Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [30]
DISTRACTED AS THE reporters were with family gossip, they missed the secret visit of a black man to Roosevelt’s office late on the night of Sunday, 29 September. It was unlike Booker T. Washington to be so furtive. He was a world-famous figure, revered even by white Southerners, and had visited William McKinley in broad daylight. But fame had made him cautious. Privately, he admitted to “grave misgivings” about Roosevelt’s telegram from Buffalo. The President must not expect him to be an automatic ally in any strategy to dismantle the Southern patronage system wrought by McKinley and Hanna.
Washington’s resistance did not last long. He was impressed by how frankly Roosevelt stated that he did not intend to appoint “a large number of colored people” to federal office in Dixie. That would only worsen racial tensions there, currently exemplified by a lynch rate of about one hundred hangings per year. Better to name just a few exemplary blacks, concentrating instead—with Washington’s approval—on “the very highest type of native Southern white man … regardless of political influences.” He, Theodore Roosevelt, was the first President to mingle Union and Confederate blood. As such, he wanted “to see the South back in full communion” with the North.
Washington listened, darkly impressed. Here was a candidate desperate for delegates in 1904, yet willing to gamble on a patronage policy of quality rather than quantity—indeed, if Roosevelt was to be believed, to appoint members of the opposite party when necessary. For forty years, Republican executives, aided by Grover Cleveland, had imposed Northern reform on the South, with the result that white Democrats there were almost totally alienated from the federal civil service. Divided as they might be into “Gold” and Bryanite factions, they were united in their fear of the fecund Negro. Only the most rigid segregation, they believed, could save them from all becoming mulattoes.
State by state, Southern legislatures were disfranchising Negroes. By the next presidential election, not one black man in a thousand would be eligible to vote. Washington understood that it made little sense for Roosevelt to elevate many Negroes in areas where they were unwelcome at the ballot box. Every new black postmaster licking stamps, every tax assessor asking uppity questions, would fan the flames of Southern race hatred. And the “flames” were not metaphorical. Just the other day in Winchester, Tennessee, a maddened crowd of whites had burned a black man at the stake and sold slices of his roasted liver.
Washington, whose political agenda was as unsentimental as Roosevelt’s (if considerably more veiled), agreed to help create a new Southern majority of moderate white appointees, plus a minority of blacks. The President, in gratitude, promised an identical patronage policy in the North.
This effusion might have bypassed most ears, but Washington caught its significance. No other President had ever appointed a black official above the Mason-Dixon Line. None had considered the feelings of franchised blacks in such states as New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Surely this was proof of Roosevelt’s enlightenment.
AFTER LEAVING THE White House, Booker T. Washington headed south via Virginia, where he had been born a slave forty-five years before. One of the first things he could remember was the sight of his uncle being strapped to a tree and screaming under the lash of a cowhide whip, “Pray, master, pray, master!” The half-coherent cry still rang in his ears, convincing him of the white man’s urgent need to be regarded as superior, and the black man’s equally urgent need to accommodate that fantasy, on pain of extinction.
Washington’s pale gray eyes and tawny complexion further sharpened his consciousness of white lust, white guilt, and white hatred. As his mother had endured the embraces of some nameless white man—or men—so must he endure the contempt of rednecks, and the paternalism of rich Yankees. Present passivity was