Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [118]
Upstairs, in contrast, the modernized heating system worked so well that several embassy ladies grew flushed and faint. Etiquette did not permit them to sit while Mrs. Roosevelt remained standing. Tempers rose along with the temperature, until ushers cracked a few windows in the East Room. The resultant convection only increased the flow of fresh air beneath.
Roosevelt (attended, for the first time in White House history, by military aides) felt a corresponding chill in some of the later hands he shook. His last guests, drawn past him with a brisk “Dee-lighted,” proceeded as if catapulted toward the State Dining Room, only to encounter another line for hot punch. At 10:30, a young aide in a cutaway coat shouted that the reception was over, and a band of forty pieces swung into “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” Yet another line jammed the basement as metal tags were redeemed, and the swing doors gave proof that the night was colder than ever. Outside on East Executive Avenue, hundreds of carriages jostled for precedence while porters bawled out names through megaphones.
The President, oblivious, cheerfully entertained a few close friends to a supper of bouillon, champagne, and ice cream.
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning, one of his houseguests, Owen Wister, said, “I don’t believe you should have appointed Dr. Crum.”
Roosevelt looked incredulous. “You don’t?”
William D. Crum was the black Republican he had named as Collector of Charleston nine weeks before. Although thirteen other Negroes had already won Roosevelt’s federal favor, Dr. Crum was the first he had chosen to replace a white incumbent. This alone guaranteed that there would be lively debate in the Senate when the appointment came up for confirmation. Several other factors suggested that the President (for all his air of innocence) was seeking a showdown with Senator Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina, the chief articulator of race hatred on Capitol Hill. “Pitchfork Ben” was not likely to vote in favor of a high Negro official in the cradle of the Confederacy—particularly one who had once had the temerity to campaign against him.
Roosevelt turned to Mary Wister, who was known for her good works and enlightened interest in Negro education. But she echoed her husband’s criticism.
“Why, Mrs. Wister! Mrs. Wister!” His head swiveled back and forth. “Why don’t you see—why you must see that I can’t close the door of hope upon a whole race!”
The Wisters said that he had, in fact, pushed it farther shut. Thirteen Negro appointments in sixteen months (compared to three thousand white) amounted to something less than a hill of beans. Moreover, most had been to minor posts or “consultancies”—such as the one exploring the idea of wholesale transportation of blacks to the Philippines. President McKinley had been more generous.
Roosevelt’s argument was that the quality of his Southern appointments mattered more than their quantity. Blacks were better served in the long run by an enlightened coalition of Gold Democrats and Union League Republicans than by the Hanna-McKinley alliance of “Lily White” bosses and purchasable Negro delegates. Before appointing Dr. Crum, he had awarded four of the most important posts in South Carolina to decent white men, three of them Democrats and two the sons of Confederate soldiers. His fifth nominee represented this same philosophy of merit. Objection to Dr. Crum could be based only on race, and “such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.”
Wister, who had lived in Charleston, tried to explain that white Southerners could not be appealed to on the grounds of logic. “It’s a condition you have to reckon with, not a theory.” The Reconstruction nightmare of a rapacious black majority raised up by Yankee patronage was still vivid enough to make men like Tillman scream. “Your act theoretically ought to do good to the colored race, but actually does them harm by rousing new animosity.”
The argument lasted through two more breakfasts. “Here the Negroes are,