Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [35]
Notwithstanding this expression of support, Roosevelt declined to see Washington later in the day. At a public reception that evening, he sat aloof, kneading his silk hat. He seized on Twain and asked whether it had been “right” to invite a Negro to the White House. The novelist, speaking carefully, said that a President was perhaps not as free as an ordinary citizen to entertain whomever he liked.
Twain’s private opinion was that Roosevelt should “refrain from offending the nation merely to advertise himself and make a noise.”
A LARGE CROWD awaited the arrival of the presidential train in Washington the next morning. Few eyes followed Roosevelt as he stepped down to the platform; attention was riveted on Alice, pausing prettily behind him. The rumor, false or not, that she had been willing to eat with a Negro was scandalous, and the slenderness of her body, in its wine-colored traveling dress, sent agreeable signals of sex. Newsmen ogled her with pleased anticipation as she followed her father out of the station, a bunch of violets nodding in her belt. Here, manifestly, was copy for many seasons.
ROOSEVELT’S QUERULOUSNESS about his dinner invitation did not abate in the days ahead. While maintaining a public silence, he admitted to friends that he was puzzled and depressed. He had only wanted to show “some little respect” to an esteemed fellow American. White Southerners could abuse him if they chose. “I regard their attacks with the most contemptuous indifference, but I am very melancholy that such a feeling should exist in such bitterly aggravated form.” As for Booker T. Washington, “I shall have him to dine just as often as I please.”
Some of these remarks may have reached Washington’s ears, for a polite letter came from Tuskegee:
My dear Mr. President: I have refrained writing you regarding the now famous dinner which both of [us] ate so innocently until I could get to the South and study the situation at first hand. Since coming here and getting into real contact with the white people I am convinced of three things: In the first place, I believe that a great deal is being made of the incident because of the elections which are now pending in several of the Southern states; and in the second place, I do not believe the matter is felt as seriously as the newspapers try to make it appear; and in the third place I am more than ever convinced that the wise course is to pursue exactly the policy which you mapped out in the beginning; not many moons will pass before you will find the South in the same attitude toward you that it was a few years ago.
That attitude, however, had always been skeptical. Sensing Roosevelt’s need for reassurance, Washington wrote again to say that the controversy was “providential,” even therapeutic. “I cannot help but feel … that good is going to come out of it.”
Some good, certainly, accrued to himself. His reception by the President had transformed him into a political force of the first magnitude. Booker T. Washington now commanded the fear, as well as the love, of black Americans. Eventually the former emotion might qualify the latter, but for the time being he was “King of a captive people.”
Roosevelt’s gains were more negative. He had learned the evanescence of presidential popularity, the complexity of race prejudice, and “the infinite capacity of the newspaper press to manufacture sensations.” He had to accept that he had no real constituency in the South, and stood little chance of assembling one, so united were Democrats against him. Perhaps his dream of bipartisan reform had always been quixotic. The most he could hope was that Southern blacks would reward his goodwill at the next national convention.
The summer of 1904, however, seemed far away in the fall of 1901. Roosevelt could only lament his sudden misfortune, and the revival of old doubts about his maturity. A forty-third candle on his birthday cake on 27 October did not console him, nor the gift of a possum from some black admirers. He dutifully announced that he would wait until “the first