H. W. Brands is the author of "TR: The Last Romantic" and the just-released "Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt." He teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin.



Historian H.W. Brands says power as well as race was behind controversy over Booker T. Washington.



AUSTIN, Texas (CNN) -- In his concession speech on Tuesday night, John McCain illustrated the historic significance of Barack Obama's election by noting that a little over a century ago the inclusion of another black man, Booker T. Washington, at a White House dinner provoked outrage in large parts of the country.



McCain wasn't giving a history lecture, and he quickly moved on, but the tale is worth exploring, as it is both more complex and more instructive than McCain's brief remarks suggested.



Washington was the one who initiated the acquaintance that led to his 1901 dinner with Theodore Roosevelt. Washington had built the Tuskegee Institute of Alabama into a political base that made him the most powerful black leader in the country.



Invited to address the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1895, Washington offered white America a racial bargain: Blacks would cease agitating for immediate political and civil rights if whites would fund black educational and economic advancement.



This "Atlanta Compromise" outraged black intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, but it appealed to white leaders in the South and white philanthropists in the North -- and it marked Washington, the broker of Northern largesse and Southern cooperation, as one of the shrewdest politicians in the South.



Washington spotted Roosevelt on the rise, and after Roosevelt became vice president, Washington invited him to Tuskegee, where he knew Roosevelt, the apostle of the strenuous life, would be entranced by the rigorous physical regimen the students pursued.



Roosevelt was preparing to visit Tuskegee when the assassination of William McKinley elevated him to the presidency and threw his plans into turmoil.



Roosevelt instead invited Washington to call at the White House whenever he was in town. Washington didn't have to be asked twice. Within weeks, he was in the capital and was invited to join the president for dinner on October 16.



Roosevelt's ascension to the presidency made him that much more interesting to Washington. Yet no more interesting than Washington was to Roosevelt. The peculiar politics of the Republican Party gave Washington an importance among Republicans that belied the abnegations of the Atlanta Compromise.



Discriminatory Jim Crow laws kept most blacks from voting in the South, but they didn't prevent the Southern states from sending delegations to the Republican national conventions every four years. These delegations could tip the balance in a tight contest, and Roosevelt -- who though president was profoundly unpopular among the Republican bosses -- expected the 1904 convention to be a tight contest.



Roosevelt's invitation to Washington to dine at the White House had little to do with Washington's race per se, but everything to do with Washington's role as a political boss of Southern Republicans who happened to be black.



Likewise, the outrage expressed by Southern editors and spokesmen over Roosevelt's alleged affront to the South, while couched in the language of race, was really about political power. "White men of the South, how do you like it?" fulminated the New Orleans Times-Democrat. "White women of the South, how do you like it?"



The Richmond Times frothed over the implications of the honor Roosevelt had bestowed on Washington: "It means that the president is willing that Negroes shall mingle freely with whites in the social circle -- that white women may receive attentions from negro men; it means that there is no racial reason in his opinion why whites and blacks may not marry and intermarry, why the Anglo-Saxon may not mix negro blood with his blood."



The vehemence of the Southern response gave the game away. Booker Washington had explicitly forsworn any claim to social equality, let alone the right for blacks to marry whites.



What the Southern foamers, political conservatives to a man, feared was that Washington might help the dangerously progressive Roosevelt get elected in his own right
Who was a specific African American who visited the White House? What did the opposition say? Who is H.W. Brands? What dinner was controversial?
Booker T. Washington, "White women of the South, how do you like it?" author of "TR: The Last Romantic" and the just-released "Traitor to His Class: The White House
question: Who was a specific African American who visited the White House?, answer: Booker T. Washington, | question: What did the opposition say?, answer: "White women of the South, how do you like it?" | question: Who is H.W. Brands?, answer: author of "TR: The Last Romantic" and the just-released "Traitor to His Class: The | question: What dinner was controversial?, answer: White House