Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  By 1894 Jim Crow was tightly woven into the nation's Southern quilt. Booker T. Washington realized that unless a way of surviving it could be devised, the plight of Negroes would be hopeless, especially in the South, where almost 90 percent of the Negroes lived and where the status quo was more than burdensome—it was deadly.26 He took it upon himself to come up with a plan by which Negroes could become economically self-sufficient and not dependent on whites, and whites would realize they needed blacks, not as slaves in all but name and not as field hands and pack animals, but as people who could help bring the South into the future. To achieve this, black people had to overcome what must have been for him as an educator the bitterest legacies of slavery—ignorance and illiteracy—and considering the era, they had to learn in a way that would not threaten whites. Do this and they would be taking a big step “up.” He used an invitation to speak to the National Education Association in Madison, Wisconsin, to test his thoughts.

  Ever the realistic man, Washington acknowledged in his speech that the separation of the races was a fact of life that would not go away anytime soon. To live and advance in such a world, the Negro had to make himself “through his skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived that the community could not dispense with his presence.” When Southern whites saw they too would benefit from educated and productive Negroes, they would accept the formula to bring this about. This white cooperation was essential; without it, the proposal would fail. For this reason, and because it would ensure black “prosperity,” industrial education—for a time, nothing higher other than in exceptional cases—should be pursued by Southern blacks.27 He saw the results of an industrial education justifying his faith in it as a bridge between the races that both whites and blacks could cross to learn to work with each other. “As the people of the neighborhood came to us to buy bricks, we got acquainted with them; they traded with us and we with them. Our business interests became intermingled. We had something that they wanted, they had something which we wanted. This, in a large measure, helped to lay the foundation for the pleasant relations that have continued to exist between us and the white people in [the area].”28

  Nothing was said directly about Negro political rights (to vote and otherwise participate in government) and social rights (an integrated society). Washington hinted that in exchange for an education and working-class economic rights, these could be shelved until the future. He made this point elliptically when he said, “in relation to his vote, the Negro should more and more consider the interests of the community in which he lived, rather than seek alone to please some one who lived a thousand miles away from him and from his interests” (author's emphasis). It was a message of black accommodation to the reality of white power and white authority. His program of industrial education would prepare blacks to live with whites socially and politically. In other words, not now full equality; only after adequate preparation. Washington's speech was so short and his manner so reassuring it is likely most listeners missed this last point.29 Washington would be more clear a year later in Atlanta.

  IN 1895 WASHINGTON ADDRESSED the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. He was introduced by Rufus Brown Bullock, a New Yorker who was raised by abolitionists yet fought for the Confederacy, then served as Georgia's Reconstruction governor. Georgians took to Bullock no more warmly than to boll weevils, and his time in the governor's mansion was marked by financial mismanagement and allegations of bribery. In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell captures his rascality by making him a friend of Rhett Butler, something of a scamp himself.30

  Washington emphasized to both races the point made in Madison: the blacks were in the South to stay. It was blacks he began speaking to. There was nothing in the North to tempt them, and the Hampton/Tuskegee education he offered was the key to bettering their lives where they were.

  Cast down your bucket where you are—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions…. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands…. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.”31

  Then he turned to whites, and his disgraceful pandering to their racism grates on twenty-first century ears. He told them their support for Negro self-improvement would not endanger their own ways of life:

  You can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.32

  Then he dropped the other shoe on both races:

  The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly…. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. (author's emphasis)

  Because of its often-repeated catchphrase, “Cast down your bucket,” the address originally was referred to by that name. As time passed and doubt about Washington's ideas set in, calling it the “Atlanta Compromise” seemed more appropriately to reflect what he was saying.

  AFTER THE ATLANTA SPEECH, Washington was viewed by both blacks and whites as a man standing apart from all other Negroes. There was no Negro leader that could be considered anywhere near Washington in the impact he had on articulating the relations between the races. His thoughts and conclusions were thought to represent the views of all Negroes. From then on, if Booker T. Washington said it, that's what Negroes thought. And what whites liked to hear. Clark Howell, the managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote the next day to the New York World, “The whole speech is a platform on which the whites and blacks can stand with full justice to each race.” Full justice certainly did not mean social equality to Howell, because, as Harlan wrote, Howell was “particularly gratified” that it was eliminated as a factor.33

  Not until Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech would the words of a black man so alter the course of the nation. “Cast down Your Buckets” was only five minutes long, but it had an impact disproportionate to its brevity. The spontaneous applause, cheers, and shouts of approval by those who heard it in Atlanta told those there, including Washington himself, that here was a man with the answer to an insoluble problem both blacks and whites would accept. But Washington would be a flawed messenger. He was, as Harlan noted, the perfect Negro for whites because he “shifted from whites the responsibility for racial problems they were thoroughly tired of.” By making the problem of race an economic one, Washington took it out of politics, and this too was what fatigued whites wanted so many years after emancipation.

