Theodore Rex (13 page)

This effusion might have bypassed most ears, but Washington caught its significance. No other President had ever appointed a black official above the Mason-Dixon Line. None had considered the feelings of franchised blacks in such states as New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Surely this was proof of Roosevelt’s enlightenment.

AFTER LEAVING THE
White House, Booker T. Washington headed south via Virginia, where he had been born a slave forty-five years before. One of the first things he could remember was the sight of his uncle being strapped to a tree and screaming under the lash of a cowhide whip,
“Pray, master, pray, master!”
The half-coherent cry still rang in his ears, convincing him of the white man’s urgent need to be regarded as superior, and the black man’s equally urgent need to accommodate that fantasy, on pain of extinction.

Washington’s pale gray eyes and tawny complexion further sharpened his consciousness of white lust, white guilt, and white hatred.
As his mother had endured the embraces of some nameless white man—or men—so must he endure the contempt of rednecks, and the paternalism of rich Yankees. Present passivity was future power.

For sixteen years he had been urging his fellow Negroes to accept disfranchisement as inevitable, to concentrate instead on educational and vocational self-improvement.
Blacks and whites alike, with the exception of extremists at either end of the color spectrum, accepted this as the only practical solution to “the color problem.” Washington’s famous simile, “
We can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” implied both economic integration and social segregation. But he
insisted that the vote would not long be withheld from a race acquiring skills, learning, and property.

Washington’s philosophy of accommodation struck many black intellectuals as craven, yet his career showed how it could be turned to advantage. Where once little Booker had crawled on packed dirt, and endured slave shirts that stung his skin, big Booker now summered in wealthy New England resorts, and ruled a multimillion-dollar educational empire. The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute of Alabama, the black teacher-training college he had founded in 1881, was a huge and thriving enterprise, financed by eager philanthropists. Through the “Tuskegee Machine”—his secret fraternity of academics, businessmen, preachers, politicians, and journalists—he controlled most of the nation’s Negro newspapers and political platforms. Washington was the most powerful black man in America, and to Theodore Roosevelt (who tended to equate power with creativity) “a genius such as does not arise in a generation.”

Exactly what his full ambition was nobody knew. Courteous yet inscrutable, he operated on many levels.
Roosevelt, gazing at him with blind patrician eyes, saw only a chunky yellow man of quiet speech and deferential manner. Washington, gazing back, saw himself reflected quite otherwise in the President’s spectacles: a double image of anger and power, wholly, bitterly black.

NO SOONER HAD
he returned to Alabama than the patronage agreement he had with Roosevelt was put to the test. A federal district court judge died in Montgomery, not far from Tuskegee. Washington swung into immediate action. The vacancy could best be filled, he wrote the President, by Thomas G. Jones, a former governor of the state. “He stood up in the Constitutional Convention and elsewhere for a fair election law, opposed lynching, and he has been outspoken for the education of both races. He is head and shoulders above any of the other persons who I think will apply for the position.” Jones also happened to be a Democrat.

Roosevelt received the last piece of information with modified rapture. He would have preferred a Republican judge to begin with, if only to lull Senator Hanna into a false sense of security. This important appointment would be seen as a prototype of his future patronage policy. Hanna was bound to suggest someone from the “Lily White” wing of the GOP. A dilemma then loomed. If Roosevelt accepted Hanna’s recommendation, he would look like a puppet in his first major presidential act, and perpetuate the Southern status quo. If he appointed Governor Jones—a racial moderate who had fought under Lee—he would gratify Negroes, while persuading Southern Democrats that their long exile from political privilege was over.

Morally, his course was clear. Yet the politician in him hesitated. Washington
sent an aide, Emmett J. Scott, to the White House to press the appointment. Scott reported that the President was cordial, yet cagey:

Washington was forced to investigate and reply with some embarrassment that if Jones had never actively “supported” the Commoner, he had cast a vote for him in 1900.

