Young TR grew up in a divided household during the Civil War. His mother's family, the Bullochs, came from Georgia and owned slaves. They quietly supported the Confederacy. TR's father was a New York abolitionist. This paradoxical situation may have led TR to an ambivalent attitude towards African-Americans as a politician. Although he believed that blacks were entitled to constitutional rights, politics compromised that belief.
Booker T. Washington
In 1895, African-American educator Booker T. Washington announced a potential compromise- African-Americans would abandon their demands for immediate political equality in exchange for white support for black education and economic advancement. Southern white leaders, as well as national, lauded Washington as the model and sensible African-American. As did President Roosevelt, who in 1901 invited Washington to dinner at the White House.
By taking advantage of Washington's popularity, Republican TR hoped to eventually loosen the grip the Democratic Party had on the South. However, the dinner invitation backfired. A black man freely socializing with whites in the White House unleashed a storm in the South. TR was surprised by the reaction and he attempted to play down the invitation as just a simple gesture of hospitality or it was just lunch, not dinner.
Lynching and Brownsville
That white hot southern anger flared again over TR's published anti-lynching letter to Indiana Governor Winfield Durbin in 1903. Concerned about the rise of black lynchings, TR wrote that "Even where the real criminal is reached, the wrong done by the mob to the community itself is well-nigh as great. Especially is this true where the lynching is accompanied with torture," and that "Mob violence is simply one form of anarchy."
The anger continued with TR's appointment of African-Americans to federal positions in the South. Although the vast majority of the appointments were white, the few blacks that TR appointed, with the consultation of Booker Washington, caused "a literally frantic denunciation of me..." He also admitted that he had "completely lost control of the republican machine" in the South because of his actions.
But the South praised TR in 1906 when he dishonorably discharged three companies of black soldiers after they fought whites in Brownsville, TX, resulting in one white death. Now northerners were angry- believing that some of the soldiers were only guilty by association when they refused to testify against their fellow soldiers. Although TR claimed there was no political influence in his decision, one wonders if he was trying to placate the South.
The Progressive Party
Three years after handing the Presidency to William Howard Taft in 1909, Roosevelt itched for the Oval Office again in 1912. After being blocked from the Republican nomination by the conservative wing of the party, Roosevelt and the progressive wing stormed out of the convention to form the Progressive or Bull Moose Party. TR was nominated on a platform of social justice- supporting labor, women's suffrage, and conservation. There was no mention of African-American rights.
It was a party of "lily-white" progressivism, according to Professor James Chace. Just like the Republican Roosevelt, the Progressive Roosevelt saw the need to attract white southern support for national success, viewing it as "unfinished business" from his presidency. To do this, racial issues had to be avoided. Even staunch progressive Jane Addams, a leader of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), swallowed her reservations about TR and seconded his nomination.
But TR was in a political conundrum and could not avoid race. He saw the need to court northern blacks as well as southern whites. After the Progressive convention, Roosevelt dined with two African-American Progressives in Rhode Island. This only reminded white southerners of TR's dinner with Booker T. Washington eleven years ago and it rekindled their anger. Ultimately, TR's southern strategy failed. Democrat Woodrow Wilson trounced TR and Taft in every southern state.
Ironically, six years later, TR's last public appearance (November 2 1918) was at Carnegie Hall in an address to the Circle for Negro War Relief, at the invitation of black leader W.E.B. DuBois, an opponent of Washington's compromise. With an eye on the 1920 Republican presidential nomination, Roosevelt promised to do "everything I can to aid, and bring about, to bring nearer, the day when justice, the square-deal, will be given as between black man and white." It was too little too late. TR died two months later.
With Booker T. Washington's compromise, an anti-lynching letter, the Brownsville decision, and his Progressive Party stance, TR had a mixed record when it came to African-American rights. Historian H.W. Brands stated it best when he wrote that Roosevelt really was torn on race. "No other issue found him resorting so often- and not just rhetorically- to the 'on the one hand...on the other' construction."
Sources
Brands, H.W., TR: The Last Romantic, New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Chace, James, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs- The Election That Changed the Country, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
McCullough, David, Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, A Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
William L. Wunder - BA in History, University of Iowa, 1994, with Dean's List honors. History Buff- constant reader of books in American ...
