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The format is approximately 3.375 inches by 5.25 inches. Unpaginated [8 pages] The rear cover has an advertisement for the American Promoting & Trustee Co.! This small sized pamphlet is bound in peach-colored printed covers over a saddle-stapled binding. Staples beginning to pull at textblock, a bit of faint scattered foxing inside. This rare little pamphlet castigating Theodore Roosevelt for hosting Booker T. Washington at the White House just weeks after becoming President in late 1901. This racist tone of this piece is to many extreme, coming as it does from a citizen of Boston. Though a native of the city, with family ties to the Boston Post, J. Whitney Beals, Jr. had business interests in the South, and one can assume may have significantly influenced his thinking and attitudes. Here, for illustrative purposes, is one of his paragraphs: "What is more sacred than one's family table, and where a breach is committed whereby a negro enters the social circle, it is leading the black race to other social advances, and one would expect to see the races on equal footing at their homes or at the opera; but it would not rest there. The children of the two colors would mingle together at social gatherings, and then the possibility of intermarriage would follow." This language was authored by a member of Boston's elite, an individual directly connected to one of New England's most respected newspapers (which had a pro-Abolition heritage). This text underscores how racism was not just Southern but was woven into the culture of Northern respectability, making Beals's pamphlet a revealing artifact of its era. On October 16, 1901, shortly after moving into the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt invited his adviser, the African American spokesman Booker T. Washington, to dine with him and his family. The event provoked an outpouring of condemnation from white politicians and press in the American South. This reaction affected subsequent White House practice and no other African American was invited to dinner for almost thirty years. This work appears to have been primarily motivated in reaction to President Roosevelt's hosting of Booker T. Washington for a dinner at the White House. The text starts out with "No nobler sentiment was ever more clearly expressed than the editorial in the New Orleans Times-Democrat of Oct. 24, 1901--:THE SOUTH WILL MEET THE ISSUE," and those who read this article will see that an error of judgment has been committed by our President. Later, the author writes "This act of our President is the first step towards making the black man our social equal, and while it is too late to mend the harm that has been done, Mr. Roosevelt has lost the respect of over five millions of people, representing the most cultured and high bred of our citizens and the true aristocracy of this country." This work ends with the following statement "'Tis, indeed, pitiful that the President has fallen under the spell of these evil counselors." This is extremely RARE, and when researched the OCLC database noted only a single copy, in the collections at Duke University. The Post was founded in November 1831 by two prominent Boston businessmen, Charles G. Greene and William Beals. Edwin Grozier bought the paper in 1891. Within two decades, he had built it into easily the largest paper in Boston and New England. This was a prominent, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper that dominated New England media. At its peak in the 1930s, it circulated over a million copies.
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