Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  EVEN WITHOUT HEARING FROM President Roosevelt, the pressure to crack this nut was building. If the soldiers shot up Brownsville because of Brownsville's treatment of them, it might be a good idea to learn just how bad this treatment was. General Ainsworth directed the Department of Texas to look into this, and the Department of Texas instructed the Twenty-Sixth Infantry to send someone back to Brownsville to find out. According to two of its officers, it was pretty bad. So scorching were two affidavits that, toward the end of September, Lieutenant Colonel Leonard A. Lovering was sent to Fort Reno to “make an investigation and report on the matter.”45

  In his report two weeks later, Lovering confessed it was “difficult to obtain testimony about troubles between soldiers and civilians in Brownsville.”46 Since this would have meant a thin report, one not pleasing to Generals McCaskey and Ainsworth, Lovering showed some initiative and inflated the meaning of “the matter” he was told to investigate to include more than the attitude of people in Brownsville toward the Black Battalion. As long as he was speaking to the soldiers to get an idea of what they really thought about the harassment, he might as well ask them about the shooting itself.

  Lovington's report is by far the most thorough of the army investigations that took place in the two months after the shooting. He took the sworn testimony of Major Penrose, Captains Macklin and Lyon, Lieutenant Grier, and practically every noncommissioned officer and enlisted man in the battalion. He asked for and received evidence showing which soldiers were at the post or nearby on that fateful night. He made lists of those soldiers with alibis, those absent from the post on duty elsewhere, and those seen by officers while the shooting was in progress. Lovington asked soldiers where they were when the shooting began and had they been harassed by civilians, and a surprising number neither had trouble nor heard of any soldier who had.

  He also questioned Major Blocksom about items in his report, including why men who heard the first shots were so sure they were fired from the town into Fort Brown. Carefully inspecting buildings and other structures in the post, Blocksom “could find no bullets striking anywhere in the post.” His theory was that the early shots supposedly fired into the post were intentionally aimed high and over the post to justify an impression the fort was under attack.47 (This might explain why the next morning Captain Macklin found army shells on the town side of the waist-high wall.)

  After all this, Lovering's conclusions were disappointing. His report joined those from Penrose and Macklin in failing to identify any shooter. It did not advance the ball at all.48

  WHILE LOVERING WAS WASTING time at Fort Reno and President Roosevelt was working himself into a fury in Oyster Bay, the Black Battalion was languishing at Fort Reno, its military effectiveness withering away from inactivity and the late-summer Oklahoma sun. Major Penrose despaired for his battalion and its men. On September 20, the same day the battalion's Company A arrived from Wyoming to bring it to full strength, he knew he had to make it clear to the army that things could not go on this way. He reminded the Department of Texas that adding the time they were confined to Fort Brown after the shooting and their days at Fort Reno, his men “had no liberty of any kind or character for over a month.” They endured extra guard duty, extra drills, roll calls when bugled back to their barracks, one or two surprise inspections each night, and unending policing (cleaning up) of their area. Penrose had thought this might persuade soldiers who knew something about the shooting to come clean. None had. More frustrating to him, this make-work had the opposite effect. All his officers and many of the black noncommissioned officers agreed with him that only a few men knew anything, and they were continuing to resist.

  The next day, General McCaskey wired Washington that the men of the battalion were practically prisoners, and he recommended the restrictions be ended.49 Three days later he forwarded a letter from Penrose suggesting that restrictions be ended (as a carrot) and discharges be implemented (the stick), but in stages to encourage men to talk before they were out of the army and it was too late; McCaskey commented that Penrose's proposal of discharges was “excessive.”50

