Booker T & Them: A Blues

2. Which Treats of the Station in Life & the Pursuits of the Famous Colored Gentleman, Booker T. Washington, & His Sally to Break Bread with President Theodore Roosevelt TR, & That Meal’s Aftermath

( 6 ) Which Treats of the Station in Life & the Pursuits of the Famous Colored Gentleman, Booker T. Washington, & His Sally to Break Bread with President Theodore Roosevelt TR, & That Meal’s Aftermath 2 1901 Scan Dixie. See “Swamp State” (nee Carolana)–born “Pitchfork Ben”jamin Ryan Tillman, 1847– 1918. Once its governor (when the population was 40.1% white & 59 .9 % black), & 4 times its senator. Embodying the unrepentant supremacist white attitude in post-Reconstruction, the 1-eyed forefather of Clemson & Winthrop Colleges speaks on disenfranchising South Carolina’s black citizens: “We have done 01 Harris text.indd 6 12/13/11 11:25 AM ( 7 ) our level best . . . we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it,” he crows from the first state to have split from the Union. See 406.6 miles north. The White House. Interior 2-shot: see Booker T. Washington, Founder & President of Tuskegee in Macon County in the state of Alabama, & Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. President, only a month on the job, hosts Washington who’d come to dinner. To “talk over the question of possible appointments in the South.” “The President Dines a Darkie” & “President Roosevelt Proposes to Coddle Descendants of Ham” is the news fit to print. “Social equality means decadence and damnation,” Tillman bitches. (57 years earlier the guest roster lists the Command Performance of The Ethiopian Serenaders, a Blackface minstrelminstrel troupe, “for the Especial Amusement of the President . . . [John Tyler—Whig, supporter of state’s rights & other Southern interests, annexer of Texas, father of 15, & expelled from his own party—1790– 1845], His Family and Friends . . .”). “The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are,” Edison says, “first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.” 01 Harris text.indd 7 12/13/11 11:25 AM ( 8 ) 16 October, 1901: Picture Roosevelt & Washington: 2 soft-walking performance artists who carry big shtick, jostling. Washington, born a slave, is, in the anythingis -possible 20th century, “The most influential negro in America.” The Wizard. The Power broker. Accommodator. Compromiser. Apologist. His Tuskegee Institute Manual Arts Education Program die-cuts dark drudges for the heavy lifting industrial needs of his Robber Baron benefactors. See Republican Roosevelt, who Mark Twain says is “the most popular human . . . that has ever existed in the United States” (1858–1919, 26th President), bespectacled, blind in one eye, nearsighted in the other. A snobbish Swell & once puny, sickly lad, played “store and baby,” branded Punkin-Lily & Jane-Dandy. Who, as a man, while grieving the same day deaths of wife & mother, exiles himself to the Bad Lands. Masters the frontier territory, its trials & trails. Returns re-made; hardy, scrapper. Man’s man. Maverick. Hawk. Pot-bellied, bandy-legged Bully Boy puff. Ascends like Zeus from Societal Olympus. Enters the Arena of Politics. Is a progressive regulator, reforming trustbuster, an imperialistic gunboat diplomat. A nationalist naturalist. Is robust. Is full of himself. Is Veep at 42. Youngest Pres ever at 42. Made so by an anarchist assassin’s .32. Is, according to lawyer, lecturer, state legislator, preacher, playwright, screenwriter, actor, real-estate speculator, novelist 01 Harris text.indd 8 12/13/11 11:25 AM ( 9 ) Thomas Dixon, “honest, patriotic, intelligent and brave as a lion.” (More on Dixon when time, space, & chronology permit.) As president, Roosevelt (TR) packs a gat. Is 1st chief-exec of the moving picture age. As with the West he masters the medium. He exudes dynamism, zing, vigor. The camera loves him. Makes it his ally. The teddy bear will (next year) be named for him. Thomas Edison’s motion picture short Goldilocks & the Three Bears will be about TR. Roosevelt is “THE BEST OF AMERICA.” “You’re All Right, Teddy,” is his 1904 presidential campaign song penned by colored brothers John Rosamond (1873 –1954) & James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938 ), educator, lawyer, & secretary of the NAACP, appointed (1906) by TR American consul to Venezuela & Nicaragua, author, poet (God’s Trombones & “Lift Every Voice and Sing”). Johnson’s 2-faced protagonist, “Ex-Colored man” in The Autobiography of an ExColored Man, a novel, is mulatto. His dilemma, face the public as a ragtime pianist, or hide his dark side in middle class white obscurity? Showing his full frontal whiteness TR says of negroes, “A perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane; the negro, for instance, has been...