Was the Rough Rider President Theodore Roosevelt a Proponent of Civil Rights?

Today we will learn and reflect on this question:
Was the Rough Rider President Theodore Roosevelt a proponent
of civil rights? This question does not have a simple answer.
This question is somewhat personal for me, he was my favorite
president, in my youth I read his standard biographies and
autobiography, and most of the books that he himself wrote, and
named my son Theodore. So, I really want to answer YES to this
question, but unfortunately, in politics, as in relationships, often
the answer is complicated.

Theodore Roosevelt was a reforming
President, his accomplishments included:
• Fighting monopolies by trust busting,
• Regulating the food and drugs sold to
consumers,
• Conservation efforts including
establishing national parks,
• Fighting corruption, and
• Promoting merit-based civil service.

Soon after becoming President, he invited the black educator Booker T
Washington to dinner in the White House to explore what progress could
be made on civil rights. Roosevelt was stunned by the immediate vitriolic
blowback from the Southern Press and politicians. He realized that if he
attempted civil rights reforms that his entire reform package would be
blocked, and he would accomplish nothing. But his Justice Department
did attempt to litigate against the Deep South peonage, or convict labor
abuses.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this video. Feel
free to follow along in the PowerPoint script we uploaded to SlideShare.
Please, we welcome interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn
and reflect together!

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Theodore Roosevelt was not a man bound by class, which can be seen in the
composition of the Rough Rider volunteer regiment unit he organized to fight in the
Spanish American War. The newspaper publicity hyping his heroic charge leading his
Rough Rider regiment up San Juan Hill made him a household name, eventually
propelling him to the Presidency.
Roosevelt, like his distant cousin Franklin, was a member of the patrician class,
which meant that, of course, he attended Harvard University. After serving in the
New York State Legislature, Roosevelt was devastated when both his beautiful
young wife Alice and his mother passed away on the same day, just two days after
the birth of his daughter, also named Alice. For solace, he purchased a cattle ranch
in North Dakota, developing many friendships among the rough riding cowboys in
this western state. His rough rider recruits were an unlikely mix of wealthy blue-
blooded aristocrats and rough and ready cowboys from the Badlands.

Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill, by Frederic Remington, before 1909.
Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider

Colonel Roosevelt
and his Rough Riders
at the top of the hill
which they captured,
Battle of San Juan, by
Photographer William
Dinwiddie, July 1898

The Rough Riders
by Mort Kunstler,
1898. Ordered to
seize Kettle Hill in
support of the main
attack, the Rough
Riders fought their
way to the top
despite heavy
enemy fire. The
American victory
led to the Spanish
surrender two
weeks later.

Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were not the only regiment
charging up San Juan Hill, history books often do not
mention the role of the colored regiment Buffalo
soldiers in the Spanish-American War. During the war
Roosevelt was chided for fraternizing with the
enlisted men, this criticism makes more sense if he
fraternized with both his Rough Riders and the
Buffalo soldiers, which have an interesting history of
their own.

https://www.nps.gov/prsf/learn/historyculture/buffalo-soldiers-and-the-spanish-american-war.htm
Buffalo Soldier
regiments
charge up San
Juan Hill, Cuba
on July 1, 1898
Robert Bowen
Collection.

Charge of the Buffalo
soldiers, the 24th and 25th
Colored Infantry, July 2nd
1898, depicting the Battle
of San Juan Hill. 1899
lithograph by Chicago
printers Kurz and Allison.

William McKinley is elected President

Before he ascended to the Presidency, Theodore Roosevelt was
Vice President under the Republican William McKinley in his
second term. McKinley had first been elected President in 1896,
and during his first term, the economy was prosperous, and the
United States was victorious in the Spanish-American War, adding
the territories of Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United
States. Although he had condemned lynching and approved the
recruiting of black officers in the Spanish-American War, fewer
blacks were appointed to federal positions, and the federal
government was reluctant to oppose violent white supremacists,
even when they staged a coup and seized control of the local
government in the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898.

Louis
Dalrymple
cartoon
from Puck
magazine,
1896.
McKinley is
crowning
himself with
the
Republican
nomination.
The "priest"
in green is
Mark
Hanna.

