Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [142]
MISSOURI. OKLAHOMA. ARKANSAS. TENNESSEE. Grinding across the dank flats of Louisiana, he braced himself for a swing through Mississippi and Alabama to Georgia, where he would try to make the most of his Bulloch ancestry. He was in Democratic territory now, and as a Republican renegade, could not hope to see many friendly black faces. Even Booker T. Washington had decided to come out for Taft.
“Theodore Roosevelt has spent some time in Africa,” the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review noted, “but he has never spent one second inside of a black skin.” If he had, he might understand the impact of his letter to Julian Harris on people long treated as a separate species—indeed, as a subspecies. His “monstrous, unpatriotic, unjust and politically immoral” attempt to “array the Northern Negro against the Southern Negro” was reminiscent of the bad old days of Reconstruction.
Then, men said it was to be “A White Man’s War;” now, he says that his cause is to be frankly “put in the hands of the best white people of the South.” … He refuses to fight and free the Negroes from disfranchisement, peonage and degrading laws that unjustly discriminate. He would recall judges who decide favorably in business and labor controversies, but has no word of reprobation for Judge Lynch; he would recall judicial decisions, but will not include the decisions upholding Jim Crow laws; he would destroy the political bosses, while at the same time he is delivering the Negroes into political despotism. He proclaims “the right of the people to rule;” but denies them the privilege of exercising that right if the people happen to be black.
These touchés might have been more damaging had they not appeared in a periodical whose title seemed designed to keep readership to a minimum. Everything Roosevelt saw of Southern Progressives flocking to his banner convinced him that his “lily-white” policy was working. “It is impossible,” Charles Thompson reported from Atlanta on 28 September, “to give any idea of the hold that the idea of ‘a new white man’s party’ has taken on in the South.” Segregationists who believed that the Negro should nevertheless be treated as a human being felt liberated from the hate policies of the Democratic Party, while old-time Populists had turned into “religious zealots, and they look on him as an apostle.”
Encouraged, the Colonel went out of his way to antagonize some Democratic hecklers when he spoke that night in the Atlanta Auditorium. He practically called Woodrow Wilson a liar for misquoting a remark he had made about the “inevitable” rise of monopolistic corporations. “He has no right … to attribute to me words which I have never used.”
Roosevelt forgot, or chose to ignore, that Wilson’s professional career had begun in Georgia. He blustered on in a way that grated on the sensibilities of his listeners, used as they were to the polite formalities of Southern speech. There were ten thousand people in the hall, including two thousand standees who crowded close to the stage to get a better view of him. As heckling spread and anger grew, he sprang onto the speaker’s table and bellowed, “I’ll get up here so you’ll all have a chance to see me.” His truculence momentarily struck the crowd dumb. Afterward, he had to be hustled out a side door.
HE RETURNED TO Oyster Bay on 2 October, worn out from his trip, only to find that O. K. Davis had organized another, to begin in a matter of days. It would link strategic points of the Midwest that he had missed the first time around, including lower and upper Michigan, the main cities of Minnesota, Illinois, and