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Dinner Given at the White House by President Roosevelt to Booker T. Washington, October 17, 1901.

Chicago: Royal Picture Gallery Co., 1904. Halftone print, 15.5” x 19.5”, mounted on linen-backed paper, 18.5” x 22.5”. CONDITION: Good, several very small spots of restoration to image, small marginal restoration at top center, manuscript restoration to the copyright notice at lower-left corner, and a few repaired marginal tears.

A rare print celebrating the unprecedented and fiercely controversial interracial White House dinner that inspired a heartwarmingly bungled assassination attempt, new levels of nastiness in political cartooning, and a ragtime opera by Scott Joplin.

This print depicts Booker T. Washington and President Roosevelt alone at a small, elegantly set table, with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the wall behind them. The actual dinner took place on October 16th (not the 17th, as the title indicates) in the company of Roosevelt's wife, daughter, three sons, and friend and hunting companion Philip B. Stewart of Colorado. While Roosevelt gave frequent dinners and the guests “remembered a simple, cordial evening,” the event became an immediate sensation, with strong and diverging responses within both Black and white communities (“Booker T. Washington Visits”). The Indianapolis Freeman hailed the invitation as an “honor conferred upon the leading Negro of America” (Davis, p. 231), but African American critics of Washington pointed out the hypocrisy of his gradualist approach to racial equality while he himself enjoyed such high personal privileges. Meanwhile, a poem making the rounds of Southern newspapers summed up white racist outrage: “I see a way to settle it / Just as clear as water, / Let Mr. Booker Washington / Marry Teddy’s daughter” (Duchsherer). The day after those verses were published, Washington downplayed the situation to President Roosevelt, writing that “Since coming here and getting into real contact with the white people…I do not believe that the matter is felt so seriously as the newspapers try to make it appear…” (“Booker T. Washington’s Dinner”). While the dinner tarnished Roosevelt’s political standing in the South, Washington received death threats and African Americans across the South faced heightened racist backlash. One group of angry Louisianans

backed up their threats [against Washington] by pooling their funds to hire an assassin. The hit man, who was black, traveled to Alabama by train. His plan was to jump off before reaching the Tuskegee station so he could slip into town unnoticed, but it backfired when he was injured in the fall and needed medical help. Since the local hospital refused to admit blacks, he was rushed to the school infirmary. Booker T.’s doctors and nurses treated him so kindly that, in a change of heart right out of a redemption drama, the would-be murderer abandoned his mission, slipped out of the infirmary, and left town as soon as he was physically able (Davis, p. 229). 

Cartoons targeting Mrs. Roosevelt were criticized as “beyond all bounds…not a question of politics, but a question of common decency,” and at least two celluloid buttons depicting the dinner also entered circulation—one evidently supportive, the other (showing an unrecognizable Washington sipping whiskey with Roosevelt) apparently not so (“Brutal Politics”). The dinner also inspired Scott Joplin to write a ragtime opera titled A Guest of Honor, which premiered in August of 1903.

The first version of this print, published in 1903, was emblazoned with the word “EQUALITY” on the side of the table cloth, and the portrait of Lincoln, rather crudely rendered, appears to rest his eyes on Washington. This version, evidently intended to be less controversial, makes no mention of equality, and Lincoln, though better rendered, looks sternly into the middle distance.

The Royal Picture Gallery Co. of Chicago seems to have been a short-lived firm, publishing ads in the Chicago Tribune between 1903 and 1904. The lengthiest of these, on July 26th, 1903, exhorts would-be agents: “DON’T DREAM—SCHEME! WORK! PLAN! Hustle! Get the exclusive agency for some big, responsible house like ours, and make money…We want agents for magnificent line of high art pictures. Everybody crazy over them. New, marvelous process. Over 300 colored reproductions of famous masterpieces. Good as originals…Sure money makers.” On January 10th of the following year, another Tribune ad promotes “Our copyrighted Equality Picture…of President Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington dining at the White house…Can be sold at sight in every colored household.” This work seems to have been somewhat of a departure from the “Reproductions of famous paintings by ASTI, MAUD STUMM, RONDEL, HENNER, SCHLEGEL, etc.” that they otherwise carried (Everybody’s Magazine, 1904).

No holdings recorded in OCLC.

A scarce print of this politically controversial and culturally momentous interracial White House dinner, of a kind not attempted by a president again for nearly thirty years.

REFERENCES: “Booker T. Washington Visits the White House” and “Booker T. Washington’s Dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt” at the White House Historical Association online; Davis, Deborah. Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012); Duchsherer, Aimee. “Let Mr. Booker Washington Marry Teddy’s Daughter” and “Brutal Politics” at the Theodore Roosevelt Center, Dickinson State University online. 

Item #8981

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