Stage-play, however, is one thing and “business” is another. Teddy is a genial democrat when playing to the grand-stand, and a bumptious autocrat in some of his White House moods.
To cut the long story short, the lady was ordered out of the White House, and when she kept her seat she was seized upon by three white men and one negro and forcibly dragged out. Her silk dress was torn, her ornaments scattered, her flesh bruised. The white men pulled her by the arms and shoulders, the negro held her by the legs; she was dragged through the mud to a cab, thrown into it like a common criminal and driven off to a criminal’s resort, the House of Detention.
A more shocking outrage has never been committed at the White House. It was indecent, it was brutal, it was despotic, it was violative of all democratic usage and of every human consideration. The poor lady was so terribly frightened, so rudely handled, subjected to such a public and unprovoked humiliation that she was thrown into a fever and confined to her bed for many days.
No—I have already stated that it was not your sister, or your mother or your wife whose legs were held by Roosevelt’s nigger while his three white ruffians dragged her, screaming, through the mud, and flung her, bruised and frantic, into a cab to be driven off as criminals are driven.
But it might have been.
And when you consider the incident from that point of view you will admire the courage with which Senator Ben Tillman denounced the outrage, while you regard with utter scorn the cowardly attitude of the great majority in both branches of Congress who were afraid to say what they thought.
Mr. Roosevelt was not originally responsible for the outrage, but he chose to become so by his refusal to express any regrets at the occurrence, and by his failure to rebuke the brutes who were guilty of such needless violence to a respectable visitor at a public office which belonged as much to her as to anybody else on this earth.
Maximum and Minimum Benefits, at Least