Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [129]
He had plenty of patience, however, for crucial discussions, choosing eventually to run on “a straight-out progressive ticket” in most states of the union. Excepted only were those in the hopelessly reactionary South, Wisconsin as the pocket principality of Senator La Follette, and six Republican states (Maine, West Virginia, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, and California), progressive enough to have voted for him already. Elsewhere, he felt the third-party ticket would give him a chance to cut into Wilson’s support.
More than that, he wanted to cut into Taft’s. He would show no mercy for the entire Fagin’s den who had ganged up on him in Chicago. “I regard Taft as the receiver of a swindled nomination,” he wrote Van Valkenburg. “I cannot consent to do anything that looks as if I was joining with him. I won’t go into a friendly contest with a pickpocket as to which of us should keep my watch which he stole.”
AS THE CONVENTION loomed nearer, Roosevelt had to decide a moral issue that, agonizingly for him, related to the cause of his departure from the party of Abraham Lincoln. It concerned the right of certain delegations to attend a national convention over the claims of others. Except that this time, the rivals were all for him, and all hailed from Southern states. They differed only in that some were white and some black.
Since he personified the Progressive Party, his opinion in the matter would define its larger attitude to the question of race. A firm, yet compassionate statement would, he hoped, offer voters an alternative to the Democratic Party’s “lily-white” philosophy, and the Republican Party’s sectional mix of tolerance and exploitation on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Such a statement would help clarify his racial views, which had confused many people over the years. Was he still, to white Southerners, the “coon-flavored” President of 1901, who had wined and dined Booker T. Washington? Or was he rather the reactionary commander in chief of 1906, who had dishonorably discharged a whole Negro regiment in Brownsville, Texas, on trumped-up evidence of rioting?
In his own mind, Roosevelt was a fair man, inclined neither to patronize nor sentimentalize those darker and poorer than himself. He was proud of having fought to elevate blacks to federal office as President, and if the number was small, it was better than Taft’s deliberate score of zero. He had appointed an anti-peonage judge in the South, and been the first chief executive ever to speak out against the “inhuman cruelty and barbarity” of lynching. Brownsville was the one race-related incident in his career that might be ascribed to prejudice. But even then, he had prejudged only in the sense that he had been too quick to uphold an army investigation of the case.
Without exception, black people who knew him, from Dr. Washington down to James Amos, his valet, found his goodwill to be sincere, and never more so than when they advanced themselves by their own efforts—some farther, in the relative scheme of things, than he with all his privileges. Yet stray observations over the years had revealed him to be enlightened only in contrast to those of his peers who were outspoken in their xenophobia. Associating with such friends, he was as inclined to agree as disagree, assuring the novelist Owen Wister that blacks were “altogether inferior to the whites,” and the historian James Ford Rhodes that the Fifteenth Amendment had been “bad policy,” and the elephant hunter Quentin Grogan that if he could eliminate every Negro in America at the touch of a button, he would “jump on it with both feet.” Or so they chose to remember.
Roosevelt was struck by the extremes of advice he was now getting on the race question, from visitors and correspondents who all assumed he was their soul mate. Some wanted the Progressive Party to be exclusively white; others, segregated. He wondered if he could not persuade the former element—concentrated in the Old Confederacy—that he posed no reconstructive threat.