Theodore Rex (48 page)

JUSSERAND AND VON STERNBURG
, both still in Europe, were unable to attend the President’s annual Diplomatic Reception on 8 January. But the rest of their Washington colleagues were there, beribboned and bemedaled, clutching swords, checking the precedence list posted outside the Blue Room. (“Germany” was slashed off the top in pencil: so much for the former doyency of Theodor von Holleben.) Secretary Hay, a diminutive, elegant figure
in black, stood behind the President as he shook hands. His snowy beard screened all expression. Only the slanting, hemiopic eyes flashed occasionally with what Henry Adams called his “
cosmic cynicism.”

One by one the diplomats filed by, bowing at an international variety of angles. Two of the most junior loomed disproportionately large in Roosevelt’s spectacles: Don Gonzalo de Quesada, Minister of Cuba, and Dr. Tomás Herrán, the Colombian
chargé d’affaires
. They served as walking reminders that the two treaties he wanted most—respectively granting Cuban trade reciprocity and canal rights in Panama—were still nothing but draft protocols.

Roosevelt’s strategy regarding the first measure was simple. Hay assured Quesada that if Congress had not helped his struggling republic by 4 March, the President would call a special session and compel it to sit until “justice was done.”
The canal treaty presented a more vexing problem, in that Herrán kept getting conflicting instructions from Bogotá. Depending on the vagaries of sea mail and Colombia’s chronically faulty telegraph system, he was at times ordered not to sign Hay’s protocol, and at others, apparently, authorized to haggle over its monetary terms as if he were negotiating a contract for the sale of coffee.

Downstairs, 1,800 nondiplomatic guests were discovering that the White House’s new spaciousness had been bought at the expense of old coziness. The night was blustery, and as group after group crowded through the swing doors into the East Wing lobby, frigid gusts blew through the basement. Footmen confiscated coats and wraps, in exchange for cold metal tabs that some women stored wincingly
en décolletage
. Until all the ambassadors and ministers were received above, there could be no movement of the thinly clad throng. Mothers and daughters huddled together for warmth while the gusts rearranged their coiffures and rattled the portraits of the First Ladies.

Upstairs, in contrast, the modernized heating system worked so well that several embassy ladies grew flushed and faint. Etiquette did not permit them to sit while Mrs. Roosevelt remained standing. Tempers rose along with the temperature, until ushers cracked a few windows in the East Room. The resultant convection only increased the flow of fresh air beneath.

Roosevelt (attended, for the first time in White House history, by military aides) felt a corresponding chill in some of the later hands he shook. His last guests, drawn past him with a brisk “Dee-lighted,” proceeded as if catapulted toward the State Dining Room, only to encounter another line for hot punch. At 10:30, a young aide in a cutaway coat shouted that the reception was over, and a band of forty pieces swung into “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” Yet another line jammed the basement as metal tags were redeemed, and the swing doors gave proof that the night was colder than ever. Outside on East Executive Avenue, hundreds of carriages jostled for precedence while porters bawled out names through megaphones.

The President, oblivious, cheerfully entertained a few close friends to a supper of bouillon, champagne, and ice cream.

AT BREAKFAST THE
next morning, one of his houseguests, Owen Wister, said, “I don’t believe you should have appointed Dr. Crum.”

Roosevelt looked incredulous. “You don’t?”

William D. Crum was the black Republican he had named as Collector of Charleston nine weeks before. Although thirteen other Negroes had already won Roosevelt’s federal favor, Dr. Crum was the first he had chosen to replace a white incumbent. This alone guaranteed that there would be lively debate in the Senate when the appointment came up for confirmation. Several other factors suggested that the President (for all his air of innocence) was seeking a showdown with Senator Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina, the chief articulator of race hatred on Capitol Hill. “Pitchfork Ben” was not likely to vote in favor of a high Negro official in the cradle of the Confederacy—particularly one who had once had the temerity to campaign against him.

Roosevelt turned to Mary Wister, who was known for her good works and enlightened interest in Negro education. But she echoed her husband’s criticism.

“Why, Mrs. Wister! Mrs. Wister!” His head swiveled back and forth. “Why don’t you see—why you
must
see that I can’t close the door of hope upon a whole race!”

The Wisters said that he had, in fact, pushed it farther shut.
Thirteen Negro appointments in sixteen months (compared to three thousand white) amounted to something less than a hill of beans.
Moreover, most had been to minor posts or “consultancies”—such as the one exploring the idea of wholesale transportation of blacks to the Philippines. President McKinley had been more generous.

