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By Root 4168 0

many the birthplace of rock and roll. Throughout the delta that November the fields were covered with bright white bolls—a second cotton harvest. Clad in a fringed buckskin jacket he had acquired in the Dakota Territories, topped off with a brown slouch hat, the president looked like Seth Bullock of Deadwood, and the full cartridge belt around his waist added an air of a Rough Rider ready for action. The Mississippi River valley that loomed in front of him seemed stranger, even exotic. The president had already made a request of one of his hosts, Stuyvesant Fish, president of the Illinois Central Railroad: “My experience is that to try to combine a hunt and a picnic, generally means a poor picnic and always means a spoiled hunt,” Roosevelt wrote. “Every additional man on a hunt tends to hurt it. Of course I am only going because I want to hunt—and do see I get the first bear without fail.”6

Reporters covering his train ride to Mississippi noted that Roosevelt was reading his friend the French ambassador Jean-Jules Jusserand’s The Nomadic Life, a history of the Crusades of the Middle Ages, and surmised that the text was meant to inject some intellectual adrenaline and romanticism into the preparations for the “Great Bear Hunt.” (Reporters could never account for Roosevelt’s eclectic reading tastes.) When the train entered the delta the view from the presidential compartment changed from rolling hills to unhindered flat plains. At each railroad platform were bales of cotton ready for shipping to the textile mills of New England and Europe. The always gregarious Roosevelt waved at the Mississippi field hands who lined the tracks for an unprecedented glimpse of a U.S. president. Blacks recognized that, whatever Roosevelt’s shortcomings, cruelty and injustice always moved him to action. Since the Booker T. Washington affair Roosevelt had become a hero to African-Americans and mulattos. Nonsegregationist newspapers in the Mississippi bottom reported the president’s trip positively. One headline read: “President Speeds to Bruin Land.” A few hamlets along the train route hung patriotic crepe paper streamers as a welcoming gesture.

By going to Mississippi, Roosevelt was hoping to accomplish a few things with regard to race. It was the twentieth century, and he felt that the South had to stop seeing the world as a bridge into the burning past. The first step for a new civil rights era, he believed, was to champion antilynching laws throughout the South and Middle West. Anyone lynching a black had to be vigorously prosecuted. Racist vigilantes, the president worried, had gotten out of control. On the economic front what troubled Roosevelt was that African-American cotton pickers were trapped in a dead end: their position as tenant farmers bordered on slavery. The economic situation was unaceptable below the Mason-Dixon Line thirty-seven years after the Civil War. How could he help lift the African-Americans of the Deep South out of their condition of peonage?

But grappling with the “Negro” condition was just part of his agenda in Mississippi. Roosevelt was extremely interested in seeing America’s agricultural sector increase under his leadership. Worried about declining farm ownership in the South, particularly in the delta, Roosevelt wanted to educate himself about how the price of the cotton crop could rise up from seven cents a pound to ten cents a pound. (By 1909 he had achieved this objective.) In fact, farm property values, as a result of Roosevelt’s agricultural policies, doubled throughout the United States between 1900 and 1910. Under the expert management of Secretary of Agriculture Wilson the Roosevelt administration also championed organized food inspection programs and improvements in rural roads. New levees were approved to help control annual overflows. “In many respects,” the historian Lewis L. Gould has pointed out, “his administration was an era of unmatched prosperity on the American farm.”7

In addition to civil rights and his agriculture policy, there was a third factor that influenced Roosevelt to choose the