Theodore Rex (60 page)

Daylight faded. Still more quiet men came from the city, and from the fields, until there were no spaces left between the groups waiting for dark. The communal mood was disciplined, almost professional. Marksmen checked their rifles; boilermakers armed themselves with freshly sharpened saws and cold-steel chisels; quarriers counted out sticks of dynamite; shipyard workers readied a huge launch ram.

At sunset, electric lights went on in the yard. The marksmen took aim. Quickly, methodically, every bulb was shot out. Inside, the warden took his wife and children upstairs and locked them in the women’s chamber. Chief Black and two deputies arrived, stood against the yard door, and pleaded that the law be allowed to take its course. A short man in a red sweater listened, smiling, then said, “Come on boys, get to one side, you’re bothering us.” Out of the darkness came the ram, and the big door split like balsa. The crowd, four thousand strong now, surged roaring into the yard.

Guards on the penitentiary roof fired high. There was an answering fusillade, so heavy that the guards dropped out of sight. The boilermakers came forward and began to saw through the door of wood and steel bars. In twenty minutes, it was down. Beyond lay a door of solid steel. That took a half hour. The crowd waited patiently. A flight of stairs led down to yet another steel door. The boilermakers took new saws and cold chisels, and set to work.

Prison staff inside pushed a firehose through the door’s speaking hatch and shot out a high-pressure blast. This momentarily delayed progress, but the marksmen fired bullets down the hose until its handlers withdrew. Soon the door was open. Tunnel-like passages receded in several directions. The mob explored them and reported back to the man in the red sweater. Attention focused on a third door of solid steel. The boilermakers crouched down again.

By then the rumble of thousands of voices, and the steady rasp of sawing, must have penetrated to the inmates, who had not heard the initial tumult in the yard. Most were Negroes. By the time the third door fell, and the mob entered the prison chamber, they were hysterical with fear. “He’s in cell thirteen!” one man screamed. “On the second gallery!”

That meant two more barriers of steel. Afterward, when experts came to assess the damage, they had nothing but praise for the skill of the boilermakers. Every plate, bar, and bolt was sliced as smoothly as cheddar. The last filament snapped at 11:00
P.M.
, and cell thirteen revealed itself. It was empty.

There was a moment’s hesitation, then: “Shove back the panel!” Hard as it was to believe that a six-foot Negro could squeeze himself into a shallow
closet measuring four feet by two and a half feet, when the door slid open White burst out like a bull. Viselike hands secured him. Then, as joyful shouts echoed through the passages into the yard, the prisoner was escorted outside.

“I did it!” White jabbered in half-praying, half-confessional tones. “O Christ save my soul! I did it!” His mantra continued nonstop, even when the man in the red sweater calmed the waiting crowd: “Let nobody strike or hurt him. We are going to take him to the place where he committed the crime, and we are going to burn him alive.”

An oddly ecclesiastical procession began. A man on a white horse rode his mount in slow circles to clear the way. Next came an old farmer in blue overalls, carrying a lantern on a long forked stick. Then came White, weaving as if drunk between his two escorts. Six other horsemen flanked him, and the crowd fell into place behind.

As the procession moved out into open country, along a mud road pleached with maple trees, its joy increased. Someone struck up “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” to roars of laughter. Then massed voices joined in “Marching Through Georgia.” Young men jumped through the trees and fanned out across the fields. But they stayed abreast of the swaying lantern and the white horse.

Around midnight, the scene of White’s crime came into view: a notched hedge by a plowed field. He stood talking to himself as carpenters cut fence rails into faggots. A youth in a Panama hat chopped slats into kindling. Soon a neat pyre arose, its interstices stuffed with straw. Ceaselessly moving, the man on the white horse shaped the crowd into a circle, and ordered the inner ring to hold hands. Centripetal pressure made the ring wreathe and sway. Oddly, those nearest the pyre seemed disposed to kick it down. “For God’s sake,” a voice called, “don’t do this! Shoot the man! Hang him … don’t burn him!”

The man in the red sweater shouted, “We’re going to burn the nigger alive, and we’re going to do it right here and now.” He produced a rope. White was brought inside the ring and bound from the ankles up, like a papoose. His confession moaned on—“Then I gave her a hack in the throat with my knife and asked her again.…” The rope began to cramp his chest. “You would not do this to me if I was a white man.…” A few more coils silenced him. It was 1:30 in the morning.

Suddenly, White was seized at head and foot and tossed onto the pyre. A match lit the straw. “Give it to him!” “Burn him up!” The yells sounded scattered and uncertain. Then flames climbed over White’s body. Several watchers turned away, gagging.

