". . . There is one point . . . [which] makes me feel very doubtful; that is, as to the wisdom of making the recommendation for a commission. I am very much afraid that a certain extreme element here in the North would misunderstand that recommendation and hail it as having . . . a sinister party purpose; and I am almost equally afraid that an exactly opposite element in the South, would make the same mistake. . . . [T]he best way to get at it would be for some first-class southern Senator or Congressman to introduce the bill and then for me heartily to back it up. . . . What are your relations with Senator [Alexander S.] Clay, and do you think he would introduce it? . . .
". . . I had better not embody the suggestion in my message, but see how what I say on lynching is accepted and then try a special message after consulting with the southern members whom you and I and men like ex-Governor Montague and Judge Jones feel to be really disinterested and patriotic, with the necessary courage to make their virtue count for something."
with--Retained copies of two of Howell's letters to him, the first discussing the proposal to launch an investigation into the race problem in Atlanta and elsewhere ("This problem is the greatest one with which the people of our section of the country have to deal. Indeed, it seems to me that it is now rapidly becoming the great national question . . . ."), and the second, expressing approval of his statement on the race problem. Atlanta, 24; 31 October 1906.
Beginning on September 22, 1906, in Atlanta, a series of violent disturbances resulted in the deaths of 21 men, mostly African-Americans, some of whom had been hanged from lampposts.
On December 6, 1906, Roosevelt delivered his Sixth Annual Message, in which he addressed a number of national problems, including the practice of lynching: ". . . [E]very lynching represents by just so much a loosening of the bands of civilization; that the spirit of lynching inevitably throws into prominence in the community all the foul and evil creatures who dwell therein. No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered. Every lynching means just so much moral deterioration in all the children who have any knowledge of it, and therefore just so much additional trouble for the next generation of Americans. . . ."