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DISAGREED. His displeasure with Penrose's variation of Blocksom's recommendation was that it was at best a half measure and, if not immediately successful, it would take too long to reach a result that would put him and the army right back where they had been all along, no suspects to deal with and no justice to dispense. On October 4, 1906, the acting secretary of war ordered the US Army's inspector general, Brigadier General Ernest A. Garlington, to Oklahoma to get the matter over with quickly.51 Gone was the need to learn what happened. “The President directs that you…secure information that will lead to the apprehension and punishment of the men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry believed in the riotous disturbance” (author's emphasis). Garlington was told to tell the soldiers, “The orders given by the President [are] ‘If the guilty parties cannot be discovered…the whole three companies…should be dismissed and the men forever debarred from reenlisting in the Army or Navy of the United State as well as from employment in any civil capacity under the Government.’”52

  Evidently, no thought was given to the legal basis of such a presidential order or the precedents for such an action. With his mind free of any such concerns, on the same day Garlington was sent to Oklahoma, Roosevelt was off to dedicate the new Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg (“the handsomest building I ever saw”) and talk with the state's Republican bosses about the off-year elections coming up the next month.53

  ON HIS WAY TO Fort Reno, Garlington stopped in Oklahoma City to speak to Major Blocksom, where, other than finding out for the first time about Lovering's investigation, he learned “nothing new.”54 Then on to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to examine the twelve soldiers (he referred to them as prisoners) still in the guardhouse there. He believed these were the men more likely to be shooters or conspirators. Each of them denied any role in the raid or knowing anything about it. If this small group had been involved in the raid, Garlington's chances of getting one to admit it were slim. The smaller the conspiracy, the less likely one member will break away. An active player was unlikely to admit his own guilt and buy himself a court-martial. Better to play dumb and be returned to civilian life. What made no sense to Garlington was that, although all of them knew the whites in Brownsville did not want them at Fort Brown and knew of Newton's, Reid's, and Adair's abusive treatment, none felt any animosity or resentment. Garlington's better chance was at Fort Reno, where he was more likely to find a soldier guilty only of hearing what others had done and now willing to tell what he had heard to stay in the army.55

  At Fort Reno, Garlington met with the battalion's officers; they had learned nothing new to tell him. He turned to noncommissioned officers with longtime service in the army and careers and pensions to protect; some were aware of the ill-treatment in Brownsville, but all were mystifyingly indifferent to it. None knew anything about the raid. He assembled the entire battalion and read President Roosevelt's order with its threat of dismissal. He appealed to their pride as members of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry and in themselves as soldiers. It was futile. In a last effort, General Garlington said he would make himself accessible to any soldier who wanted to disclose privately what he knew. One soldier came to him, and that man, unnamed by Garlington but later identified as First Sergeant Mingo Sanders of Company B, showed up, “not to give information, but to urge his own case for exemption” from the discharges.56

  Recognizing he failed to “secure information that will lead to the apprehension and punishment of” the raiders, Garlington returned to Washington to make his report. There was “a possible general understanding among the enlisted men of this battalion…that they would admit nothing.” He repeated every previous investigation's conclusion: the raid “was done by enlisted men…at Fort Brown.” Acknowledging the innocent soldier would be punished along with the guilty, he nevertheless recommended every enlisted man who was at Fort Brown that night be “discharged wit
hout honor.”57

  THE THREAD OF LOGIC for a conspiracy of silence was a straight line starting with the May announcement of the battalion's transfer to Brownsville to the salvo of shots on August 13: the townspeople did not want them; attempts were made to keep them away; the black soldiers came anyway and were greeted by an unwelcoming town and sullen townspeople; unhappiness with the soldiers’ presence quickly led to racial discrimination, harassment, and violence; the soldiers’ resentment quickly became anger and a plan to get even, which all soldiers thought a good idea; and to protect their comrades who did the shooting, a conspiracy of silence was agreed to.

