Men of different races may well stand uncompromisingly against any suggestion of social equality. Indeed it would be helpful to have the word equality eliminated from this consideration, to have it accepted on both sides that this is not a question of social equality but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal and inescapable difference. We shall have made real progress when we develop an attitude in the public and community thought of both races which recognizes the difference.[369]
To this he added, as if replying to some unexpressed utterance, altho’ he was the sole speaker:
I would accept that a black man cannot be a white man and that he does not need and should not aspire to be as much like a white man as possible in order to accomplish the best that is possible for him.[370]
In these two utterances President Harding put himself in accord with Abraham Lincoln and in opposition to Theodore Roosevelt’s dinner to Booker Washington, and, from this, he drew near to what is supposed to be the teaching of Booker Washington:
“I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote.... I have no sympathy with the half baked altruism that would overstock us with doctors and lawyers of whatever color and leave us in need of people fit and willing to do the manual work of a work-a-day world.”[371]
From these generalizations, after quoting from F. D. Lugard a paragraph which even a Philadelphia lawyer would be puzzled to unravel, in which it is declared that while there shall be equality in the paths of knowledge and culture and equal admiration and opportunity, yet each must pursue his own inherited traditions, and while agreeing to be spiritually equal diverge physically and materially, the President reached the piece-de-resistance of his discourse:
“It is probable that as a nation we have come to the end of the period of very rapid increase in our population. Restricted immigration will reduce the rate of increase and force us back upon our older population to find people to do the simpler physically harder manual tasks. This will require some difficult adjustments. In anticipation of such a condition the South may well recognize that the North and West are likely to continue their drains upon its colored population, and that if the South wishes to keep its fields producing and its industry still expanding it will have to compete for the services of the colored man.”[372]
To this, the most important part of the President’s remarks, while complimenting the tone and spirit of the whole, the same paper in which Carlyle McKinley in 1889 sought to reveal to the South its true policy, thus replied:
“The South would be glad to see a considerable part of the negro population in this section find homes in other sections.”[373]
The comment of that Northern publication which had, as has been shown, most intelligently discussed the migration of the Negroes from the South to the North and West in 1916, was to the effect that while the President’s scheme had much to recommend it as far as the spirit was concerned, yet—