For his reelection campaign of 1900, the popular
Rough Rider and vigorous campaigner Theodore
Roosevelt was tapped to be the Vice-Presidential
candidate, since Vice President Garret Hobart had
passed away. Six months into his second term,
William McKinley was assassinated by a disgruntled
anarchist, and Theodore Roosevelt was thrust into
the Presidency.

William
McKinley, with
Theodore
Roosevelt as his
Vice Presidential
candidate, ran on
his record of
prosperity and
victory in 1900,
winning easy re-
election over
William Jennings
Bryan.

Assassination of President William
McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at Pan-
American Exposition reception on
September 6, 1901, by T. Dart
Walker, circa 1905

The first reports after the assassination attempt were that the
President’s condition was improving, and he would likely recover.
On the morning of Friday, September 13th, 1901, a messenger
was sent to summon Theodore Roosevelt to return to
Washington, but after several hours they discovered he had gone
mountain climbing. Later that afternoon a guide informed him of
the news on his descent. When he boarded a special train at
dawn, he learned that President McKinley had succumbed to his
wounds and infection. One of his first actions as President was to
invite the black leader Booker T Washington to a White House
dinner.

Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt & the naturalists, 1914

https://youtu.be/yxDnJ6sBoJc
Republicans and Booker T Washington

Booker T Washington was the foremost black leader of his generation, he had risen
from being an illiterate plantation field slave freed by the Northern victory in the
Civil War to a leading educator and fund-raiser for Tuskegee Institute and other
black colleges. When his mentor, General Armstrong of the Hampton Institute, was
asked by a member of the Alabama Legislature if he could recommend a white
administrator to establish a new black trade school, he replied that he knew a very
talented young black educator that would be perfect for the job, his former student,
Booker T Washington.
Booker T Washington quickly discovered that the Alabama Legislature had only
appropriated funds for teacher salaries, he was on his own to find some ramshackle
classrooms. Tuskegee was a liberal college town, or liberal by Deep South standards,
and he was able to locally raise funds for his black college trade school, the
Tuskegee Institute, during the darkest times of the Jim Crow Redemptionist era
when lynchings of blacks were rampant.

Dining Room and Students Learning by Doing, Construction of Classrooms at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama

Tuskegee Institute not only trained black educators;
they were also taught useful trades, and they learned
these trades by helping to build the schools, and they
even learned how to fire the bricks to build the
school in a brick kiln they constructed!

Very few black students had any money for tuition, so soon the
financial needs of Tuskegee Institute outstripped the resources of
local benefactors, so again with the help of his mentor General
Armstrong, he started fundraising up North so Tuskegee Institute
could expand its programs, often spending six month of the year
speaking and fundraising among Northern businessmen and
tycoons. The sales cycle for this fundraising was so long that he
was forced to cater to the prejudices of his white benefactors,
and was not free to offer the free-wheeling criticisms and
protests of the more activist WEB Du Bois, who was a co-founder
of the activist NAACP organization.

William McKinley was friendly to Booker T Washington and had visited
Tuskegee Institute during his first term. Henry Pringle writes, “Politically,
the nomination depended largely on the control of the Southern
delegates, who were, in 1901, still in Hanna’s hands.” Mark Hanna was
Republican Senator and Chairman of the Republican National Committee
with ties to big business who was McKinley’s campaign manager.
“Roosevelt had arranged to visit Tuskegee Institute in the early fall and
Booker T Washington had agreed to build a new Republican organization
in the South, an organization based on character instead of patronage
and bribery.” “A trip to Tuskegee had been planned for November 1901,”
and he had been entertained either at Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay or
at the White House prior to the famous dinner.

Robert C Ogden, Senator
William Howard Taft,
Booker T Washington
and Andrew Carnegie,
standing on the steps of
a building, at the
Tuskegee Institute's 25th
anniversary, 1906

Theodore
Roosevelt
speaking at
National Negro
Business
League, with
Booker T
Washington,
1900

In the years after the Civil War, the Republican Party had
become more and more the party of Big Business, and less
and less the party of civil rights, whose concern for
defending due process and voting rights for black citizens
faded over time. A cartoon by Puck illustrates this vividly,
we have the lone black man Booker T Washington
leapfrogging in the bottom of the picture, but he was
outnumbered and overshadowed by several business
tycoons, including Andrew Carnegie, who was the
dominant philanthropist for Tuskegee Institute.`

Puck’s illustration of outing at Harmony Park, by JS Pughe, 1904

Booker Washington and Theodore Roosevelt at Tuskegee Institute, October 24, 1905
Booker T Washington Dines at White House

On the day Roosevelt took the oath of office on the
train at Buffalo, New York, he wrote to Booker T
Washington requesting that they meet to discuss
federal appointments for blacks. In late September
Booker T Washington was invited to dine at the
White House with the President and his family,
discussing plans for the Deep South.

