Theodore Rex (14 page)

“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 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.

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 for Theodore Roosevelt.

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: