Free Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss

progressive principles, his “Square Deal,” as it came to be known. In his annual message to Congress in 1905 he called for a pure food and drug law, supervision of insurance companies, investigation of child labor, an employers’ liability law for the District of Columbia, and suits against railroad rebates.
    He also made a public pronouncement that he was later bitterly to regret: “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”
    Race relations occupy so much of our news today that it is natural to inquire what TR did about them. There is no question that he found any sort of racial or religious discrimination odious, but there was far less that a president could do about them in his day than in ours. Indeed, there was very little he could do. The South was solid in its determination to maintain segregation; states’ rights were deemed sacred, and the North was indifferent. TR could only express his helpless indignation at the counting of Negroes as part of the voting population without allowing them to vote: “It is an outrage that this one man [Congressman John S. Williams of Mississippi] should first be allowed to suppress the votes of three black men, and then to cast them himself in order to make his own vote the equal of that of four men.” And he could only add, “To acquiesce in this state of things because it is not possible at the time to attempt to change it without doing damage is one thing. It is quite another to seem formally to approve it.”
    Early in his first term TR had invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, which had aroused a howl of protest in newspapers throughout the South. Roosevelt’s response was: “As things have turned out I am very glad that I asked him, for the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary.… I do not intend to offend the prejudices of anyone else, but neither do I allow their prejudices to make me false to my principles.”
    But in private he admitted that the invitation had been a political mistake, which he did not repeat, and today we might feel that he was going a bit far in not offending the prejudices of others. Witness, for example, this letter of his about the reappointment of three Negroes to political offices in Georgia:
    The three best offices in Georgia are filled by colored men who have done their work admirably. High-grade whites feel outraged that these three best offices should be given to colored men, and if it were a case of original appointments I should, as a matter of wisdom, from the standpoint of both races, certainly not make more than one of the three a colored man. But to refuse to reappoint or continue in office a good servant simply because he is colored is an entirely different thing; yet it is wholly impossible to make this distinction clear to most thoroughly good men in Georgia.
    The “thoroughly good” may stick in a modern throat, but that was the world TR had to face. We should give him credit for making it clear that his condemnation of discrimination was not limited to hostility against any one race:
    There is nothing that I protest more strongly, socially and politically, than any proscription or looking down upon decent Americans because they are of Irish or German ancestry; but I protest just exactly as strongly against any similar discrimination against or sneering at men because they happen to be descended from people who came over here three centuries ago.
    Where hate crimes, however, occurred in nations beyond his jurisdiction, he refused to indulge in idle protests or empty threats. Citing the Old West of his younger days where a man didn’t draw a gun unless he was ready to shoot, he deplored the brandishing of weapons one had no idea of using. At a later time, during America’s neutrality in the first years of World War I, he would accuse Wilson, in his relations with Germany, of shaking