Part 13

Hitherto I have spoken chiefly of the obligations existing on the part of the white man. Now let you remember on the other hand that no help can permanently avail you save as you yourselves develop capacity for self-help. You young colored men and women educated at Tuskegee must by precept and example lead your fellows toward sober, industrious, law-abiding lives. You are in honor bound to join hands in favor of law and order and to war against all crime, and especially against all crime by men of your own race; for the heaviest wrong done by the criminal is the wrong to his own race. You must teach the people of your race that they must scrupulously observe any contract into which they in good faith enter, no matter whether it is hard to keep or not. If you save money, secure homes, become taxpayers, and lead clean, decent, modest lives, you will win the respect of your neighbors of both races. Let each man strive to excel his fellows only by rendering substantial service to the community in which he lives. The colored people have many difficulties to pass through, but these difficulties will be surmounted if only the policy of reason and common-sense is pursued. You have made real and great progress. According to the census the colored people of this country own and pay taxes upon something like three hundred million dollars’ worth of property, and have blotted out over fifty per cent of their illiteracy. What you have done in the past is an indication of what you will be able to accomplish in the future under wise leadership. Moral and industrial education is what is most needed, in order that this progress may continue. The race can not expect to get everything at once. It must learn to wait and bide its time; to prove itself worthy by showing its possession of perseverance, of thrift, of self-control. The destiny of the race is chiefly in its own hands, and must be worked out patiently and persistently along these lines. Remember also that the white man who can be of most use to the colored man is that colored man’s neighbor. It is the Southern people themselves who must and can solve the difficulties that exist in the South; of course what help the people of the rest of the Union can give them must and will be gladly and cheerfully given. The hope of advancement for the colored man in the South lies in his steady, common-sense effort to improve his moral and material condition, and to work in harmony with the white man in upbuilding the Commonwealth. The future of the South now depends upon the people of both races living up to the spirit and letter of the laws of their several States and working out the destinies of both races, not as races, but as law-abiding American citizens.

AT THE CAPITOL BUILDING, MONTGOMERY, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905

_Governor; Colonel Wiley; My Fellow-Citizens_:

My friends and fellow-citizens, think what a privilege ours is; think what it means for this nation; that there is no place in this Union where the President of the Union can feel more at home, can feel more that he is indeed the President of all the Union, of a reunited and indissoluble Union, than here under the shadow of the first capitol of the Confederacy. Poor indeed would be the soul of the man who did not leave Montgomery a better American than he came into it, after being received as I have been received to-day.

In speaking to all of you I know that the younger—those of my own age and younger still—will not grudge my saying a special word of greeting to the veterans of the great war. Here again think how fortunate we are. There is no other people of which history tells, which, having passed through such a war as we passed through, after forty years finds not only that the flag which had been rent in sunder is once again whole without a seam; finds all the people challenging as theirs the right to claim their part in the heritage of glory bequeathed to every American, alike by the Americans who wore the blue and the Americans who wore the gray in the great Civil War. In coming to your mighty and beautiful State, with its wealth of agriculture, its wealth of manufactures, I am more than ever impressed by the solidarity of our interests as a people. As the Governor pointed out, the greatest and most important single export of our people is the export of cotton; and the whole nation is concerned in the welfare of the cotton growers. It is not only important for Alabama and the rest of the Gulf States; it is important for the entire Union, because it is the cotton crop which determines the balance of trade as being in favor of this Nation. The business of any part of this Nation is the business of the entire Nation; and the National Government is bound to do everything it can in the interest of the cotton growers; to preserve your markets; to do everything that can possibly be done to see that the natural demand for cotton abroad is kept up and is met here under fair conditions by our own people. Perhaps no State in the Union is more interested than this in the performance of what is to be the greatest engineering feat the world has yet seen—the building of the Isthmian canal. The cotton crop largely goes to Asia. The canal will of course immensely shorten the water route to Asia. Our influence in the Orient must be kept at such a pitch as will ensure our being able to guarantee fair treatment to our merchants and manufacturers by China. We must insist upon having fair treatment; and as a step toward getting it we must give fair treatment in return. I would demand that on ethical grounds alone; I would demand it also on grounds of self-interest.

Now I want to say a word about the children. Nothing pleases me more than to see the care you are devoting to education in this State; and among the many splendidly heroic deeds credited to the Southern people in peace as well as in war is the fact of having to face, as they did, the future in the midst of a broken and war-swept country, they not only built up their industrial prosperity, but they have provided steadily for the education of the coming generation.

The successful performance of political duty depends absolutely upon the successful performance of domestic, of social, duty. There never can be, there never will be a good government in which the average citizen is not a decent man in private life. It is a contradiction in terms to speak of a good government if the good government does not rest upon cleanliness and decency in the home, respect of husband and wife for one another, tenderness of the man for those dependent upon him, performance of duty by woman and by man, and the proper education of the children who are to make the next generation. The vital things in life are the things that foolish people look upon as commonplace. The vital deeds of life are those things which it lies within the reach of each of us to do, and the failure to perform which means the destruction of the State.

AT BIRMINGHAM, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905

_Mr. Rhodes; and you, My Fellow-Citizens_:

I wish to say that I am stirred most deeply by this magnificent reception from what Mr. Rhodes has so well called the Magic City of the South. Alabama has made a wonderful record. At the close of the war, shattered, war-swept, it seemed that it was impossible for her people, in the grip of poverty as they were, to rally; and any people less strong than you of Alabama would have failed; but you had the stuff in you and you succeeded. About the year 1880 the tide turned, and the last quarter of a century has seen in Alabama a progress that would have been absolutely impossible in any other age or in any other nation than ours. The agriculture of the State went upward by leaps and bounds; but even more marvelous was your mechanical and industrial success. You have in this State coal and iron, the two basic elements in modern industrialism, and you have also a wealth of water power only partially used; and given that amount of natural resources and the right type of man to use them, the result will be what we have seen. But there is something that is ahead of any kind of natural resources, and that is the citizenship of the man on the soil. Proud though I am of your extraordinary industrial prosperity, I am prouder yet of the men who have achieved it.

Think what it means for our nation to have the President of the United States greeted as he has been to-day, with on his right and his left hand as the guard of honor the veterans of the Civil War, the men who wore the blue, the men who wore the gray, united forever.

As I came up the street nothing pleased me as much as the sight of the school-children drawn up alongside the line of march. Remember that we shall leave this country in the hands of the children of to-day, and that the American of to-morrow will be what we train the boy or girl to be. If the children are not well educated, if they are not brought up as they should be, the State will go down. We of this generation have received a splendid heritage from you men of the years of ’60 to ’65. Honor to us if we treat your great deeds as spurring us onward; and shame to us if we treat your great deeds as excuses for our own idleness or folly. When I speak of education I do not mean only education in intelligence. That counts tremendously; but education in character counts more. It is character that determines the Nation’s progress in the long run.

In the organizations of veterans after the Civil War each hails the other as comrade. It makes no difference whether the man was a lieutenant-general or whether he was the youngest recruit that served at the very end of the war. All that is asked is, did he do his duty in the place in which he was. If he did, you are for him. If he did not, you have no comradeship with him. I ask that the same lesson that you of the Civil War applied practically in your own persons during and since that war be applied by the rest of us in civil life. I ask that we scorn alike the base arrogance of the rich man who would look down on his poorer brother and the equally base envy of the poor man who would hate his richer brother; and that you apply to every citizen of this Republic just this one test—the test that gauges his worth as a man. Does he do his duty fairly by himself, his family, his neighbor, and the State and the Nation? If he does, be for him, whether he is rich or poor, because if you do not you are recreant in the spirit of Americanism.

REMARKS ON BEING PRESENTED WITH TWO CONFEDERATE BADGES, AT BIRMINGHAM, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905

_Ladies; General_:

I accept the two badges in the spirit in which they are offered; for your spirit here is that we are now indeed and forever reunited under the flag of the indissoluble Union; and that henceforth the only rivalry between the man whose father fought in the Union army and the man whose father fought in the Confederate army will be the generous rivalry of seeing who can do most for our common country.

AT CITY PARK, LITTLE ROCK, ARK., OCTOBER 25, 1905

_Governor; Judge Trieber, and you, My Fellow-Citizens_:

I am fortunate enough to have spoken all over the Union, and I have never said in any State or any section what I would not have said in any other State or in any other section. I am fortunate in being President of a nation where you do not have to praise one State by running down any other State. Arkansas, the New England States, the Western, the Eastern, the Northern, the Southern—they are all good States and I am for them all. The thing that has impressed me most as I have gone through this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Canadian border to the Gulf, has been not the superficial differences of our people, but the essential likenesses of our people. The average American is a pretty good fellow; and all that is necessary, as you men of the honor guard, you men of the blue and gray know, is that he should know the other average American and they will get on all right. That is true as regards locality and locality, and true as regards occupation and occupation. Thank heaven, we are free now from all danger of sectional antagonism! We must now see that there never comes any spirit of class antagonism in this country, any spirit of hostility between capitalist and wage-worker, between employer and employed; and we can avoid the upgrowth of any such feeling by remembering always to treat each man on his worth as a man. Do not hold it for him or against him that he is either rich or poor. If he is a crooked man and rich, hold it against him, not because he is rich, but because he is crooked. If he is not a rich man and crooked, hold it against him, still because he is crooked. If he is a square man, no matter how much or how little money he has, stand by him because he is a square man. Distrust more than any other man in this Republic the man who would try to teach Americans to substitute loyalty to any class for loyalty to the whole American people. Republics have flourished before now, and have fallen; and they have usually fallen because there arose within them parties that represented either the unscrupulous rich or the unscrupulous poor, and that persuaded the majority of the people to substitute loyalty to the one class for loyalty to the people as a whole.

