On guess who’s
coming to dinner, the White House edition.
In 1901, Booker T.
Washington, one of the nation’s most famous and influential educators,
political leaders, authors, and icons was invited
to dine at the White House with the newly inaugurated President, Theodore Roosevelt.
Sounds logical enough—but Washington was an African American,Washington D.C.
was still segregated, and “dining” had the connotation (particularly in the
South) of social equality more broadly; for all those reasons, and many other
social and cultural factors, the invitation and dinner became hugely
controversial. Both Roosevelt and Washington were smart enough to know that
this would happen, and both
apparently hesitated at their respective moments of decision (Roosevelt in
sending the invite, Washington in accepting). But both went through with it,
and Washington became the first African American to dine publicly with a
sitting president.
There would be a
couple distinct ways for an AmericanStudier to analyze such an event. One would
be to do our own version of what Deborah
Davis does in her book Guest of Honor (see also two of the hyperlinks in the
prior paragraph): to connect the dinner to many of the possible relevant
contexts, from the lives and impacts of the two men to the cultural, social, political,
and historical trends that contributed to the dinner’s significance and controversies.
Davis focuses on the contexts leading up and during the event’s moment, but it
would also be interesting to consider a few from subsequent years: to contrast,
for example, Roosevelt’s invitation with one of Woodrow
Wilson’s first actions as president, his segregation of the federal government.
Roosevelt’s action was informal, intimate, and even, it seems, somewhat
impromptu (the two men had a meeting scheduled and he decided to make it a
dinner); Wilson’s much more formal and standardized and planned. Does that
partly explain why Roosevelt could buck custom and much of popular opinion in
the way he did? Does it further indict Wilson, that he thought through his plan
to bring Jim Crow to Washington (after promising African American supporters
during the campaign that he would fight for equality once elected)? In any
case, the comparison would at least provide additional frames through which to
analyze each moment and action.
But an AmericanStudies perspective on Booker and
Teddy’s dinner might also take a step back, and consider why such small events
or moments can have such symbolic resonance in our culture. After all, much of
what I said in Monday’s post about George Washington’s conversation with
Phillis Wheatley would likewise apply here—this dinner didn’t change a thing in
terms of Washington’s status (or that of any African American at the turn of
the 20th century), didn’t have the slightest impact on Jim Crow laws
or any other institutionalized racisms, didn’t, really, mean anything at all. But
on the other hand, we AmericanStudiers tend to believe that narratives and
images matter, often at least as much as realities. And if the problem of the 20th century
was, as Washington’s peer and sometime-adversary W.E.B. Du Bois put it, the
problem of the color line, then at least the Roosevelt-Washington dinner,
as an image, as a national narrative, illustrated that it was possible for all
Americans, even the most public of them, to cross that line and find some common
ground—or at least some good food—together.
Next conversation tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses to these figures and this moment? Other Black
History Month connections you’d share?
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