Our biographer Pringle
states that Booker T
Washington “felt that
Roosevelt wanted to help
not only the Negro, but the
whole South.” But Roosevelt
was totally ignorant of how
Southerners would react,
“for the President of the
United States to entertain ‘a
nigger’ was unforgivable.
Having done so, Roosevelt
could no longer hope that
the South might be
reconciled to the GOP.”

Pringle samples some of the reactions by the Deep South
newspapers to Roosevelt’s White House dinner guest:
• “The New Orleans Time-Democrat demanded, ‘White
men of the South, how do you like it? When Mr
Roosevelt sits down to dinner with a Negro, he
declares that the Negro is the social equal of the
white man.’
• The Memphis Scimitar screamed that Roosevelt had
perpetrated ‘the most damnable outrage ever.’
• The editor of the Richmond Times portrayed the
President as believing that blacks and whites might
even intermarry.”
• The Democrat Senator Benjamin Tillman of South
Carolina said that “we shall have to kill a thousand
niggers to get them back in their places.”

Roosevelt was stunned by the violent reactions to a simple dinner
invitation; in the future, Booker T Washington would be received
only during business hours. The Southern Republicans would
never forgive Roosevelt for this unforgivable breach of racial
etiquette, as multiple footnotes in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
biography attest.
These attitudes did not disappear, during the Presidency of the
Republican Herbert Hoover a similar incident occurred when his
wife invited Jessie de Priest, wife of the newly elected black
Congressman from Chicago, to tea along with the other white
wives of congressmen. Again, vitriolic attacks from the Southern
press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_De_Priest_tea_at_the_White_House

Although Hoover did not have a stellar civil rights
record, as we recounted in our video on the history
of the NAACP and WEB Du Bois, the first lady held
her ground and refused to snub and shun Jessie de
Priest.

An issue usually excluded from the biographies of Theodore Roosevelt
was a long-running civil rights legal struggle begun under his
administration combatting the horrors of the peonage convict labor
system of the Deep South, which was actually a system of random slavery
which was often even more cruel than the plantation slavery before the
Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment has a loophole that permits the
involuntary servitude of convicted prisoners, so Southern sheriffs would
round up young black men on false vagrancy charges and sell their slave
gang labor to the highest bidder, or to their friends. You can in the
thumbnail that sometimes children were caught up in what were
concentration camps that sometimes rivaled the Nazi work camps in their
brutality and mortality rates. In some counties in Deep South Alabama,
there were thousands of convict laborers slaving on dozens of
plantations.

Orphaned and "Criminal" Children, Library of Congress, 1903

Even when cases were proven, Southern juries would not convict.
The sources mention Attorney General Knox, but these cases
must have had the enthusiastic approval of Roosevelt, though
due to the reaction to inviting a black man to dinner dissuaded
him from publicizing this struggle. The issue of peonage
simmered, sometimes generating harsh newspaper headlines
and state legislative investigating committee reports for several
decades, but the system of peonage was not abolished until the
New Deal administration of FDR, when embarrassing
comparisons could be made to the Nazi concentration work
camps.

Convicts leased to harvest timber in Florida, circa 1915 Convict laborers in Birmingham, 1907

Blackmon says this about convict labor, “The
quasi-slavery of the twentieth century was rooted
in the nascent industrial slavery that flourished in
the last years of the Civil War. The same men who
built railroads with thousands of slaves and
proselytized for the use of slaves in southern
factories and mines in the 1850’s were also the
first to employ forced African American labor in
the 1870’s.” Most southern states enacted
vagrancy laws by 1865 that were so vaguely
worded that any blacks could be arrested if they
were on the streets and not working, some states
enacted laws making it illegal for black workers to
change employers without permission. African American convicts working
with axes, Reed Camp, SC, 1934