  It has been impossible to read the Atlanta Compromise today with anything less than astonishment. How could Washington counsel his fellow Southern blacks to accept and accommodate themselves to their decidedly second-class status? How, we ask ourselves, did anyone accept such an idea? What were they thinking? What was Washington thinking?

  For one thing, he was thinking about getting the country behind his program of industrial education. For another, he was thinking about Jim Crow. In the South in 1895, Negroes were fo
rced to think about it, live with it, and often suffer and die because of it. W. E. B. Du Bois was Washington's analytical opposite in dealing with Jim Crow and Negro inequality, and the perfection that was his way of writing shows how dehumanizing its petty humiliations were when lived with day after day.

  Did you ever see a “jim-crow” waiting room? There are some exceptions but usually no heat in winter and no air in summer; undisturbed loafers and white train hands and broken disreputable settees; to buy a ticket is torture: you stand and stand and wait and wait until every white person at the “Other Window” is waited on. Then the tired agent yells across (because all the tickets and change are over there): What d'y want? WHAT? WHERE? He browbeats and contradicts you, hurries and confuses the ignorant; gives many the wrong change; for lack of time compels a number to purchase tickets on the train at a higher price and sends them all out on the platform burning with indignation and hatred.

  The “jim-crow” car is up next to the baggage car and engine. The train stops out beyond the covering in the rain or sun or dust. Usually there is no step to help one climb on, and often the car is a smoker cut in two and you must pass through the white smokers and then they pass through your part with swagger and noise and stares. Your apartment is half or quarter or an eighth of the oldest car in service. Unless it happens to be a through express, the old plush is caked with dirt, the floor is gummy and the windows dirty.

  …It is difficult to get lunch or drinking water. Lunch rooms either “don't serve niggers” or serve them at some dirty and ill-attended hole in the wall. Toilet rooms are often filthy. If you have to change cars be wary of junctions which are usually without accommodation and filled with quarrelsome whites who hate a “darky dressed up.” You are apt to have the company of a sheriff and a couple of meek or sullen black prisoners on part of your way and the dirty colored section hands will pour in toward night and drive you to the smallest corner. “No,” said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameo and her dress flowed on her like a caress), “We don't travel much.”34

  All this was sanctioned in 1896 by the US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, when it permitted Louisiana, and by extension everywhere else, to segregate railroad cars, and by extension everything else. As the painful reality of Jim Crow chafed on both Washington and Du Bois, their differences would clash head-on over Brownsville.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FIRST PUBLIC office was from the voters. In 1882, he had just turned twenty-four when he was elected to the New York state legislature as a Republican. His immaturity and brash manners made for rough navigating at first, but when he got his balance, in his own words, “I rose like a rocket.”35

  His agony after his wife's death took him out of public life, and he became a cattle rancher in the Dakota Territory. Historian and Roosevelt biographer Peter Collier wrote, “Something in the grim and desolate environment” of the Dakota Badlands connected with Roosevelt's now-anguished mental state.36 He loved the raw and unfinished country, the hard work, the cowboys, even the harsh climate. He met, worked with, and genuinely liked people he never would have encountered back east. He saw an America and Americans that expanded his view of his country—its youth, strength, promise, and future. It was in Dakota where, for the first time, he saw himself as a part of that promise and future. His time there changed him.

  But a bitter winter a couple of years into the venture killed his cattle and brought the ranch to ruin. Roosevelt told Arthur Parker, editor of the Bad Lands Cowboy, that he was leaving Dakota to do public and political work back east. “Then you will become President of the United States,” Parker said. He would “remember distinctly that [Roosevelt] was not in the least surprised.”37

  Meanwhile, because of the crushing financial losses from his Dakota hiatus, he had to earn a living for his daughter and new wife, Edith. The family moved from New York City to Oyster Bay on Long Island and to the home he had built and named for his wife Alice, now renamed Sagamore Hill. As an undergraduate at Harvard, his interest in the navy had led him to write The Naval War of 1812, which became a book in 1882 and was very well received. He decided to become a writer of biography and historical narrative. This interlude in his life would pass, but he used it well to make himself a better writer and someone who, back in public life, could effectively use his pen to persuade men to his ideas.

  President Cleveland was defeated for reelection in 1888, and the Republican whom Roosevelt campaigned for, Benjamin Harrison, showed his appreciation by appointing Roosevelt to the Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt handled the job well—too well. He antagonized fellow Republicans thirsty for federal appointments from Postmaster General John Wanamaker, the administration's spoilsmeister, when he set out to tidy up Wanamaker's Post Office. In the end, Roosevelt learned that clean politics can be the best politics, and in 1892, when Harrison lost his own reelection race to the Democrat he had beaten four years earlier, Grover Cleveland kept Roosevelt in the job. By the spring of 1894, Roosevelt was ready for a change.

