December 6, 1906 – President Theodore Roosevelt Pontificates on the Cause of Lynching

On this day in history, Roosevelt delivered his sixth annual message to Congress.

Roosevelt subscribed to the popular view of some circles in his era that the white race was superior. He bought into (and himself espoused) the eugenics theories of the time that inspired the rise of the Nazi Party a generation later. He saw life as a violent struggle between the strong and the weak, with whites being “the forward race” and blacks and other non-whites “intellectually inferior.”

In 1905, speaking to the Republican Club in New York City, he said that if “morality and thrift among the colored men can be raised,” then those same virtues among whites, which most Americans assumed to be more advanced, would “rise to an even higher degree.” At the same time, he warned that “the debasement of the blacks will, in the end, carry with it [the] debasement of the whites.”

While TR is known for inviting Booker T. Washington, a black man, to the White House, as PBS points out, “Roosevelt invited Washington not to improve the situation of blacks, but because they agreed that blacks should not strive for political and social equality.”

Roosevelt’s Administration actually decreased the number of federal appointments to blacks, with Roosevelt promising Southerners that he would appoint local federal officials that would not disrupt the accord between north and south.

Roosevelt advocated that whites should breed as much as possible – otherwise they risked “race suicide”.

President Theodore Roosevelt

On December 6, 1906, in his address to Congress, he raised the problem of lynching of black men in the South:

. . . I call your attention and the attention of the Nation to the prevalence of crime among us, and above all to the epidemic of lynching and mob violence that springs up, now in one part of our country, now in another. . . . . A great many white men are lynched, but the crime is peculiarly frequent in respect to black men. The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape–the most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse than murder. Mobs frequently avenge the commission of this crime by themselves torturing to death the man committing it; thus avenging in bestial fashion a bestial deed, and reducing themselves to a level with the criminal.”

He then seems to contradict his point by admitting:

Lawlessness grows by what it feeds upon; and when mobs begin to lynch for rape they speedily extend the sphere of their operations and lynch for many other kinds of crimes, so that two-thirds of the lynchings are not for rape at all; while a considerable proportion of the individuals lynched are innocent of all crime.”

Regardless of the cause, Roosevelt issues a plea for adherence to the rule of law:

The lesson is this: No good citizen can afford to countenance a defiance of the statutes, no matter what the provocation. The innocent frequently suffer, and, it is my observation, more usually suffer than the guilty. The white people of the South indict the whole colored race on the ground that even the better elements lend no assistance whatever in ferreting out criminals of their own color. The respectable colored people must learn not to harbor their criminals, but to assist the officers in bringing them to justice. This is the larger crime, and it provokes such atrocious offenses as the one at Atlanta. The two races can never get on until there is an understanding on the part of both to make common cause with the law-abiding against criminals of any color.”

In other words, blacks have an obligation to make sure these alleged black rapists of white women are brought to justice in order to prevent lynching:

Every colored man should realize that the worst enemy of his race is the negro criminal, and above all the negro criminal who commits the dreadful crime of rape; and it should be felt as in the highest degree an offense against the whole country, and against the colored race in particular, for a colored man to fail to help the officers of the law in hunting down with all possible earnestness and zeal every such infamous offender. Moreover, in my judgment, the crime of rape should always be punished with death, as is the case with murder; assault with intent to commit rape should be made a capital crime, at least in the discretion of the court; and provision should be made by which the punishment may follow immediately upon the heels of the offense; while the trial should be so conducted that the victim need not be wantonly shamed while giving testimony, and that the least possible publicity shall be given to the details.”

As he concludes on this particular issue:

Let justice be both sure and swift; but let it be justice under the law, and not the wild and crooked savagery of a mob.”

The full text is here.