Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [402]
46 “We have made” TR, Letters, 7.585–86.
47 He noted that Ibid., 7.587–89. According to TR, 7 out of every 8 black delegates at the Republican convention voted for WHT. Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 63.
48 The machinery does not TR, Letters, 7.590.
Biographical Note: Even allowing for “the pastness of the past,” and the fact that TR never shared the virulent racism of, e.g., Owen Wister, Henry Adams, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it is difficult not to see him now as anything other than paternalistic in his attitude to blacks. His genuine admiration, approaching reverence, for Dr. Washington was shared by many liberal white Republicans in the early years of the 20th century. However, the very uniqueness they ascribed to the author of Up from Slavery emphasized their consensus that Negroes generally languished at the opposite end of the scale of achievement. The best that can be said for TR’s paternalism is that it was good-natured and devoid of fear. His descriptions of his black safari employees in African Game Trails are affectionate, but almost always dismissive, e.g.: “Most of them were like children, with a grasshopper inability for continuity of thought and realization for the future.” (TR, Works, 4.120.) For a detailed analysis of the reasoning behind his letter to Joel Harris, see Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 167ff. For the agonized subsequent discussions of race policy in the provisional National Progressive Committee, ending in the decision to endorse TR’s attitude, see “Proceedings of the Provisional National Progressive Committee, 3–5 August 1912,” bound ts. (TRC).
TR had no patience with blanket or “scientific” theories of race, describing Houston Stewart Chamberlain, xenophobic author of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), as “an able man whose mind is not quite sound,” and remarking of Joseph de Gobineau’s famous Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1855) that “to approach it for serious information would be much as if an albatross should apply to a dodo for a lesson in flight.” (TR, Works, 14.201, 464–65.) Racial extremism on the liberal side also irritated him, especially in regard to foreign policy: “I have some worthy friends in Boston appeal to me to give self-government to a number of individuals who regard themselves as overdressed when they wear breech-clouts.” (TR, Works, 15.548.)
The only extended study of TR’s racial attitudes is Thomas G. Dyer’s Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, La., 1980). It is flawed by presentism, and a failure to examine TR’s long and close relationship with Booker T. Washington—a subject worthy of a book in itself. For a more balanced analysis relevant to the politico-racial situation in 1912, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, chap. 3, “Lily White Progressivism.” See also McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, chap. 6., and David W. Southern, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917 (Wheeling, W.V., 2005). Two contemporary essays on race by TR are self-revelatory: “The Negro in America,” and “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” in TR, Works, 14.185–202 and 412–18.
49 Many of the Progressive Except where otherwise indicated, the following account is based on “First National Convention of the Progressive Party,” typed minutes (TRC), and daily reports in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Atlanta Constitution, 5–8 Aug. 1912.
50 Barbed wire no longer White, Autobiography, 483.
51 The semi-religious glow The New York Times, 23 June 1912; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 410. For TR’s appointment of Straus to his cabinet (“I want to show Russia and some other countries what we think of Jews in this country”), see Straus, Under Four Administrations, chap. 9.
52 The record size Many states sent double