it is a good thing from every standpoint to let the colored man know that if he shows in marked degree the qualities of good citizenship—the qualities which in a white man we feel are entitled to reward—then he himself will not be cut off from all hope of similar reward.”
At the same time, he could make racist remarks and observations, particularly about people of color abroad, and he worried that a white failure to reproduce sufficiently might lead to “race suicide,” a popular theory in those days. “I am an optimist,” Roosevelt wrote a sister in 1899, “but there are grave signs of deterioration in the English-speaking peoples.” To William Howard Taft, who succeeded him in 1909, Roosevelt lamented a low birth rate among the “best people.” “In spite of our enormous immigration,” Roosevelt told Taft, “there is a good reason to fear that unless the present tendencies are checked your children and mine will see the day when our population is stationary, and so far as the native stock is concerned is dying out.”
He could also be unfairly harsh about the conduct of black soldiers in the Spanish-American War, writing that they had flinched in battle and run to the rear. “Here again, I attributed the trouble to the superstition and fear of the darkey,” TR wrote, “natural in those but one generation removed from slavery and but a few generations removed from the wildest savagery.” Roosevelt was wrong: The troops he had thought were fleeing fire had in fact been following the orders of a white officer. Standing corrected, he said that he was “the last man in the world to say anything against the colored soldiers.” The mistake was telling. “Roosevelt’s frequent invocation of the idea of equal opportunity for all Americans regardless of race and his occasional efforts in behalf of blacks earned him a reputation among both his contemporaries and among many historians as a racial ‘moderate,’ ” the scholar Thomas G. Dyer wrote. Still, Dyer added, “although Roosevelt may have been a moderating force in an age of high racism, he nevertheless harbored strong feelings about the inferiority of blacks, feelings which suggest the pervasiveness of racism and the harsh character of racial ‘moderation’ in turn-of-the-century America.”
Most things in politics
, in other words, are relative. To honor Lincoln’s Birthday in 1905, shortly after he won a full presidential term on his own, Roosevelt gave a farsighted address to a Republican gathering in New York City:
We of to-day, in dealing with all our fellow-citizens, white or colored, North or South, should strive to show just the qualities that Lincoln showed—his steadfastness in striving after the right, and his infinite patience and forbearance with those who saw that right less clearly than he did; his earnest endeavor to do what was best, and yet his readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the ideal best was unattainable; his unceasing effort to cure what was evil, coupled with his refusal to make a bad situation worse by any ill-judged or ill-timed effort to make it better.
TR nodded to the Lost Cause but made it clear that the right side had prevailed. Federal and Confederate troops, Roosevelt said, “fought with equal bravery and with equal sincerity of conviction, each striving for the light as it was given him to see the light; though it is now clear to all that the triumph of the cause of freedom and of the Union was essential to the welfare of mankind.”
His words were eloquent, his tone gentle:
Our effort should be to secure to each man, whatever his color, equality of opportunity, equality of treatment before the law….Every generous impulse in us revolts at the thought of thrusting down instead of helping up such a man. To deny any man the fair treatment granted to others no better than he is to commit a wrong upon him—a wrong sure to react in the long run upon those guilty of such denial. The only safe principle upon which Americans can act is that of “all men up,” not that of “some men down.”