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Brewer's statement the theatre resounded with applause and Booker Washington got up and bowed. This of course was a jarring incident amid the best of behavior, but he may have been urged to this recognition by someone at his side.

The mischief of Roosevelt's action lay first, in his being looked upon by the negroes as a saviour. President Lincoln had given them political freedom and now President Roosevelt was to raise them to social equality. And second, in its effect on the white people at the South. Their attitude is well expressed by the words of a Southerner living in Tuskegee who was full of praise for Washington's work, "Now when I meet the man who has done all this I can't call him Booker like I would an ordinary nigger, but thunder! I can't call a nigger Mister, so I just say, Professor." A young Southerner said to Leupp: "I love that man [Theodore Roosevelt]; I would do anything in the world for him, follow him anywhere. But the one thing in his career which I shall never get over is the Booker Washington incident. Understand me: I do not disparage Washington's work - I appreciate it as much as you do. I admit all that you say of his personal worth. He has been in my mother's parlor and invited to sit down there. I don't know that I should have had any feeling about the President asking him to lunch or dinner by themselves. But to invite him to the table with ladies - that is what no Southerner can brook!" 1

At the end of the letter already cited, Roosevelt on November 8, wrote, "As things have turned out I am very

1 The Man Roosevelt, 230. This book has been of much use to me in writing of the Booker Washington incident.

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glad that I asked him [Booker Washington], for the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary." This was a note of defiance but his mature opinion afterwards was different. He said to me that he had made a mistake in asking Booker Washington to dinner; that among the Southerners there was prejudice against such action and, while he could not comprehend their feeling, it was there and had to be reckoned with. He began his administration with great consideration for the South in the matter of Federal appointments and while, after the Booker Washington incident there was criticism in regard to some of them, on the whole he stood pretty well at the South. "Half my blood is Southern," he wrote.2 It was understood that he did not approve of the policy of forcing negro suffrage upon the Southern States involved in the Reconstruction Acts of Congress and the XV Amendment and he never repeated the Booker Washington incident. In his Autobiography written in 1913 he made no mention of it. But his action did not injure him permanently in the South. When he came before the people for election in 1904 he carried Missouri by a handsome majority, the first time in her history since 1868 when she had voted for the Republican candidates. The result in Maryland was so close that he was adjudged one electoral vote.1

"The year 1902," wrote Bishop, "was one of incessant activity for Roosevelt." 5 How could it be otherwise with a man of his capacious brain, equal in action and study to that of three men! Henry Adams, who was on

1 Bishop, i. 166.

3 William R. Thayer's Roosevelt, 284.

2

Bishop, i. 154.

A History of the Presidency (1916), Stanwood, ii. 137.

P. 188.

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terms of social intimacy, wrote: "Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt.. was pure act." He might wield "unmeasured power with immeasurable energy in the White House." When he opened the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition in December, 1901, at Charleston it was an expansionist President who hoped "that it may prove of great and lasting benefit to our industries and to our commerce with the West Indies." 2

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"Of the making of expositions there is seemingly no end," wrote James B. Townsend. "The Pan-American at Buffalo had hardly closed its gates in November [1901] when the ... Charleston Exposition threw open its doors. It is a far cry from Buffalo to Charlestonover a thousand prosaic miles in actual figures but in midwinter seemingly half the globe in climate and surroundings. The traveler who turned his back upon the deserted halls of the Pan-American, swept by the wintry blasts from the North and found himself thirty-six hours later in Charleston, her feet bathed in the almost tideless summer seas, her quaint old buildings recalling the far past, a warm sun making the city beautiful, and the Cherokee roses blooming in its old gardens, felt himself indeed the pleased victim of a transformation carried by magic 'from lands of snow to lands of sun.' ” 3 The Exposition opened on December 1, 1901, and continued until June 1, 1902, and on April 9, President Roosevelt

1 Bishop, 152; Education, 417.

Appleton's Annual Cyclopaedia, 1902, 644.
Cosmopolitan Magazine, March, 1902, 523.

was in Charleston and addressed the "Men and women of the South, my fellow-citizens of the Union." "Charleston," he said, "is a typical Southern city. . . All of us, North and South, can glory alike in the valor of the men who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray. Those were iron times and only iron men could fight to its terrible finish the great struggle between the hosts of Grant and Lee." I nominated as Vice-Governor of the Philippines, he said, an "ex-Confederate, General Luke Wright of Tennessee, who in the Civil War fought with distinction in a uniform of Confederate gray. . . . Of course," he declared in conclusion, "we are proud of the South. . . . I am proud of your great deeds, for you are my people." 1

June, 1902, found the President attending the Commencement Exercises of Harvard University when his Alma Mater conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws. President Eliot, in one of his famous characterizations, spoke of him as "a true type of the sturdy gentleman and the high-minded public servant of a democracy." 2 After Roosevelt's speech at the Alumni dinner, Eliot said of him, in the hearing of John Hay, who was the recipient of the same honor, "What a man! Genius, force and courage and such evident honesty." In this speech Roosevelt complimented John D. Long and Senator Hoar, and referred to Henry Cabot Lodge as his "closest, stanchest and most loyal personal friend." He spoke highly of Hay, Root, Taft and Leonard Wood,

1 Roosevelt's Presidential Addresses, etc. The Review of Reviews Co. (1910), i. 18 et seq.

* Washburn, 65.

'Life of Hay, Thayer, ii. 348; Washburn, 65.

and the talk merited the words which Hay, with becoming modesty, wrote, "It was the speech of a great ruler and a great gentleman." 1 It is an admirable trait in Roosevelt's character that, having accepted his assistants from his predecessor, he stood by them and gave them due credit. He never had any envy of his helpers from which some great men are not free.

"I could do more to do Antonius good,
But 'twould offend him," "

declared one of Mark Antony's officers.

During the last of August and early in September Roosevelt made a number of speeches in the New England cities, the burden of which was that the general government must be given the power to regulate "great corporations which we rather loosely designate as trusts.” 3 It must be remembered that we are now, in the year 1902, before the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Northern Securities case which was not rendered until March, 1904, and that neither Roosevelt nor the crowds that flocked to hear him were aware what the decision would be, but he was insistent that the general government should be given this power through legislation by Congress. "At present," he declared in Boston, "we have really no efficient control over a big corporation which does business in more than one State." 4 "We must get power first, then use that power fearlessly but with moderation, with sanity, with self-restraint." 5 "So far from being against property," he said during his

1 Life of Hay, Thayer, ii. 349. The speech is printed in the Review of Reviews, Pub. 78.

'Antony and Cleopatra, iii. 1.

'Current Lit. Pub., i. 40. 4 Current Lit. Pub., i. 45.

Б Fitchburg, ibid., 55.

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