  Garlington scoffed at the notion that no one could say anything because no one knew anything. There had to be “a possible general understanding…as to the position they would take.” “The secretive nature of the race, where crimes charged to members of their color are made, is well known.”58

  Speaking for himself and a great many other people at the time, journalist and author Arthur Wallace Dunn believed that “Brownsville showed a characteristic of the Negro little understood. Negroes will not tell on each other…. A chief characteristic of the Negro is secretiveness regarding himself and his people.”59 Alvred B. Nettleton, Civil War veteran and self-described “anti-slavery advocate when that phrase had a meaning,” was so sure this was happening in Brownsville, he sent a letter to Secretary of War Taft telling him “a very large proportion of the command” knew what happened but was not saying so.60 The soldiers’ defenders were just as sure the soldiers never talked because they were not the shooters.

  The argument goes on today.

  The army was at the end of its rope. The fox could not be caught. Let it go, but at least get it out of the hen house. Garlington recommended the dismissal of every enlisted man “serving at Fort Brown, Tex., on the night of August 13, 1906, and forever debarring them from reenlisting in the Army or Navy of the United States, [and] from employment in any civil capacity under the Government.”61

  IF THERE WAS SUCH an agreement among the soldiers to keep quiet to avoid criminal prosecution and army court-martial, it worked. The Cameron County grand jury, probably just itching to prosecute the men arrested by Texas Ranger McDonald, could do nothing. It had no hint of whom to indict. The army had the same problem.62 Those who doubted the conspiracy-of-silence theory were helpless to undermine it. One of the regiment's staunchest defenders, Brigadier General Andrew S. Burt, who was, except for the time in Cuba, their commanding officer from 1892 until 1902, refused to believe it. Pressed by the Senate Military Affairs Committee, “So that you would not expect the members of the battalion who had nothing to do with the shooting try to conceal the facts in regard to it, and prevent the detection of those who were guilty?” “No, Sir,” the general emphatically replied.63 Even General Garlington admitted he “could find no evidence of such understanding.”64 But without evidence, a reverse logic took hold, and the idea of a conspiracy of silence became self-supporting; the longer soldiers claimed unawareness of anything, the more they were lying, and this itself was proof of their agreement to say nothing about what they knew.

  Some saw this as a good thing, a sign of progress. Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, a white officer who led the First South Carolina Volunteers in the Civil War, was convinced it was “a long step forward” for the black race. “When I commanded them in the South, I feared they would never learn to stick together and be loyal to each other.” Higginson was elated the Brownsville soldiers “can neither be forced nor bribed to reveal who did it.”65

  If the conspiracy was planned and implemented right after the shooting, how was it possible to maintain it? Their champion General Burt didn't think it could be. The fact that it did not leak out was proof to him there was no battalion-wide conspiracy. His reasoning was oddly racial. He stood with the soldiers because “the colored man is essentially a vain man, and if a number of those men had been in a conspiracy, some one man in that crowd, if he would have been in it, he would have wanted to tell, so as to aggrandize some credit to himself. They are naturally a vain race.” Among only fifteen to twenty men, maybe the secret could be kept, but among all the enlisted men at Fort Brown, it would be “simply an impossibility.”66

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ACCEPTED THAT there was a conspiracy of silence in Brownsville and brooded about it. Such a thing could “not be tolerated in any soldiers, black or white.” Worse, it foreshadowed “the gravest danger to both races.”67 What worried him was that it suggested the black race was particularly likely to shield black criminals and would therefore, as a race, be thought untrustworthy.68 This was “the greatest danger.” Four months after the dismissals, he wrote he was “really deprest over this.” He said before Brownsville, he dismissed “the claim of Southern whites that the decent Negroes would actively or passively shield their own wrongdoers.” Now he wasn't so sure, and it gave him “the most serious concern,” because it showed that “colored people…[have lost] sight of every real movement for the betterment of their race, of every real wrong done their race by peonage or lynching, and to fix their eyes only upon this movement to prevent the punishment of atrociously guilty men of their race.”69 “The respectable colored people must learn not to harbor their criminals, but to assist the officers in bringing them to justice. This is the larger crime…. The two races can never get on until there is an understanding on the part of both to make common cause with the law-abiding against criminals of any color.”70