Some of the Negro’s bonds burned loose, and he managed to writhe off the pyre, screaming “O God forgive me!” He was tossed back, head foremost, and the fire, fierce now, engulfed him. Incredibly, White writhed off again. Before he could be picked up, an exasperated bystander hoisted a long-handled
hammer, arched it through the air, and shattered his skull. “That settles it!”

There was a chorus of disappointment from the incendiarists, led by the old farmer with the lantern. They returned the corpse to the pyre, which burned all night. By dawn, a few pale bones were all that remained of the black man, White.
Vendors hawked them in the streets of Wilmington as souvenirs.

THE DELAWARE LYNCHING
was not, as some shocked headlines claimed, the first to occur north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But it was the first there with a motive that was explicitly racial, and its sadism revolted even Southerners.
Roosevelt, child of a Georgian mother, was torn in his heart between “the horror that such savagery aroused” and concern that if he spoke out against it now, as passions still surged (fresh mobs were roaming the streets of Wilmington, protesting Sheriff Black’s arrest of the man in the red shirt), he might touch off worse and wider demonstrations. His one public reference to lynching, in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion, had badly damaged him politically. There was no question he must say something soon—but when, and how best for moral effect?

He poured out his distress to Jules Jusserand, who was fast becoming a confidant. What really worried him, he said, was “the demoralizing effect of mob executions” on young minds. He had heard of boys of twelve taking part. “They will be brutalized for life.”

The Delaware affair came as a particular shock to Roosevelt, because the national lynch rate had been dropping since he had taken office. If, now, four thousand hitherto peaceful whites living on Union soil were capable of such barbarity, what price Judge Jones’s manumission of a few peons in the South?

AS SUMMER SETTLED DOWN
over Washington, the President, deserted by his wife and children, waited impatiently for some positive news from Bogotá. On 24 June, he gave a bachelor dinner for Hay and Jusserand. He said he was studying the
War Reports
of Prince Eugene of Savoy, that most self-confident and impetuous of monarchs, and was not fazed by James J. Hill’s angry determination
to take the
Northern Securities
case to the Supreme Court. “He detests me, but I admire him,” Roosevelt said. “He will detest me much more before I have done with him.”

Hay, much of whose wealth derived from railroad stocks, disapproved of the Administration’s antitrust policy. “
Where will it begin, and where will it stop?” he complained to Jusserand afterward. “Where is the limit, the line of demarcation?”

The next morning, a cable arrived from Arthur Beaupré, saying that the Colombian Congress had at last convened to debate the treaty, but did not appear to be intimidated by Hay’s ultimatum. A good sign, perhaps, was that President Marroquín had not specifically recommended against ratification. That guaranteed many weeks—if not months—of leisurely debate.

Hay and Roosevelt agreed to await further developments in their respective watering places. With that, they separately left town. Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Loomis remained behind to stay in wire contact with Beaupré.

“
Out of consideration for my feelings,” the President advised Hay, “pray go as little to Washington this summer as possible—otherwise I shall feel too poignantly that I am neglecting my own duty.”

CANNONS CRASHED AND
a school choir sang “God Save the President” when Roosevelt stepped down under the white gull-wings of Oyster Bay station on 27 June 1903. He listened smiling, his hand resting on a child’s small golden head. The face beneath suffused in bliss. His own children stood outside the circle of attention, waiting to escort him to his carriage. They felt no sense of deprivation, for what he gave, he gave without stint.
Only Alice, still the family “orphan” at nineteen, yearned for more. Haunted by the ghost of her namesake, hurt by his denial of that ghost, contemptuous of his guilt, she fought the maddening smile as best she could, with her own income, with cigarettes and flashy clothes. She begged him to let her buy a red automobile like Marguerite Cassini’s. Rebuffed, she “chauffeured” the cars of other friends at desperate speeds up to twenty-five miles an hour. She kept dynamite caps and pet reptiles in her purse, stuck silver butterflies in her hair, and—knowing how Roosevelt despised arrogant wealth—flaunted her popularity with the Four Hundred. But she remained his “blessed girl.” It was also what he called dowdy little Ethel.

“
Father doesn’t care for me,” Alice scratched angrily in her diary. “That is to say, one eighth as much as he does for the other children.… We are not in the least congenial.… Why should he pay any attention to me or things that I live for, except to look upon them with disapproval.”

The most Roosevelt would say, to Ted, was, “
I wish she had some pronounced serious taste.”

Ted, now fifteen, understood the word
serious
very well. He had all of his
father’s purposeful force, but imagination and intellect were denied him. Small, nervous, grim, plug-ugly, he made plenty of the best blood flow at Groton. “He is a regular bull terrier,” Roosevelt noted proudly. “In a game last year he broke his collar bone, but finished the game without letting anyone know what had happened.”