Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [34]
The word nigger had not been seen in print for years. Its sudden reappearance had the force of an obscenity. Within hours, newspapers from the Piedmont to the Yazoo were raining it and other racial epithets on the President’s head.
ROOSEVELT DINES A DARKEY
A RANK NEGROPHILIST
OUR COON-FLAVORED PRESIDENT
ROOSEVELT PROPOSES TO CODDLE THE SONS OF HAM
Some of the more sensational sheets expressed sexual disgust at the idea of Edith Roosevelt and Washington touching thighs, so to speak, under the table. The President was accused of promoting a “mingling and mongrelization” of the Anglo-Saxon race. Booker T. Washington was sarcastically advised to send his daughter to the White House for Christmas: “Maybe Roosevelt’s son will fall in love with her and marry her.”
The storm squalled louder when reporters discovered that Roosevelt had entertained blacks before, in the gubernatorial mansion at Albany and at Sagamore Hill. Hate mail and death threats swamped the White House and the Tuskegee Institute. In Richmond, Virginia, a transparency of the President’s face was hissed off the Bijou screen. In Charleston, South Carolina, Senator Benjamin R. Tillman endorsed remedial genocide: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”
Roosevelt was dumbfounded by the violence his invitation had provoked. At first he blamed Bourbon extremists. Yet even the most temperate Southern opinion held him in reproof. “At one stroke, and by one act,” the Richmond News declared, “he has destroyed the kindly, warm regard and personal affection for him which were growing up fast in the South. Hereafter … it will be impossible to feel, as we were beginning to feel, that he is one of us.”
BY TACIT AGREEMENT, Roosevelt and Washington refused to discuss their dinner with reporters. The President sent private word to Tuskegee that he “did not care … what anybody thought or said about it.” Both men were buoyed, however, by the continuing support of Northern newspapers. The Springfield Republican remarked that while Roosevelt’s gesture “may have been an indiscretion,” it was “splendid in its recognition of the essential character of the presidential office.”
ON 21 OCTOBER, another lightning report flashed through the South. The President and Booker T. Washington were to dine together again, at Yale University’s bicentennial. What was more, Miss Alice Roosevelt would probably join them. Yale issued a denial—Dr. Washington was merely scheduled to march behind Roosevelt in the academic procession—but too late to still the uproar in Dixie. “The whole South,” a nervous white minister wrote, “has not been so deeply moved in twenty years.”
Roosevelt looked calm and purposeful as he traveled through Connecticut on 23 October. The Secret Service, however, was noticeably apprehensive when he reached the Yale campus. In view of what had happened the last time a President had accepted public handshakes, he was forbidden to work the crowd.
Shocked by this restriction, Roosevelt seemed to realize his personal and political danger for the first time. He averted his eyes from Washington during their march to Hyperion Theater. A revised security plan seated them far apart, with the Negro in the audience and Roosevelt himself on the stage. No reference to their dinner was made during the ensuing speeches. But cheers filled the hall when Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer invoked the Father of the Nation and remarked, “Thank God, there have always been in this country college men able to recognize a true Washington, though his first name be not George.”
Degrees were awarded to a distinguished list of honorees, including John Hay, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, and the white-suited Mark Twain. “One name yet remains—” President Arthur Hadley intoned, and was unable to continue, so loud was the roar