Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  It worked. On March 23, Roosevelt wrote Lodge, “The machine people here [Senator Platt's organization] have it in their heads that I am to be made Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and evidently approve of it as a means of getting me out of New York.” For Platt, distancing the hard-to-control Roosevelt from his fiefdom trumped any fear he might have over the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Roosevelt had overcome his ornery personality and self-centered nature to get what he wanted. He needed more than the assistance of others; he needed to overcome his own reputation.40

  While earning his right to ask for the appointment by campaigning for McKinley, Roosevelt, as Edmund Morris described it, “went about his familiar business of emasculating the opposition.”41 Morris cites how Roosevelt wowed the crowds by likening Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan and others favoring free silver to “the leaders of the Terror in France in mental and moral attitude.” He went after Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois for pardoning rioters from the Haymarket bombing in 1886, calling them “these foulest criminals, the men whose crimes take the form of assassination.” This manner of speaking—harsh language, abrasive condemnation, and take-no-prisoners attitude—would become standard Rooseveltian vilification of people who did not support him and his ideas or when he felt he had to defend his actions.

  “Because the world is judged by its majority, and an individual too is judged by the majority of deeds, good or bad, if he performs one good deed, happy is he for turning the scale both for himself and for the whole world on the side of merit; if one commits one transgression, woe to him for weighing himself and the whole world in the scale of guilt, for it is said, ‘But one sinner.’ On account of this single sin which this man commits he and the whole world lose much good.”

  Rabbi Eleazar, son of Rabbi Simeon

  THE TRAIN CARRYING THE soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry ran straight as the crow flies almost due north from Brownsville. Around 9:00 p.m. it stopped at San Antonio, where the commanding officer of Fort Sam Houston and armed guards took custody of the prisoners from the Fort Brown stockade, then continued on to Fort Reno, a post with room to absorb four companies of infantry (including the straggling Company A on September 20).1 Penrose wired a greatly relieved General Ainsworth of their arrival at Fort Reno early Monday morning and added, “No trouble whatever during the journey.”2

  Fort Reno dated back to 1875, in what was then called the Indian Territory (which combined with the Oklahoma Territory to form the state of Oklahoma). A 1901 drawing shows flat Oklahoma land on which barracks and administrative buildings formed a square for the parade ground. Outside and parallel to one side of the square and extending away from it in both directions was a wide street with its own buildings and access to the town that took its name from the fort's, El Reno. For the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, it was a detention center away from the regular army, where they could be questioned about their roles in the shooting, probed for information they might have about others more deeply involved, and threatened with punishment for not cooperating.

  While the army's investigation proceeded unsuccessfully, the soldiers tried to crack the case on their own. More than anything, they wanted to avoid dismissal from the army for something they did not do. The oldest soldier in the battalion, First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, was candid enough to say his concern was his own self-interest. “I'm for Sanders…. I wanted to do all I could to relieve myself of this responsibility.”3 First Sergeant Jacob Frazier of Company D, who thought soldiers might have done it, tried to find out which ones. “Yes, sir; I did. I tried in a secret way…. I just spoke about it as though I didn't care much if they had killed the whole town. I wanted to see if I could get any information from anybody…. My time that I put in the service, it has been honest and faithful…. I did not want to lose my time [and] that is why I did that. I didn't want them to go and throw me out of the service, to cast me out, not even to allow me a job in the civil employment of the government. I wanted to be a man.”4 (His commanding officer, Captain Samuel Lyon, did not want him thrown out either. After the discharge, he gave Frazier a letter addressed “To any recruiting officer, United States Army” and recommended his reenlistment and return to Company C.5) Quartermaster Sergeant George McMurray of Company C testified everyone wanted to know who had done the shooting, and, “I would ask among the men, have you found out yet who did the shooting?”6 Sergeant Samuel C. Harley, also from Company C, a wounded veteran of the assault on the blockhouse at El Caney in Cuba: “We did possibly all we could in the time we had…but [I] could not get a single hint.”7 Even the lower-ranking enlisted men with not enough years in the army to worry about losing pensions and benefits worked at it. While still at Fort Brown, Private Len Reeves of Company D “called [my section] all together…and explained the matter to them and told them that if any of them knew who did it, or had heard, or anything about it, they would let me know [and] after we got to Fort Reno also, but I was never able to find out anything. Everybody seemed to be trying to find out, just like I was.”8

  ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5, because no soldier confessed to a part in the raid, because no soldier identified anyone who had any role in it, and because no soldier was able to persuade the army or President Roosevelt to protect him from discharge, no soldier was rescued from Roosevelt's decision. In a short, fifty-word letter on White House stationery, President Roosevelt directed the secretary of war to comply with General Garlington's recommendations. Four days later, with Secretary Taft away from Washington and unavailable, Arthur Murray, a lost-to-history acting chief of staff, issued Special Orders No. 266, which listed the names of the 167 soldiers to be discharged “and forever debarred from reenlisting in the Army or Navy of the United States, as well as from employment in any civil capacity under the Government.” (There was no legal authority to keep the men from future federal civil employment; Roosevelt corrected that in his special message to the Senate on January 14, 1907.) General Garlington's report carefully noted the names of soldiers who had been at Fort Brown on the night of the raid but whose enlistments ended before Special Orders No. 266 and had been honorably discharged. Roosevelt's order would remember these men and change their discharges to “without honor.”

