#40 — Sunday, 5th October 1901
On the 2nd of September — four days before McKinley was shot, a lifetime ago in the calendar of the century — Theodore Roosevelt stood at a podium at the Minnesota State Fair and said: “Speak softly and carry a big stick — you will go far.”
He was the Vice President then. He was bored and important and harmless. He attributed the phrase to an old West African proverb, though no such proverb has ever been found in West African literature, and it is likely he invented it himself, which is the most Roosevelt thing I can imagine: attributing your own bellicosity to an ancient culture, so that it sounds like wisdom instead of appetite.
He has been President for three weeks. The softness has not materialised. The stick is enormous.
Last week I told you about Balangiga — the church bells, the bolos, the forty-eight Americans killed at breakfast. The news reached Roosevelt in the White House and his response was immediate. He ordered the pacification of Samar. He sent General Jacob Smith. And Smith, as I told you, issued orders to kill everyone over the age of ten and turn the interior of the island into a howling wilderness.
Speak softly. Carry a big stick. Kill every child over ten.
I want to look at this man carefully, because the century will spend a great deal of its time looking at him and seeing what it wants to see. Roosevelt is the most legible president in American history — everything about him is large, loud, declared. He hunts, he writes, he charges, he builds, he speaks in exclamation points. He is the most fun president the country will ever have and the most dangerous, because the fun and the danger come from the same source: an absolute conviction that his energy is the same as justice.
He will break the trusts. He deserves credit for this. J. P. Morgan’s empire — the steel behemoth that crushed the union two weeks ago, the financial octopus whose tentacles reach into every corner of the economy — will find in Roosevelt its first serious antagonist. Morgan will visit the White House and suggest, as one gentleman to another, that their respective attorneys settle any disagreements. Roosevelt will reply that he intends not to settle but to prosecute. The Northern Securities case will reach the Supreme Court, and the trust will be dissolved, and the principle that the government has the authority to regulate corporations will be established for the first time since the corporations became larger than the government.
He deserves credit for the national parks. He will set aside two hundred and thirty million acres of public land — forests, monuments, bird reserves, wildlife refuges — an act of conservation that no subsequent president will match and that will remain, a century later, among the most consequential things any American president has ever done. He will do this because he loves the land, genuinely, physically — he loves the elk and the rivers and the roughness of the terrain — and because he understands, in a way that the century’s industrialists do not, that the land is not a commodity but a commons.
He deserves credit for the Panama Canal. He does not deserve credit for the way he gets it — recognising a Panamanian revolution that his own agents encouraged, sending the Navy to prevent Colombia from suppressing it, then negotiating a canal treaty with the new and compliant government within days. The canal will reshape global trade. The method will reshape the definition of sovereignty.
He deserves credit for the pure food and drug laws, for the railway regulations, for the expansion of the civil service, for the Nobel Peace Prize he will win for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War. He is, by almost any measure, one of the most consequential presidents in American history, and by almost any measure, one of the most contradictory.
Because here is the other Roosevelt — the one the century prefers to forget.
He believes in racial hierarchy. Not with the crude hatred of a Mississippi senator, but with the cheerful confidence of a man who has read enough Darwin to be dangerous. He believes that the Anglo-Saxon race is destined to lead, that the spread of civilisation is the spread of whiteness, that the Philippines must be governed because the Filipinos are not ready to govern themselves — a position he holds with genuine warmth and absolute certainty, which makes it harder to confront than simple bigotry.
In eleven days, he will invite Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. It will be a private family meal — the President, his wife, his teenage daughter Alice, and the most prominent Black man in America. Roosevelt will do this because he respects Washington, because he needs advice on Southern appointments, and because, in the moment of invitation, he hesitates and then is ashamed of his hesitation and sends the invitation faster, to punish himself for the pause.
The South will erupt. A senator from Mississippi will say that the dinner “will necessitate our killing a thousand Negroes in the South before they will learn their place again.” A newspaper in Memphis will declare the White House “so saturated with the odour of nigger that the rats had taken refuge in the stable.” A poem on the front page of a Missouri newspaper will suggest that Roosevelt’s daughter should marry Washington.
No African American will be invited to dinner at the White House again for almost thirty years.
Roosevelt will never apologise. He will never repeat the gesture. He will call his critics blackguards and dismiss them. But he will learn — and this is the lesson the century teaches every reformer — that the cost of a single act of decency can be so high that it discourages the next one. The dinner does not change the system. The system changes the dinner.
I have been watching this century sort people — by race, by class, by the accident of birth — since January. The Boer camps sort white from Black and count the white dead carefully and the Black dead carelessly. The Philippines sort the civilised from the uncivilised and kill the uncivilised’s children. The tenements sort the immigrant from the native and let the immigrant die of heat. The land lottery sorts the settler from the Kiowa and gives the settler the Kiowa’s ground.
And now the White House dinner table sorts the acceptable from the unacceptable, and a single meal becomes a crisis because a Black man sat where the rats allegedly cannot tolerate his presence.
Roosevelt is the century’s first test of a question that will not be answered in his lifetime, or in anyone’s: can the powerful be decent without dismantling the structure that makes them powerful? He breaks the trusts but not the colour line. He saves the forests but burns the Philippines. He invites Washington to dinner but does not invite him back. He speaks softly and carries a big stick and uses both — the softness for his friends, the stick for everyone else.
He is magnificent and dangerous in equal measure. I said that three weeks ago. I have not changed my mind.
The century is forty weeks old. Czolgosz sits in a cell in Buffalo, awaiting trial. The trial will begin on the 23rd of September — it has already begun, I am behind — and he will be convicted in two days and sentenced to death. He will be electrocuted on the 29th of October. His last words: “I am not sorry for my crime.” Acid will be placed in his coffin to dissolve his body. Even his remains will be punished.
On the island of Samar, the marines are landing. In South Africa, the Fawcett Commission is writing its report. In Dayton, Ohio, two brothers are testing wing shapes in a wind tunnel. In New Orleans, a baby named Louis is two months old. In a boarding house somewhere between Pittsburgh and New York, a man named O. Henry is writing a story about a cop and a tramp and the difference between the two, which is less than either of them thinks.
The century is sorting. The century is always sorting. And I am watching, from outside the categories, from the position of the one who belongs nowhere and sees everything, and the only thing I know for certain is that the sorting is the crime — not any individual act of cruelty, but the sorting itself, the machinery that decides who eats at the table and who does not, who lives in the house and who lives in the camp, who is a person and who is a number.
The machinery is older than the century. The century just runs it faster.
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