  The idea that the black community has a code of silence for black crime has proven durable, even among African Americans of the twenty-first century. In 2010, more than a century after Brownsville, Bill Maxwell, an African American syndicated columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, wrote of three black women in Tampa who, after hearing gunshots, rushed into the street to find two police officers on the ground dying. Maxwell writes that for calling 911 and remaining with the dying officers until help arrived, the women were “ostracized by many other black people…. Their sin, considered by many to be perhaps the worst in American black culture, was helping ‘the enemy’—the police.”71

  ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5, President Roosevelt, just as he had threatened, ordered “that the recommendations of General Garlington be complied with.”72 Every enlisted soldier who had been at Fort Brown on the night of the raid was to be dismissed without honor. Not one was to be spared.73

  One question—at the time and ever since—is why it took Roosevelt two weeks to do what Major Blocksom recommended back in September, which Roosevelt himself supported when Blocksom proposed it.74 Was it that the 1906 off-year elections were the next day and Roosevelt did not want to antagonize and scare away those who were probably the most loyal Republican voters—Negroes? The New York Times reported two weeks after the election from a “leak” (never identified by the New York Times) that “political considerations were not wholly overlooked” and the order was kept hidden until “it was too late for the colored vote…to be affected.”75 Three days later, the New York Times seemed to confirm the connection between the delay and election day when it wrote that Republican leaders in Washington were congratulating themselves “on the President's foresight in holding up the publication of the order,” otherwise “some well-known men in Congress…would have lost.”76

  Roosevelt had a lot on his plate at the time. Bids for work on the Panama Canal had to be sorted out. The attorney general needed guidance on the ongoing prosecutions of trusts, especially the Standard Oil case. There was the frightening possibility that Japan, fortified by the way it humbled Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, might turn hostile to the United States over treatment of Japanese workers in western states, most importantly California. A vacancy on the Supreme Court had to be filled.77 Possibly the biggest domestic mess was the Department of the Interior, where charges of fraudulent land acquisitions in the American West by wealthy ranchers (almost all Republican and some elected officials) to take advantage of favorable terms and cheap prices under the Desert Land Act of 1877
would not go away.

  ALL THIS WAS NOTHING compared to the Niagara of Roosevelt correspondence. In the same ten-day period, he wrote letters dealing with investigations by the Interstate Commerce Commission into railroad rates; the as-yet unratified treaty with Great Britain to resolve the use of nets by American fisherman in the waters of Newfoundland; the consequences to the American navy if disarmament meetings in The Hague actually accomplished anything; and the ongoing disarray in Cuba. He was telling anyone (and it seemed everyone) how he disliked William Randolph Hearst (he aligned Hearst's “thoroly” disreputable life with that of Winston Churchill, then a low-ranking member of the British government) and how, as his spelling of “thoroly” indicates, conscientiously he was working to simplify spelling. He was also thinking about whom he might want for the 1908 Republican presidential nomination.78 Catching his breath, Roosevelt sent a “private and personal” letter to a different Winston Churchill, the American writer from New Hampshire, complimenting him on his recent book about Granite State politics.79

  IT CANNOT BE DENIED that the off-year election was important to Roosevelt and something he worked on with care, perseverance, and worry. Roosevelt always put his heart and soul into winning his own and other Republicans’ elections. Presidents are not only the heads of state and heads of government; they are also the head of their political party. Working on party affairs is part of the job and in election years especially so. The 1906 election would be the last one of his administration, and for him too much of his legislative program and legacy were still at stake. Historian Barbara Tuchman understood that Roosevelt always had “a haunting fear of being defeated in elections.”80 As Election Day got closer, Roosevelt spent more time immersed in it. The men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, in limbo at Fort Reno, were part of the election's equation, and they had to wait for it to be over.