  Secretary of War Taft was enjoying his vacation in Quebec and not really in the Brownsville loop, but perhaps he should have been. Scrupulously and judicially mindful of the obligation to act only with full knowledge of the facts and the law, he might have tried to dissuade Roosevelt. Such advice would have been worth listening to. Since Ainsworth had the matter under control at the War Department and Roosevelt was incrementally becoming more directly involved, Taft was not asked for his opinions and could tend to other business.

  SUCH AS CUBA. BY the summer of 1906, President Tomás Estrada Palma had lost control of his country and asked for a supportive show of force from his American patrons.9 President Roosevelt responded with Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon, thousands of US Marines and the navy, and, following in their wake, the man who never failed at any task Roosevelt gave him, William Taft. When Bacon disembarked the Marines, an angry Roosevelt wired: “You had no reason to direct the landing of those troops without specific authority from here. They are not to be employed in keeping general order without our authority.”10

  Taft, meanwhile, feared he too knew far too little about Cuba. “I am so lacking in knowledge that it is quite embarrassing to me to go,” he said to Secretary of State Elihu Root.11 Nevertheless, on September 19, as the men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry were drilling in Oklahoma, Taft arrived in Havana, where he promptly named himself Cuba's provisional governor.12 Quickly stabilizing the situation, on October 3 he returned to Washington. Taft came back not to the Brownsville matter or anything else dealing with the War Department. There was the election campaign going on, and President Roosevelt drafted his military leader into its ranks. Brownsville may have shared presidential attention with Cuba and the election, but by November, very little of the secretary of war's time was available for
the plight of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry.13

  THE ACTUAL ADMINISTRATION OF the War Department was for Taft an insignificant part of his job.14 The government money he controlled and could dispense on behalf of Roosevelt made Taft a “star salesman” for the administration's policies and programs.15 So off he went, campaigning in early October through the middle and far west. In Cheyenne on the day Roosevelt ordered the discharge of the Black Battalion and in the presence of Wyoming's Senator Francis E. Warren, Taft inspected Fort Russell and the new barracks and other buildings built with $750,000 of federal generosity. This expenditure and the deference paid to Senator Warren reflected his control of Wyoming and the power he held back in Washington as chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. Taft went on to Fort Sam Houston, where the arrested men from Brownsville were confined, but there is no indication that he questioned them or otherwise sought to solve the Brownsville dilemma. He may not have been aware they were there.

  A DISCHARGE WITHOUT HONOR is not a dishonorable discharge. Under the Articles of War, a dishonorable discharge could be awarded only after trial by court-martial. Discharge without honor had its roots in the Civil War, when soldiers were summarily discharged after doing something to “disgrace the service” but not necessarily a crime, and therefore could not be dishonorably discharged.16 Even serious offenses—desertion, for example—could be handled this way.17 A soldier discharged without honor was entitled to travel expenses back to his place of enlistment, and those with at least twenty years’ service, such as First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, could still be admitted to the Old Soldiers’ Home in Washington, DC.

  And it was not considered punishment.18 President Roosevelt would use this to parry accusations he was “punishing” men not found guilty of any crime.

  IN THE AFTERNOON OF November 8, President Roosevelt sent a cable to King Edward VII of Great Britain, the world's foremost sea power. The next day was Edward's birthday, and Roosevelt wanted his congratulations and best wishes to arrive punctually.19 That evening, with the highly satisfying voters’ decision behind him and the order to discharge the soldiers issued, President and Mrs. Roosevelt boarded the USS Louisiana for Panama. “It seems a strange thing to think of my now being President, going to visit the work of the Panama Canal which I have made possible” (author's emphasis).20

  THE SHOOTING ITSELF HAD attracted little attention in the newspapers.21 The New York Times, in three short paragraphs, incorrectly reported its cause was Negro troops angry over efforts to arrest one of their own for the Evans assault. It got the number and type of casualties right but misidentified the wounded policeman as Joe Dominge.

