Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [154]
He instantly turned aside, leaving me—I think—with my mouth open, and began telling in a loud voice and with great unction of his lunch [with] a committee of prominent Jews interested in the Kishinev petition. He even imitated Oscar Straus by a hitch of the shoulders and laughed heartily when somebody asked if he had provided boiled ham for his guests. Once he said:
“Do not all these things interest you? Isn’t it a fine thing to be alive when so many great things are happening?” …
As the time drew near for leaving, I began to wonder when the President would ask me for the information upon which I had spent so much time and hard work. I had my heavy briefcase in hand when I went up to say goodbye—and my grand plans for enlightening the Government of the United States vanished in a handshake.
Mr. Bonaparte, Mr. Kohlsaat, and I walked down together, some three miles, to Oyster Bay. I carried my heavy case, filled with my memoranda, and papers, and maps and pictures—and the sun was hot.
Behind his jocularity on Southern race relations, the President was giving serious thought to an “utterance” on lynching. He admitted that long-term justice for the Negro concerned him more than any other issue. One of his least-noticed guests that July was Rollo Ogden, sometime Presbyterian missionary, editor of the New York Evening Post, and a crusader against mob justice. They met amid reports that anti-Negro vigilantes were menacing a jail in Evansville, Indiana. Governor Winfield T. Durbin had sent in state troops, who killed six rioters; even so, hundreds of terrified blacks were quitting town. The parallels to both the Wilmington lynching and the Kishinev pogrom were obvious. (A cartoon in Literary Digest showed Nicholas II tearfully rejecting the B’nai B’rith petition: “Excuse me, I’m too busy weeping over this Delaware affair.”) Roosevelt promised Ogden that he would say something soon.
For political reasons, he could not do so immediately. A Democratic primary campaign of extreme virulence was approaching its climax in Mississippi, with two racists, Hernando Money and James K. Vardaman, respectively fighting two Administration-backed moderates for the senatorial and gubernatorial nominations. Since there was no effective Republican opposition in that state, selection was as good as election. Much invective was being lavished on the “nigger-loving gang in Washington,” particularly Roosevelt for his support of Minnie Cox. Governor Andrew H. Longino, running for re-election, was blamed for involving the President in Mississippi politics during his 1902 visit to the Little Sunflower. Any move now by the detested “Teddy” against lynching, which Longino had himself condemned, would ensure the Governor’s defeat.
SO ROOSEVELT REMAINED SILENT, as midsummer heat mounted across the nation. The sun shone strong on western corn, ripening what looked, to James Wilson’s expert eye, like bumper crops. A good harvest was gold in Republican coffers, the Secretary of Agriculture wrote from South Dakota: “This people is very prosperous and so enthusiastic for you that they will contribute just as freely to next year’s campaign as to build a church.”
Temperatures—and tempers—rose less encouragingly at labor conventions in many cities. So far in 1903, there had been a record three and a half thousand strikes nationwide, and not only Wall Street held Roosevelt responsible. In a severe blow to his popular image, the National Association of Letter Carriers endorsed William Randolph Hearst for President as “a true friend of the plain people.” Union after union berated Roosevelt for the low pay increase awarded the anthracite miners, and for his more recent, precedent-setting enforcement of an open shop in the Government Printing Office.
James S. Clarkson, his chief patronage lieutenant outside Washington, grew nervous. He bombarded