WEB Du Bois and Theodore Roosevelt

We found no indication that WEB Du Bois ever met with Theodore Roosevelt during
his presidency or his campaigns, although he did introduce Roosevelt before one of
his last speeches in 1918. In his autobiography, WEB Du Bois does mention that
Roosevelt attempted to break up the business trust monopolies, though the
Supreme Court blocked his actions.
After the intense push back by Southern segregationists of his dinner with Booker T
Washington, it is credible that Theodore Roosevelt would back-pedal, appealing for
white racial purity in a Lincoln Day Address in 1905. During a swing through the
South later that year he “stressed his mother’s Southern birth, lectured Tuskegee
undergraduates about the dangers of falling into crime, and derided African
Americans as a ‘backward race.’” The Roosevelt administration chose not to get
involved in the white supremacist Atlanta Race Riots of 1906, although the
administration did approve a handful of black federal appointments.

Theodore
Roosevelt visits
Washington,
DC, 1914

When Roosevelt was later running to be reelected as President
under the Progressive Bull Moose Party in 1912, WEB Du Bois
suggested in the Crisis magazine that a civil rights plank be
included in the party platform, but Theodore Roosevelt did not
want to be involved with the “dangerous” WEB Du Bois, who was
both an activist and a contrarian. Although the Progressive Party
denied convention seats to African American delegates to
appease the lily-white Southerners, many blacks admired the
Progressive proposals of an eight-hour workday, six-day work
week, accident, old age and unemployment insurance, and
female suffrage.

Buffalo soldiers of the 25th Infantry, some wearing buffalo robes, Ft. Keogh, Montana, 1890
Black Buffalo Soldiers and Brownsville Affair

The minor civil rights gestures of the Roosevelt
Administration were overshadowed by the tragic
Brownsville Affair. The army foolishly transferred a
battalion of black Buffalo soldiers from Nebraska to
the Deep South segregationist town of Brownsville,
Texas.

In her biography of Theodore Roosevelt,
Doris Kearns Goodwin tells us about many
minor confrontations, “black soldiers were
forced off the sidewalk, hit with revolver
butts, and denied access to public bars.
Rumors of a black soldier assaulting a white
woman in her home circulated. Then, just
past midnight on August 14, a group of
soldiers had allegedly entered town and
fired into buildings, killing a saloonkeeper,
and so grievously injuring the chief of police
that his arm was later amputated.”
Sergeant John Harris, 10th United States Cavalry Regiment

Doris Kearns Goodwin
continues, “Eyewitnesses
produced contradictory
accounts: some claimed that
the townspeople had fired
first; other pointed to
‘colored soldiers in khaki and
blue shirts’ as the aggressors.
No one could identify any of
the individual soldiers, all of
whom had returned to their
barracks immediately after
the shootings.”

The more judicious Secretary of War and future President, Howard Taft,
was away from Washington on official business when this crisis blew up,
so it was handled by the impulsive President Theodore Roosevelt. These
were tough soldiers, including several Medal of Honor recipients, and
soldiers who served beside Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish
American War, and had battled the Sioux and Filipino guerillas. These
tough soldiers would not break rank to reveal who among their ranks
were guilty of these outrages.
So, President Roosevelt delivered on his threat to dishonorably discharge
the entire 167-man battalion, which prevented them from reenlisting and
from civil service positions. Taft eventually persuaded Roosevelt to soften
his position, he revoked the provision preventing the discharged soldiers
from civil jobs with the government and allowed individual soldiers who
could prove they were not involved to be reinstated.

Buffalo
Soldiers of
the U.S.
10th
Cavalry
Regiment
who were
taken
prisoner
during the
Battle of
Carrizal,
Chihuahua,
Mexico in
1916

Buffalo Soldier Monument, Ft Leavenworth, KS, and at El Paso, in Fort Bliss.

African Americans were universally appalled
at this harsh sentence. Even Booker T
Washington warned Taft that he had “never
in all my experience with the race
experienced a time when the entire people
have the feeling that they now have in regard
to the administration,” his associate said that
Roosevelt’s “name would be anathema with
Negroes from now on.” One black preacher
lamented, “Once enshrined in our love as our
Moses,” now Roosevelt “is now enshrouded
in our scorn as our Judas.”
White House Portrait of Theodore
Roosevelt, by John Singer Sargent, 1903

The Brownsville Affair embittered WEB
Du Bois, he declared in an article in the
Horizon that “Theodore Roosevelt does
not like black folk. He has no faith in
them.” Stoking the coals, he asked,
“What have we to thank Roosevelt for?”
“For asking a black man to dine with
him?” For appointing a few black men to
federal positions? “For saying publicly
that the door of opportunity ought to be
held open for colored men?” But, “Mr
Roosevelt by his word and deed since
has slammed” this door “most
emphatically in the black man’s face.”

