Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [121]
Roosevelt agreed to offer Bogotá a final concession, more than doubling the original rental figure proposed. The next morning, 22 January, Hay wrote to Herrán:
I am commanded by the President to say to you that the reasonable time that the statute accords for the conclusion of negotiations with Colombia for the excavation of a canal on the Isthmus has expired, and he has authorized me to sign with you the treaty of which I had the honor to give you a draft, with the modification that the sum of $100,000, fixed therein as the annual payment, be increased to $250,000. I am not authorized to consider or discuss any other change.
Herrán weighed this note for a few hours only. Its finality was unmistakable. Unbeknown to Hay, Herrán had secret instructions to sign the moment he felt “everything might be lost by delay.” That moment had now come. According to his calculations, Colombia actually had everything to gain. Indeed, by signing now, she would make a profit of $7.25 million on the original protocol. The loss of a few extra rental millions was nothing compared to the catastrophe of losing all. Colombia might have her canal, and Panama too, forever.
Late in the afternoon, Herrán went to Hay’s house.
NEWS THAT THE Panama Canal Treaty had been signed reached the White House in time to cheer Roosevelt at another disastrous reception. His problem this evening was not with crowd handling, but with the color of certain guests. Four or five Negroes strolled in to shake his hand. They were federal officeholders, so their attendance at an official, stand-up event was not unusual. This time, however, they made so bold as to bring their wives. Southern Congressmen hurried for the exits, swearing never to visit the White House again. No black women, as far as anybody could remember, had ever been entertained at a private function at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Yet another racial scandal erupted in Dixie.
“’Pears lak us niggers is on top now, Marse Roberts,” an old field hand teased his boss in Georgia.
“How’s that?”
“H’ain’t we got a nigger for President?”
White reactionaries believed the same, but failed to find it funny. James K. Vardaman, running for Governor of Mississippi, went to the limits of public invective. Theodore Roosevelt was nothing but a “little, mean, coon-flavored miscegenationist,” while the White House had become “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.”
This was not the kind of publicity Roosevelt needed, coinciding as it did with Senate Commerce Committee hearings on his nomination of Dr. Crum and floor debate on his closing of the Indianola post office.
He was lucky enough to be defended in the latter case by the fastest mind on Capitol Hill. John Spooner addressed the Senate on 24 January, in an atmosphere more rife with sectionalism than at any time since the “bloody shirt” demagoguery of his youth. Speaking with his usual easy rapidity, he affirmed the President’s goodwill toward all law-abiding Southerners. But the principle at stake in Indianola was that for which the Union Army had fought: an unconscionable minority must not be allowed to subvert the sovereignty of the state. Mrs. Cox had been “asked” to resign, after years of exemplary service:
It is as idle as the wind, Mr. President, to cavil upon the proposition that this was not a forced resignation.… If it was not duress, what was it? It was the power behind it that constituted the duress; it was the fact that that power was executed by the white citizens of that country, and that this person against whom it was addressed was colored.
Senator McLaurin rose to defend the right of a community to rid itself of personae