Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [119]
Not until 11 January, when he bade them good-bye, did he admit with outstretched arms, “Well, if I had it to do over again, I—don’t—think—I’d—do it.”
WISTER FLATTERED HIMSELF afterward that the President had surrendered, “in his completest school-boy manner,” to adult reasoning. If so, naïveté soon yielded to impulsiveness again. Roosevelt came to the defense of a beleaguered black postmaster in Indianola, Mississippi, who also happened to be female.
He knew her territory: Indianola stood not far from where he had hunted bear last fall. Appointed by President Harrison and reappointed by McKinley, Mrs. Minnie Cox was by all accounts a worthy citizen. She administered her office efficiently and even charitably, paying overdue box fees herself rather than embarrass white customers short of funds. But she had also invested her federal salary in local businesses, and become prosperous over the years. By local definition, she had therefore become uppity. At a mass meeting, white Indianolans chose to “persuade” her to resign.
Since Mrs. Cox was, as Mississippi’s Senator Anselm J. McLaurin allowed, “an intelligent Negro,” she had needed little persuasion. After hurriedly resigning, she had left town on vacation—the mayor of Indianola allowing that if she came back too soon “she would get her neck broken inside of two hours.”
Roosevelt’s reaction was prompt and precisely articulated. Mrs. Cox was being coerced “by a brutal and lawless element purely upon the ground of color.” He declined to “tolerate wrong and outrage of such flagrant character.” Neither would he stop paying Mrs. Cox her full federal salary. “The postmaster’s resignation has been received, but not accepted.”
In deference to the feelings of white Indianolans, however, he would not reopen her post office. In future, they could pick up their mail at Greenville, thirty miles away by country road.
ON 12 JANUARY, news leaked that the President had decided to give Boston a black Assistant District Attorney. In living memory, no Negro had ever received a Northern federal appointment. The report, coinciding with Roosevelt’s defense of Mrs. Cox and his refusal to back down on Dr. Crum, touched off an explosion of editorial criticism similar to that following his dinner with Booker T. Washington. Only now the complaints were heard from as close to home as his own native city. The New York Times accused him of using political operatives to corral black delegates—“not a nice game”—and the New York Herald saw danger of “setting the country back a generation in color prejudice and sectional strife.” Students at Columbia University debated a resolution “that President Roosevelt’s policy of appointing Negroes to offices in states where sentiment is opposed to it, is unwise.” Redneck reactionaries again excoriated the “nigger-loving” President, and the sheriff of Sunflower County, Mississippi, called him “a 14-karat jackass.”
By now, Roosevelt was used to this kind of invective. More worrying was the prospect of fair-minded Southerners regarding him as socially irresponsible. He pointed out in a letter to the editor of The Atlanta Constitution that merit, not color, was his prime patronage concern. On at least three recent occasions in Georgia, he had chosen to replace black men with white. Conversely, the white citizens of Savannah had not protested when he had retained a Negro as their Collector of Customs—the identical position that Dr. Crum was to hold in Charleston.
Why the appointment of one should cause any more excitement than the appointment of the other I am wholly at a loss to imagine. As I am writing to a man of keen and trained intelligence, I need hardly say that to connect either of these appointments … or my actions in upholding the law in Indianola, with such questions as “social equality” and “negro domination” is as absurd as to connect them with the nebular hypothesis or the theory of atoms.
Black leaders tried not to