Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, as portrayed by Paul Stillman and Clifford Oliver, on stage Saturday at the new pavilion next to the Knickerbocker Mansion, in Schaghticoke, Rensselaer County, NY. (If any uncertain spellers live in that vicinity, do they give up writing in despair? Even if they get the locations right, there's still the question of Knickerbocker of Knickerbacker.)
The short play has the ex-president and the civil rights leader (who founded the Tuskegee Institute) speechifying and reminiscing about their controversial White House dinner meeting of 1901, and the state of race relations in the first term of pro-segregation President Woodrow Wilson.
Washington's career was jump-started in the 1870s by the former Civil War soldier Samuel C. Armstrong. Roosevelt was the first president since the Civil War to have been too young to fight in it, but made his name soldiering in Cuba. His "splendid little war" description of that conflict may grate to modern ears, but, like Henry Kissinger, he wound up with a Nobel Peace Prize.
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