[In October 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.]
Roosevelt knew the notices were rough. “As things turned out I'm very glad that I asked him,” he wrote a correspondent after the Washington dinner, “for the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary.” TR’s reflections on the invitation tell us much about the era. Though asking Washington to dine was a pioneering act, the president was not a civil rights pioneer in the ways we, from a different century and a different context, might hope to find. For his time, however, Roosevelt was closer to the side of the angels than many other Americans were. “I have not been able to think about any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent,” he wrote but one thing I am sure, and that is that inasmuch as he is here and can neither be killed or driven away, the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have,” continuing:
I say that I am “sure” this is the right solution. Of course I know that we see through a glass dimly, and, after all, it may be that I am wrong; but if I am, then all my thoughts and beliefs are wrong, and my whole way of looking at life is wrong. At any rate, while I am in public life, however short a time that may be, I am in honor bound to act up to my beliefs and convictions.
(Source: The Soul of America - The Battle For Our Better Angels - by Jon Meacham, Page 87 and 88)
Dick Henthorn
12 Feb 2019
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