Scott delivered the telegram to Roosevelt. Surprise and chagrin struggled on the President’s face. He paced up and down. “Well I guess I’ll have to appoint him, but I am awfully sorry he voted for Bryan.”

So was Mark Hanna, when the appointment was announced on 7 October. He heard the news at home in Ohio, and demanded to know why Roosevelt had acted without consulting him. The President replied frankly: “
Because my experience has taught me that in such a case a quick decision really prevents bitterness.”

Hanna wrote back in the tones of a patient, but miffed, mentor. Roosevelt must “go slow” until he got back to town. There were bound to be many applicants for federal favor in the weeks ahead. “Reserve your decision—unless in cases which may require immediate attention. Then if my advice is of importance, Cortelyou can reach me over the ‘long distance.’ ”

Despite Hanna’s concern, praise for the appointment of Judge Jones was both loud and bipartisan.
The Atlanta Constitution
proclaimed itself “electrified … with hope of a new day.” Three wealthy young white Republicans in Montgomery, Alabama, announced that they were forming a “Roosevelt Club,” to “revolutionize and revitalize” GOP politics.
Review of Reviews
declared that Roosevelt had “immensely strengthened the real and permanent interests” of his party.

Encouraged, the President began to indulge some official vanities. He ordered three glossy carriages and five new horses, and commissioned a patriotic new livery, consisting of blue coat, white doeskin trousers, high boots, and top hat with tricolor cockade.
He scrapped the old “Executive Mansion” letterhead, with its Gothic curlicues, and replaced it with stationery proclaiming
THE WHITE HOUSE
in plain sans serif. He made free use of his power of summons. John Hay, hobbling over daily from the State Department, complained that one interview a month had been enough for McKinley.

Roosevelt in any case did not seem to need much help with foreign policy. He was already formulating it. His first diplomatic document was a three-thousand-word set of instructions for delegates to the International Conference of American States.

Behind the show, and the energy, Hay detected incipient signs of
noblesse oblige
. “Stay away if you want to be amused,” he wrote Henry Adams in Europe.

Most observers felt that Roosevelt had exercised the prerogative wisely during his first month in office. He had consoled and inspired a stricken country, steadied the stock market, established decent standards of patronage, and tempered the mutual hatreds of race and party. While doing these things in the name of continuity, he had somehow managed to hint at a future bright with possibilities of reform. It remained to be seen whether he was not, perhaps, enjoying too much success too soon.

“
For the moment all America praises the new President,” a British correspondent wrote. “But trouble is bound to come.”

ON 16 OCTOBER 1901
, the President heard that Booker T. Washington was back in town, and invited him to dinner that night.
Roosevelt had a momentary qualm about being the first President ever to entertain a black man in the White House. His hesitancy made him ashamed of himself, and all the more determined to break more than a century of precedent.
He received Washington at 7:30
P.M.
and introduced him to Edith. The only other non-family guest was Philip B. Stewart, a friend from Colorado.

Dinner proceeded behind closed doors, under the disapproving gaze of a Negro butler. Southern politics was the main topic of conversation. Washington’s aloofness precluded friendly chat, as did Edith Roosevelt’s sweet uninterest in anyone—black or white—who was not, as she put it, “de
nôtre monde.”

The President felt entirely at ease. It seemed “so natural and so proper” to have Washington wield his silver.
Here, dark and dignified among the paler company, was living proof of what he had always preached: that Negroes could rise to the social heights, at least on an individual basis. Collective equality was clearly out of the question, given their “natural limitations” in the evolutionary scheme of things. But a black man who advanced faster than his fellows should be rewarded with every privilege that democracy could bestow. Booker T. Washington qualified
honoris causa
in the “aristocracy of worth.”

For those blacks who did not, Roosevelt had little political sympathy. The Georgian blood of his unreconstructed mother persuaded him that the Fifteenth Amendment had been “a mistake,” and that, in nine cases out of ten,
disfranchisement was justified. Blacks were better suited for service than suffrage; on the whole, they were “altogether inferior to the whites.”