Roosevelt’s argument was that the quality of his Southern appointments mattered more than their quantity. Blacks were better served in the long run by an enlightened coalition of Gold Democrats and Union League Republicans than by the Hanna-McKinley alliance of “Lily White” bosses and purchasable Negro delegates. Before appointing Dr. Crum, he had awarded four of the most important posts in South Carolina to decent white men, three of them Democrats and two the sons of Confederate soldiers. His fifth nominee represented this same philosophy of merit. Objection to Dr. Crum could be based only on race, and “such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.”

Wister, who had lived in Charleston, tried to explain that white Southerners could not be appealed to on the grounds of logic. “It’s a condition you have to reckon with, not a theory.” The Reconstruction nightmare of a rapacious
black majority raised up by Yankee patr
onage was still vivid enough to make men like Tillman scream. “Your act theoretically ought to do good to the colored race, but actually does them harm by rousing new animosity.”

The argument lasted through two more breakfasts. “Here the Negroes are,” Roosevelt said despairingly, as the Wisters drank his coffee. “Not by their wish but our compulsion; and I cannot shirk the duty.…”

Not until 11 January, when he bade them good-bye, did he admit with outstretched arms, “Well, if I had it to do over again, I—don’t—
think
—I’d—do it.”

WISTER FLATTERED HIMSELF
afterward that the President had surrendered, “in his completest school-boy manner,” to adult reasoning. If so, naïveté soon yielded to impulsiveness again. Roosevelt came to the defense of a beleaguered black postmaster in Indianola, Mississippi, who also happened to be female.

He knew her territory: Indianola stood not far from where he had hunted bear last fall. Appointed by President Harrison and reappointed by McKinley,
Mrs. Minnie Cox was by all accounts a worthy citizen. She administered her office efficiently and even charitably, paying overdue box fees herself rather than embarrass white customers short of funds. But she had also invested her federal salary in local businesses, and become prosperous over the years. By local definition, she had therefore become uppity. At a mass meeting, white Indianolans chose to “persuade” her to resign.

Since Mrs. Cox was, as Mississippi’s Senator Anselm J. McLaurin allowed, “an intelligent Negro,” she had needed little persuasion. After hurriedly resigning, she had left town on vacation—the mayor of Indianola allowing that if she came back too soon “
she would get her neck broken inside of two hours.”

Roosevelt’s reaction was prompt and precisely articulated. Mrs. Cox was being coerced “by a brutal and lawless element purely upon the ground of color.” He declined to “tolerate wrong and outrage of such flagrant character.” Neither would he stop paying Mrs. Cox her full federal salary. “The postmaster’s resignation has been received, but not accepted.”

In deference to the feelings of white Indianolans, however, he would not reopen her post office. In future, they could pick up their mail at Greenville, thirty miles away by country road.

ON 12 JANUARY
, news leaked that the President had decided to give Boston a black Assistant District Attorney. In living memory, no Negro had ever received a Northern federal appointment. The report, coinciding with Roosevelt’s defense of Mrs. Cox and his refusal to back down on Dr. Crum,
touched off an explosion of editorial criticism similar to that following his dinner with Booker T. Washington. Only now the complaints were heard from as close to home as his own native city.
The New York Times
accused him of using political operatives to corral black delegates—“not a nice game”—and the New York
Herald
saw danger of “setting the country back a generation in color prejudice and sectional strife.” Students at Columbia University debated a resolution “that President Roosevelt’s policy of appointing Negroes to offices in states where sentiment is opposed to it, is unwise.” Redneck reactionaries again excoriated the “nigger-loving” President, and the sheriff of Sunflower County, Mississippi, called him “
a 14-karat jackass.”

By now, Roosevelt was used to this kind of invective. More worrying was the prospect of fair-minded Southerners regarding him as socially irresponsible.
He pointed out in a letter to the editor of
The Atlanta Constitution
that merit, not color, was his prime patronage concern. On at least three recent occasions in Georgia, he had chosen to replace black men with white. Conversely, the white citizens of Savannah had not protested when he had retained a Negro as their Collector of Customs—the identical position that Dr. Crum was to hold in Charleston.

Black leaders tried not to make things worse for him by openly saluting his policies. But William M. McGill, a Tennessee preacher and publisher who knew Mrs. Cox, could not resist issuing a brief statement in her behalf: “The Administration of President Roosevelt is to the Negro what the heart is to the body. It has pumped life blood into every artery of the Negro in this country.”