At Birmingham, Alabama, President Harding spoke on the Negro question, October 25, 1921. Elected president by the greatest majority which had ever placed a president in power, his remarks, if not very profoundly wise, were unquestionably bravely frank. His position was that unless there should “be recognition of the absolute divergence in things social and racial,” there might be “occasion for great and permanent differentiation.” To quote him in such passages as most clearly and unequivocally expressed his views, he will be found to have said: Men of different races may well stand uncompromisingly against any suggestion of social equality. Indeed it would be helpful to have the word equality eliminated from this consideration, to have it accepted on both sides that this is not a question of social equality but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal and inescapable difference. We shall have made real progress when we develop an attitude in the public and community thought of both races which recognizes the difference.[369] To this he added, as if replying to some unexpressed utterance, altho’ he was the sole speaker: I would accept that a black man cannot be a white man and that he does not need and should not aspire to be as much like a white man as possible in order to accomplish the best that is possible for him.[370] In these two utterances President Harding put himself in accord with Abraham Lincoln and in opposition to Theodore Roosevelt’s dinner to Booker Washington, and, from this, he drew near to what is supposed to be the teaching of Booker Washington: “I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote.... I have no sympathy with the half baked altruism that would overstock us with doctors and lawyers of whatever color and leave us in need of people fit and willing to do the manual work of a work-a-day world.”[371] From these generalizations, after quoting from F. D. Lugard a paragraph which even a Philadelphia lawyer would be puzzled to unravel, in which it is declared that while there shall be equality in the paths of knowledge and culture and equal admiration and opportunity, yet each must pursue his own inherited traditions, and while agreeing to be spiritually equal diverge physically and materially, the President reached the piece-de-resistance of his discourse: