Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [33]
For those blacks who did not, Roosevelt had little political sympathy. The Georgian blood of his unreconstructed mother persuaded him that the Fifteenth Amendment had been “a mistake,” and that, in nine cases out of ten, disfranchisement was justified. Blacks were better suited for service than suffrage; on the whole, they were “altogether inferior to the whites.”
“DARK AND DIGNIFIED AMONG THE PALER COMPANY.”
Booker T. Washington, 1901 (photo credit 2.1)
Yet Roosevelt believed (as most Americans did not) that this inferiority was temporary. The arguments of Charles Darwin, Jean Lamarck, and Gustave Le Bon convinced him that Washington’s race was merely adolescent, as his own had been in the seventeenth century. Negro advancement must “necessarily be painful”—witness the scars on Washington’s face, his air of swarthy suffering—but equality would come, as black Americans, generation by generation, acquired the civilized characteristics of whites. It was crucial that these voteless millions should begin to feel working for them “those often unseen forces in the national life which are greater than all legislation.”
Just how “unseen” should Washington be in his new role as presidential adviser? Even now the secretive Tuskegean was preparing to slip out of town on a midnight train. Could Roosevelt rely on him to spread the word to Negroes that the federal government was on their side?
Sometime during the last moments of the day, after Washington had left and before Roosevelt went to bed, an Associated Press reporter stopped by the White House to ask, routinely, about the day’s guest list. By 2:00 A.M. a one-sentence dispatch was humming round the country: “Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, Alabama, dined with the President last evening.”
NEITHER ROOSEVELT NOR Washington could complain about Negro reactions to this release when it appeared in the morning newspapers. Untimely congratulations warmed them, like sunbeams before a storm. “Greatest step for the race in a generation,” a black man telegraphed from Nashville. “The hour is at hand,” another rejoiced, “to make the beginning of a new order.” A third, who remembered young Theodore Roosevelt, skinny and shaky, seconding the nomination of a Negro to chair the 1884 Republican convention, told him, “Your act in honoring [Washington] was a masterly stroke of statesmanship—worthy of the best minds this country has produced.” And at a humbler level of black opinion, federal messenger boys discussed the dinner in excited whispers.
Whites, too, reacted favorably, at least those of liberal instinct. But during the afternoon, distant rumblings warned that a political hurricane was on its way up from the South. An early thunderclap was sounded by the Memphis Scimitar:
The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House. It would not be worth more than a passing notice if Theodore Roosevelt had sat down to dinner in his own home with a Pullman car porter, but Roosevelt the individual and Roosevelt the President are not to be viewed in the same light.
It is only very recently that President Roosevelt boasted that his mother was a Southern woman, and that he is half Southern by reason of that fact. By inviting a nigger to his table he pays his mother small duty.… No Southern woman with a proper self-respect would now accept an invitation to the White House,