Last week marked the 107th anniversary of a symbolically important event in the history of race relations in this country. On October 16, 1901, Booker T. Washington went to the White House to have dinner with Theodore Roosevelt. It now seems like a minor footnote, a black man breaking bread with the president of the United States, but at the time the unprecedented invitation sent shock waves throughout the south. Roosevelt was not a forerunner of the civil rights movement; Georgian on his mother's side, he regarded blacks as inferior and their enfranchisement a constitutional blunder. But this asthmatic child turned muscular dynamo admired individuals who had transcended the handicaps of upbringing. Hence Washington, the self-educated former slave who founded the Tuskegee Institute, won favor in the president's social Darwinist eyes.
Politics was also at play here. According to Theodore Rex, the second volume of Edmund Morris' magisterial biography of Roosevelt, a large number of black delegates attended Republican national conventions in those days. (What a difference from the GOP in the post-Goldwater era!) Roosevelt's dominance of the party was far from secure. He had assumed office a month earlier, after the assassination of William McKinley. Sen. Mark Hanna, McKinley's right-hand man, loomed as his rival for the nomination in 1904. Washington could help Roosevelt undercut him. Amply rewarded for counseling against militancy and activism, he was the white establishment's favorite Negro. Later, in The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois would offer a pivotal critique of his accommodationist philosophy. But in 1901, no one was revered more by his own people.
Public reaction to the dinner was swift and ugly. While northern newspapers were fairly approving, those in the erstwhile Confederacy became unhinged. The n-word, Morris informs us, reappeared in editorial pages after years of disuse. Letters poured into the White House, full of bile and menace. A U.S. senator from South Carolina, fearful that blacks would now hold their heads higher, proposed a retaliatory measure: "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that n****r will necessitate our killing a thousand n****rs in the South before they will learn their place again." Roosevelt got the message. A week later, at a celebration of Yale University's bicentennial attended by both men, he kept his distance from Washington. He received an honorary degree along with Mark Twain, whose opinion he solicited on the matter. The reply was disappointingly decorous. "The novelist," Morris writes, "speaking carefully, said that a President was perhaps not as free as an ordinary citizen to entertain whomever he liked."
At the Al Smith Dinner on Oct. 16, John McCain alluded to the racial dust-up. While praising Barack Obama at the end of a funny and gracious speech, he said, "There was a time when the mere invitation of an African American citizen to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage and an insult in many quarters. Today, it's a world away from the crude and prideful bigotry of that time. And good riddance." For a moment that night, we had a glimpse of the old McCain, the one with his dignity and self-respect still intact. He likes to call himself a "Teddy Roosevelt Republican." His tragedy is that he allowed his ambition to turn him into a Karl Rove Republican. Because of his fall from grace, however, a black man will go from being a guest at White House dinners to the host.