  Politicians and office holders, except for Brownsville's congressman and Texas's two senators, reacted to the news with a yawn. Whites normally disposed to work on behalf of Negro rights were just as indifferent. On October 10, 1906, John Milholland, the organizer, driving force, and hefty financial supporter of the Constitution League, an active biracial organization supporting Negro efforts to gain equality, spoke “to the Afro-American Constitutional League mass meeting in Cooper Union, which I hired for them, and in my speech boldly attacked Roosevelt's infamous policy towards the Southern Blacks and Whites, declaring that he [is] likely to go down in history bracketed with James Buchanan.” Milholland said nothing about Brownsville.22

  It was the horrible race riot in Atlanta a month later that overwhelmed any attention that otherwise might have been given Brownsville, even among blacks.23 George Myers and his friend and hanger-on Ralph Tyler exchanged many letters right after August 13, but not one mentioned Brownsville. Tyler made a point to compliment Senator Foraker's comments on the race riot in Atlanta, but he ignored Brownsville.24 The usually very sure-footed Booker T. Washington, generally the first to recognize the significance of events ignored by others, paid it little attention. A week after the raid he spoke to the National Negro Business League in Atlanta and had nothing to say about it.25 David Levering Lewis's Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Washington's bête noire W. E. B. Du Bois makes no reference to any comment by him. The energy of the Brownsville story soon depleted itself, as the shooting “receded to newspaper back pages and then disappeared.”26

  A CYCLONE OF ASTONISHMENT followed President Roosevelt's discharge order. Brownsville was back in the news. The New York Times declared Roosevelt's action “Unprecedented…dismissing in disgrace from the army an entire battalion of colored troops because of their failure to disclose the identity of some of their number who had been guilty of violence and murder.”27 The Washington Post, unaware that discharge without honor was not considered punishment, said, “While the President's power to discharge a soldier cannot be questioned, it is not conferred for purpose of punishment. Punishment is supposed to follow a trial.” The New York Sun saw the problem for what it was. “By the old law the individual is entitled to trial and must be proved guilty…. By the new law…the individual must prove his innocence.”28 The New York Evening Post was afraid Roosevelt has created “a most pernicious precedent.” The most bitter damnation, no doubt felt by many others as well, was from the New York Evening World: “executive lynch law.”29

  The South, as usual in those days, marched to an off-key and different drummer. The Atlanta Journal applauded Roosevelt for this “most commendable” act.30

  The Negro reservoir of good will toward Theodore Roosevelt quickly drained away. Beginning with his invitation to Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House in 1901, all hopes for real change had converged in him. With him had come the hope for the beginning, at long last, of equal participation in all America had to offer: economic advancement, political equality, social acceptance, liberation from the isolation and humiliation of Jim Crow, a chance at education that would lift Negroes out of sharecropper poverty and indenture, and, most important, the end of the physical violence, even horrible death, so many lived with day after day.

  Overnight Theodore Roosevelt went from being “our friend,” as Booker T. Washington referred to him, to, as Negro columnist Richard W. Thompson wrote to Washington's secretary Emmett J. Scott, an “anathema with the Negroes from now on.”31 In his autobiography, Washington wrote that, “as a consequence of this order, the song of praise of ten millions of people were turned into a chorus of criticism and censure.”32 For W. E. B. Du Bois, “The door once declared open, Mr. Roosevelt by his word and deed since has slammed most emphatically in the black man's face.”33

  Here and there, the expectation remained that Roosevelt could be counted on to do the right thing. Charles V. Richey, a former soldier in the Twenty-Fifth Infantry who had fought at El Caney, held on to this belief. He wrote to the Washington Post, “Let us give the President a little time, by which I think he will save the innocent boys in blue, without discredit to himself…. Teddy can still be Teddy indeed, and that we may love him more for not retreating to rehear an issue which he can meet in an honorable manner during his march forward.”34

  The revulsion's vanguard was the Negro press. Ignored in the pages of what today would be called “mainstream” broadsheets and tabloids, cohesive black communities developed separate newspapers that kept Negroes current with local and national news, political and cultural events, arts and literature, black leaders, personalities, and opinion. One of the most influential was the New York Age, edited by the talented but emotionally troubled writer, poet, and journalist T. Thomas Fortune. A week after the discharges, the Age published a sample of comments and criticisms from its sister black publications. In Richmond, the Planet called Roosevelt's decision “out of harmony with the principles of this Republic” and tore into him for “the most monumental blunder of his administration.” The Washington Bee called the discharges “shameful.” Acknowledging “a large number [of the soldiers] knew who the real perpetrators of the crime were,” the Bee nevertheless characterized what Roosevelt did to the other soldiers as “shameful in the extreme.” Also seeing politics in the announcement's delay, the paper wondered whether it might not
have affected the New York governor's race, in which the Republican Charles Evans Hughes defeated Democratic newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.35 The Baltimore Afro-American Ledger saw Roosevelt as “tinctured with colorphobia.”

  The Age characterized Roosevelt's action as “an outrage upon the rights of citizens who are entitled in civil life to trial by jury and in military life to trial by court-martial.”36 In Boston, two months after Special Orders No. 266, Alexander's Magazine pounded away at Roosevelt in every editorial into January except one.37 In Washington, DC, Calvin Chase chose to lash out at a Roosevelt defense: “If this is military discipline, then we say to h—l with military discipline.”38 Ralph Tyler alliteratively wrote Booker T. Washington that “Negroes are depleting the dictionary of adjectives in their denunciation of the President.”39

  Meanwhile, the War Department was deluged with letters from “nearly every section of the country” angry over the discharges. Ignoring its army officers’ recommendations relied upon by their commander in chief, it absolved itself from any responsibility and said it was Roosevelt's doing.40