Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [353]
2 ON 16 OCTOBER Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 318–20; Presidential scrapbook (TRP); Booker T. Washington to TR, 1 Oct. 1901 (TRP).
3 Roosevelt had a TR, Letters, vol. 3, 190.
Historiological Note: The question of whether TR was the first President to break the White House’s color bar was exhaustively discussed in newspapers of the day. Research indicated that Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, and possibly Frederick Douglass, had attended large receptions there, and probably partaken of refreshments with the general company. But neither black man ever dined with the President in intimate surroundings, as Booker T. Washington did on this occasion. Indeed, the only non-Caucasian guest to do so was Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, during Grover Cleveland’s first administration. Cleveland himself indignantly denied, in the fall of 1901, that he had ever entertained a guest of darker hue than Her Majesty. Chicago Tribune, 18 Oct. 1901; The Charlotte Observer and Chattanooga News clippings, n.d., Presidential scrapbook (TRP).
4 He received Washington Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 311, errs in saying that Alice Roosevelt attended the dinner. She was still out of town.
5 Dinner proceeded James E. Amos, Theodore Roosevelt: Hero to His Valet (New York, 1927), 54; Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 472.
6 The President felt TR to Carl Schurz, qu. by Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 313; see also TR, Letters, vol. 3, 182; Maurice Francis Egan, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1924), 213.
7 Here, dark and Archibald W. Butt, The Letters of Archie Butt: Personal Aide to President Roosevelt (New York, 1924), 68; Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 77; Charles Willis Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known and Two Near Presidents (Indianapolis, 1929), 24. Ten years after their famous dinner, TR concluded that Washington was “the highest type of all-round man I have ever met.” Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 1, 439.
8 For those blacks Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt, 97–98; TR, Autobiography, 11; TR, Letters, vol. 4, 1066; Wister, Roosevelt, 259; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 226.
9 Yet Roosevelt believed Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt, 92, 97; TR, Letters, vol. 2, 1364–65; TR in Review of Reviews, Jan. 1897.
10 Sometime during the Memphis Commercial Appeal, 18 Oct. 1901, in Presidential scrapbook (TRP); The Washington Post, 17 Oct. 1901. Leupp, The Man Roosevelt, 218–19, goes to extravagant lengths to describe this news leak as involuntary, and dismisses as “contemptible slander” any suggestion that TR may have authorized the announcement “for political effect.” But his book, published in 1904, was a campaign biography, and Leupp himself was known to be a “mouthpiece” for the Roosevelt Administration (John Bassett Moore to J. W. Bayard, 28 Oct. 1901 [JBM]). For obvious reasons, TR would want Southern voters to think, in an election year, that the famous dinner had been an impulse on his part, never to be repeated. But in 1901 he was keen to attract what support he could from moderate Southern Republicans unbeholden to Mark Hanna. His early words to heads of press agencies quoted on pp. 44–45 make plain his strong intent to control all White House news.
11 NEITHER ROOSEVELT NOR The Washington Post and New York Tribune, 17 Oct. 1901; Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 313; Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 264; Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 6, 257; The Washington Post, 18 Oct. 1901. See also August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideology in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, 1988).
12 Whites, too, “I thank you—I congratulate you—I pity you,” a typical correspondent wrote. “I think you have done an act as brave as [the Christian martyr Hugh] Latimer’s and of the same sort. You will be roasted like him, too, and like him ultimately justified with personal earthly immortality.” Albion W. Tourgée to TR, 21 Oct. 1901 (TRP).
13 But during the The Atlanta Constitution, 17 Oct. 1901, Presidential scrapbook (TRP).
14 “The most damnable” Memphis Scimitar, 17 Oct. 1901, Presidential scrapbook (TRP).
15