Remember that the rancorous envy that hates the rich is only one side of the shield whose obverse is the insolence and arrogance that looks down on the poor. The two qualities are fundamentally the same. They only differ in their manifestations because it happens that the man showing one is in a different position from the man showing the other. You show me a rich man who is arrogant and insolent in his disregard of the man of less means, and I tell you that same man, if he loses his wealth, will want to plunder every rich man. In the same way the man who preaches the gospel of hate and envy toward his fellows who are better off, if he becomes better off will oppress the men whom he once championed. Distrust the man who would persuade you that he would do you good by trying to do any other man harm. The man who is true to you will ultimately be the man who is true to the great fundamental principles of righteousness. In public life the man who seeks to persuade you that he will benefit you by wronging any one else, if the chance arises, will surely try to benefit himself by wronging you. What as a nation we need is to stand by the eternal, immutable principles of right and decency, the principle of fair dealing as between man and man, the principles that teach us to regard virtue with respect and vice with abhorrence wherever either the virtue or the vice may be found. If we substitute for the line that divides the decent man from the man who is not decent, the line dividing the rich man from the poor man, or the line making any other artificial division, we will have done irreparable wrong to the Nation itself.

Governor, you spoke of a hideous crime that is often hideously avenged. The worst enemy of the negro race is the negro criminal, and, above all, the negro criminal of that type; for he has committed not only an unspeakably dreadful and infamous crime against the victim, but he has committed a hideous crime against the people of his own color; and every reputable colored man, every colored man who wishes to see to the uplifting of his race, owes it as his first duty to himself and to that race to hunt down that criminal with all his soul and strength. Now for the side of the white man. To avenge one hideous crime by another hideous crime is to reduce the man doing it to the bestial level of the wretch who committed the bestial crime. The horrible effects of lynch law are shown in the fact that three-fourths of the lynchings are not for that crime at all, but for other crimes. And above all other men, Governor, you and I and all who are exponents and representatives of the law, owe it to our people, owe it to the cause of civilization and humanity, to do everything in our power, officially and unofficially, directly and indirectly, to free the United States from the menace and reproach of lynch law.

We can afford to be divided on questions of mere partisanship; they do not make any real difference compared to other questions. The questions of currency or the tariff are of no consequence compared to the fundamental questions, the questions upon which all good Americans should be one—the questions of decency in the life of the home and of honesty in public life. It makes very little difference in the long run whether it is a Democrat or a Republican who is President, compared to the importance of honesty and broad patriotism; it makes all the difference in the world that we shall have all our public officials honest, clean men, earnest to serve their countrymen wherever they may live. The candidate is the candidate of a party; but if the President is worth his salt he is the President of the whole people. Remember, the stream does not rise any higher than its source. You can not have good public life unless you have as a basis good private life. The country is going to be all right if the average man is decent and clean in his home life; if he is a good husband, a good father, a good son; if he does his duty by his neighbor; if he is the kind of a man you are glad to have as a neighbor and glad to do business with. If that man is the average American, America is going to continue to be all right; and if the average goes below that you can not make the country right.

I have great respect for a good man. There is only one person I respect more, and that is a good woman; and if there is any man here who does not agree with me I do not think much of him. The foundation of our happiness and well-being lies in the preservation of the typical American home, the kind of home in which you veterans of the Civil War were raised, so that when you went to battle, on whichever side you fought, you had the memory of what your fathers and mothers had taught you to rest upon and to live up to. We of the younger generation—my comrades of the National Guard here and all of our time—inherited from these older men of the heroic days, these men of the great Civil War, this splendid country of ours; we inherited our position in the world. Let us see to it that we leave to our children unimpaired and improved the heritage we received from our fathers. Shame to us if we treat the great deeds of the men of the past as excuses for laziness, or idleness, or shirking of duty on our part. Let us treat these great deeds as an incentive, as a spur; let us feel that we should hang our heads if we do not prove ourselves worthy representatives of the men who are before us—you men of the South here, whose heroism and valor for four years of war have been wellnigh surpassed by the heroism and valor you have displayed in the forty years of peace following it. Let us go on with the work of the material upbuilding of this country; and at the same time remember that, vital though it is to have a good foundation of material well-being, yet it is only the foundation and upon it must be built the superstructure of the moral and spiritual higher life of the Nation. We all honor you men of the Civil War here, you men of the blue and men of the gray. We honor you because when the call to arms came you treated material considerations as dross to be cast aside, not to be for one moment weighed in the balance, compared to the proud privilege of laying down everything, life itself, on the altar of your duty as light was given you to see your duty. Let us have that same spirit deep in our heart.

AT THE LUNCHEON AT LITTLE ROCK, ARK., OCTOBER 25, 1905

_Mr. Toastmaster; Judge Rose; My Hosts_:

Let me at the outset say a word of thanks to the Arkansas Consistory for its generous hospitality, and say how much I appreciate it.