What does Theodore Roosevelt say about this affair?
He omits painful memories from his autobiography:
he does not mention the death of his first wife,
neither does he mention the White House dinner
with Booker T Washington, and he also does not
mention the Brownsville Affair in his autobiography.
SHOULD THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S STATUE HAVE
BEEN REMOVED?

Removal of Theodore Roosevelt’s Statue

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/arts/design/roosevelt-statue-to-be-removed-from-museum-of-natural-history.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestrian_Statue_of_Theodore_Roosevelt_(New_York_City)
The New York Times
reported in June 2020
that “the bronze statue
of Theodore Roosevelt,
on horseback and
flanked by a Native
American man and an
African man, which has
presided over the
entrance to the
American Museum of
Natural History in New
York since 1940, is
coming down.”

The New York Times
article continues, “For
many, the equestrian
statue at the museum’s
Central Park West
entrance has come to
symbolize a painful
legacy of colonial
expansion and racial
discrimination.”

In the near future, it will be moved to and displayed on the
grounds of the Theodore Roosevelt Library in Medora, North
Dakota.
Local citizens certainly have the right to decide which statues will
be displayed in their city, and you can argue either that the
figures of the Indian and the black man represent racial equality
or subservience. IMHO, statutes that were not symbolic of Jim
Crow oppression should be left standing, we should be reluctant
to condemn too harshly historic figures who held opinions
considered objectionable by today’s standards. After all, neither
Plato or Aristotle condemned slavery.

Theodore Roosevelt was not immune to the prejudices of his age;
he admired the notion of Rudyard Kipling of the White Man’s
burden in spreading colonialism to the ignorant masses. As
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he had authorized the seizing of
the Philippine Islands at the beginning of the Spanish American
War, and as we noted, the Black Buffalo soldiers were among the
forces fighting Filipino forces seeking independence. Lewis’
footnote is not clear about the source, but perhaps Theodore
Roosevelt did say, “A perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very
high plane; the negro, for instance, has been kept down as much
by lack of intellectual development as by anything else.”

Roosevelt wrote an article on “Brazil and the Negro”
after his trip there in 1914. Although he commended
the lack of a color bar in Brazilian society, he did
“claim that Brazilians regarded the ‘Negro element’
in their blood as a slight weakening.” Colonialism was
finally doomed when World War II proved how little
security Great Britain could provide when the
Japanese forces attacked her Asian colonies and
threatened Australia and India.

Henry Pringle wrote the definitive biography of Theodore Roosevelt, but
Doris Kearns Goodwin always finds a unique perspective that reveals
interesting details not found in other biographies. In The Bully Pulpit, she
tells the biographies of both Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard
Taft, who were friends and close associates during his Presidency, when
Taft was Secretary of War, but became bitter rivals when Theodore
Roosevelt ran against him in 1912 as a third-party candidate for the
Progressive Bull Moose Party, throwing the election to Woodrow Wilson
and the Democrats. Her biography also focuses on Roosevelt’s alliance
with the muckraking journalists that helped sell his many reforms.

Puck
Magazine,
Sword of
Theodore

The autobiographies of Booker T Washington, WEB Du Bois, and
Theodore Roosevelt are captivating, but they have scant mention
of Theodore Roosevelt. In our series of videos on WEB Du Bois,
we used his autobiography as the primary source for his youth
and college days but used David Levering Lewis’ biography as a
primary source for his activist career, since it includes a coherent
history of the NAACP which WEB Du Bois co-founded, and for
many of the quotes in this video on Theodore Roosevelt.
This video is part of our series of videos reviewing the biography
and autobiography of WEB Du Bois.

https://youtu.be/N2ZqixUxPmo https://youtu.be/Ntjl4xqQSfw
https://youtu.be/MNhkq69CIfo https://youtu.be/YwgrKvIjoc0

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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Was the Rough Rider President Theodore Roosevelt a Proponent of Civil Rights?

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Was the Rough Rider President Theodore Roosevelt a Proponent of Civil Rights?