Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [31]
For sixteen years he had been urging his fellow Negroes to accept disfranchisement as inevitable, to concentrate instead on educational and vocational self-improvement. Blacks and whites alike, with the exception of extremists at either end of the color spectrum, accepted this as the only practical solution to “the color problem.” Washington’s famous simile, “We can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” implied both economic integration and social segregation. But he insisted that the vote would not long be withheld from a race acquiring skills, learning, and property.
Washington’s philosophy of accommodation struck many black intellectuals as craven, yet his career showed how it could be turned to advantage. Where once little Booker had crawled on packed dirt, and endured slave shirts that stung his skin, big Booker now summered in wealthy New England resorts, and ruled a multimillion-dollar educational empire. The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute of Alabama, the black teacher-training college he had founded in 1881, was a huge and thriving enterprise, financed by eager philanthropists. Through the “Tuskegee Machine”—his secret fraternity of academics, businessmen, preachers, politicians, and journalists—he controlled most of the nation’s Negro newspapers and political platforms. Washington was the most powerful black man in America, and to Theodore Roosevelt (who tended to equate power with creativity) “a genius such as does not arise in a generation.”
Exactly what his full ambition was nobody knew. Courteous yet inscrutable, he operated on many levels. Roosevelt, gazing at him with blind patrician eyes, saw only a chunky yellow man of quiet speech and deferential manner. Washington, gazing back, saw himself reflected quite otherwise in the President’s spectacles: a double image of anger and power, wholly, bitterly black.
NO SOONER HAD he returned to Alabama than the patronage agreement he had with Roosevelt was put to the test. A federal district court judge died in Montgomery, not far from Tuskegee. Washington swung into immediate action. The vacancy could best be filled, he wrote the President, by Thomas G. Jones, a former governor of the state. “He stood up in the Constitutional Convention and elsewhere for a fair election law, opposed lynching, and he has been outspoken for the education of both races. He is head and shoulders above any of the other persons who I think will apply for the position.” Jones also happened to be a Democrat.
Roosevelt received the last piece of information with modified rapture. He would have preferred a Republican judge to begin with, if only to lull Senator Hanna into a false sense of security. This important appointment would be seen as a prototype of his future patronage policy. Hanna was bound to suggest someone from the “Lily White” wing of the GOP. A dilemma then loomed. If Roosevelt accepted Hanna’s recommendation, he would look like a puppet in his first major presidential act, and perpetuate the Southern status quo. If he appointed Governor Jones—a racial moderate who had fought under Lee—he would gratify Negroes, while persuading Southern Democrats that their long exile from political privilege was over.
Morally, his course was clear. Yet the politician in him hesitated. Washington sent an aide, Emmett J. Scott, to the White House to press the appointment. Scott reported that the President was cordial, yet cagey:
[He] wanted to know if Gov. Jones supported Bryan.… I told him No. He wanted to know how I knew. I told him of the letter wherein he (Governor Jones) stated to you that … he had not supported Bryan, etc. etc. Well, he said he wanted to hear from you direct.
Washington was forced to investigate and reply with some embarrassment that if Jones had never actively “supported” the Commoner, he had cast a vote for him in 1900.
Scott delivered the telegram to Roosevelt. Surprise and chagrin struggled on the President’s face. He paced up and down. “Well I guess I’ll have to appoint him,