  The Republican reform mayor of New York, William L. Strong, thought the man who cleaned up the civil service could do the same for New York's streets. Literally. He offered to make Roosevelt the street-cleaning commissioner.38 For a man with his eyes on the White House, whether he admitted this to others or even himself, cleaning streets was not anything he wanted for his résumé. But there were four seats yet unfilled on the city's police commission, and by April 1895, one was Roosevelt's. The Roosevelt family, now with four more children, headed back to New York.

  AS POLICE COMMISSIONER, ROOSEVELT perfected the art of favorable public relations. He learned how remarkably easy it was for him. Later, when he was president, still a young man, physically vigorous, and with an attractive family of young children, it would be a snap. It was all in how you cultivated and handled the press. It helped if you liked the reporters and they liked you.

  Jacob Riis, a reporter for the New York Sun, was one of Theodore Roosevelt's firmest admirers. In 1890, he had written a book about the ghettoes of poverty in New York. Riis's reporting often took him into the city's Lower East Side, where immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were crammed as they began their transformation into Americans. Through his dealings with crooks (both criminals and police), Riis developed a cynicism but retained an immigrant's faith of what America could be. With scorching prose and electrifying photos he taught himself to take, he depicted the slums and indicted America for tolerating such a thing. His book was titled How the Other Half Lives, and it is in print to this day. One evening, not long after its publication, Riis came back to his desk at the Sun and found a gentleman's calling card. On it was written, “I have read your book and have come to help.” The signature beneath was Theodore Roosevelt's. A friendship was sealed.

  Roosevelt took to patrolling the city's streets late at night—he called them midnight rambles—to catch the police loafing. Riis often went with him and nudged him to detour into slum apartments to see how the other half lived. He would take what he saw to the White House, and it prompted many of his Progressive Era programs. “For two years we were brothers on Mulberry Street,” Riis wrote in 1904, when Roosevelt was running for the White House, in a book called Theodore Roosevelt: The Citizen.39 Readers were told Roosevelt was always cordial, gracious, gentle, and approachable. The book showcased Roosevelt's leadership. Riis's laudatory biography was Roosevelt's public relations at its best. No president before Roosevelt did it so well.

  IN 1896 ROOSEVELT DECIDED to seek an appointment from President-elect William McKinley. After the Civil Service Commission, Roosevelt knew important jobs in Washington depended on the kindness of others, and he would need help from those who had McKinley's ear, such as Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy Storer of Cincinnati. Mr. Storer was a lawyer and would be appointed to a succession of ambassadorial posts in Europe by President McKinley and to his last one in Vienna by President Roosevelt. Mrs. Maria Storer was the better politician in the family. It was she who never forgot—an
d never forgot to remind McKinley of—a Storer gift of $10,000 when he was on the ropes. When her nephew Nicholas Longworth, also from Cincinnati, became a member of Congress and later Speaker of the House of Representatives and married Alice Roosevelt in a White House wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Storer became distantly related to Theodore Roosevelt. A decade later this didn't keep President Roosevelt from firing Mr. Storer from his post in Vienna.

  Roosevelt had invited the Storers to Sagamore Hill for the weekend during the summer, while the McKinley-Bryan campaign still was raging. He was a charming, witty, and thoroughly entertaining host. Taking Mrs. Storer on a rowboat ride, he told her as he pulled on the oars that he would like to be assistant secretary of the navy. He was working hard for McKinley's election and thought he might be entitled to consideration. Would she help him? She would.

  Another boost was from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Roosevelt's closest friend. Early in December, Lodge met with Major McKinley (his Civil War army rank, still appropriate because he was not yet sworn into office) and urged him to appoint Roosevelt. McKinley knew of Roosevelt's tendency to act on his own and not as part of a team. Lodge assured him Roosevelt would do as told. Roosevelt thanked Lodge and added, “Of course I have no preconceived policy of any kind.” But Roosevelt's unpleasant tendency to do what he wanted no matter what others thought came up again just three days later. Lodge spoke with Senator Thomas Platt of New York, whose role as the Republican boss in the Empire State was more important to him than his seat in the Senate, and who was worried that as assistant secretary of the navy Roosevelt might make war on him—or as he put it, on the “organization,” by finagling with the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Roosevelt told Lodge he would not do anything deliberately to interfere with Platt. Lodge next lobbied Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, a former governor of Lodge's home state of Massachusetts. Again he faced the problem of Roosevelt's use of any position to promote his own agenda. Lodge calmed Long down.