At the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, where two and half years later Senator Foraker would be honored, a mass meeting of protest was held on November 20. “Those present refused to sing ‘America’ on the Chairman's call.” The Washington Bee's editor Calvin Chase (a Roosevelt delegate to the Republican convention six years earlier) spoke bitterly but illogically when he offered a fifty-three-year-old receipt kept by Roosevelt's maternal grandmother from her sale of a “young woman slave” to raise money for Roosevelt's mother's trousseau as proof that “the President is against the black man.” A former commanding officer of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, General Andrew Burt was supposed to speak that evening but, claiming he was physically “broken down” from his exertions to save the Black Battalion, he could not come.41 Burt loved the regiment and retained a respect and affection for its soldiers for the rest of his life. When asked if they were good fighters, he would reply with relish, “Fight, did you say? Why they would charge into hell, fight their way out, and drag the devil out by the tail.”42 In New York, Gilchrist Stewart, a black lawyer who seemed to be everywhere working on behalf of the Black Battalion, referred to Roosevelt's efforts on behalf of Japanese laborers in the American West and demanded he show similar concern for the “black citizens of America.”43
The most fiery words were by Negro preachers in their churches. Reverend J. E. C. Fernanders of the Metropolitan Union AME Church in New York said Roosevelt was sacrificing Negroes “upon the altar of Southern prejudice.” Reverend Adam Clayton Powell of the Emanuel Baptist Church in New Haven repeated this thought but focused the blame on Brownsville. “Say what you please, these soldiers were dismissed because the white people of Brownsville wanted them dismissed, and for no other reason under the sun.” He continued, “[Roosevelt] has greatly disappointed us.”44 A few Negro churches and their members saw the discharges differently. In Cincinnati, home of Secretary of War Taft and Senator Foraker, the largest black church in the city passed a resolution supporting Roosevelt and criticizing the soldiers who did the shooting and hid behind their shielding comrades.45
In his speech, Reverend Powell also had harsh words for one of his own race, Booker T. Washington. Reverend Powell said Roosevelt's order was consistent with advice he got from Washington, “a man who believes it best to submit meekly to wrongs and has sold himself for a little political sop,” and he minced few words when adding “Dr. Booker T. Washington is…responsible for the change in the President's attitude towards the Negro-American.”46
Whatever Washington may have been responsible for, he was not to blame for Special Orders No. 266. On October 30, Roosevelt secretly summoned him to the White House and alerted him to what was coming. Washington tried to talk him out of it but could not. On Brownsville, Roosevelt wanted no advice from the one black man whose past guidance he had solicited and paid attention to. This matter had nothing to do with federal appointments or rebuilding the Republican Party in the South, matters generally in Washington's portfolio. It certainly affected Negroes, and therefore had something to do with the man from Tuskegee, and it is hard to believe Roosevelt did not see this. More likely he did, but his mind was made up, and he ignored any advice to the contrary from Washington. Pledging Washington to absolute secrecy, he sent him on his way. Eleven days later, Washington wrote he “did [his] full duty in trying to persuade [Roosevelt] from the course…but got nowhere.”47 Washington saw that, having made a decision, Roosevelt was intellectually and emotionally incapable of changing his mind. But Washington kept trying.48 He had to. Negro unhappiness with Roosevelt carried great risks for him, his prestige, and his influence. Knowing he had no safe harbor save with Roosevelt, he wrote, “I cannot [be] disloyal to our friend, who I mean to stand by.” Besides, Roosevelt “always comes out on top.”49
WASHINGTON WAS NOT THE only Negro to stand with President Roosevelt. For all his militancy on the question of Negro rights and hostility to Roosevelt's order to discharge the soldiers, the middle ground was W. E. B. Du Bois's position. He accepted there was a conspiracy of silence and agreed the shooters should be severely punished, and those who knew who their identities should be too, only not as much.50 In Baltimore, preachers at its AME churches by resolution advised Roosevelt that they accepted that the Twenty-Fifth Infantry's soldiers were shooters; they stood resolutely against this behavior and just as firmly against any of the soldiers’ shielding the shooters from discovery; they believed it was reasonable for the army to maintain discipline; and they did not question the president's right to throw the guilty parties out of the army. But once the army had “exhausted its efforts without success to discover the guilty…the duty of the authorities has been fully discharged,” and granting all of the above, the president was wrong in what he did to punish the innocent along with the guilty. Taking his support for Roosevelt further even than Booker T. Washington's, the principal of the Hearne Colored Schools in Texas wrote to Roosevelt on November 8, thanking him “for this great and priceless lesson and its future bearing to my unfortunate people.”
John Milholland of the Constitution League noted in his diary on November 18, “The week has been spent trying to save the Negro soldiers in Texas whom President Roosevelt has ordered to be dishonorably discharged because they refused to ‘peach’ upon their comrades who shot up Brownsville to answer the assaults [Milholland's emphasis] and infamies upon them by the local Bourbons…. The effort is great…. I sent a long cable, costing about $25, to Roosevelt in Panama telling him of the…attitude of [the] Press.” A man whose history with Theodore Roosevelt went back two decades, he decided it would be more effective if Gilchrist Stewart, who worked for the Constitution League, signed the telegram.51 But together they were planning their next steps.
THIS WAS NOT THE first hint there might be organized pushback against Special Orders No. 266. Washington had warned Roosevelt of this when they met in October. Governor Curtis Guild Jr. of Massachusetts, a fellow Republican, asked in a telegram marked “Personal and Confidential” for reconsideration on behalf of “the most prominent colored soldiers of Massachusetts…strongly moved by the proposed punishment.” How strongly? Guild's wire was sent on the morning after the election, when most people in America still were unaware of the discharges. Somehow these soldiers managed to organize themselves that quickly and face Governor Guild in his office and demand that the telegram be sent. Pulling out all the stops, Guild went on to say that some of the men “served under [Colonel Robert Gould] Shaw” and “carried the colors [of the black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers] at Fort Wagner,” where the unit's manpower was gutted by Confederate forces. With a request there was a threat. “These men are all your friends and do not desire any political capital by public attacks on you.”
Livid at this impertinence, President Roosevelt wired back that same day, “The order in question will under no circumstances be rescinded or modified.” He felt only “profound indifference” to public attacks.52 A few hours later, a nervous Governor Guild, his office by then presumably empty of the Negro veterans, surrendered with presumably his last comment on the matter. “Cannot see why you should take offense friendly message…will simply tell them affair is closed.”53 Like Booker T. Washington, he would not pick a fight with a man who always seemed to win.
THE CRITICISM SWELLED WHILE Roosevelt was on his Panama trip. On November 15, while he was enjoying a leisurely train ride from Colón to Panama City, the New York County (Manhattan) Republican Committee unanimously voted to ask him to cancel the discharges. “Roosevelt's Own Personal Machine against Him,” reported the New York Age.54 It was big news. In the sixty-six years since Abraham Lincoln's election, the nation had sent only one Democrat to the White House. Repudiation of a president by his own party in his home city was a seismic tremble potentially foreshadowing a tectonic shift by black voters. (The New York Times’ coverage of the committee's vote was tranquilized: Gilchrist Stewart introduced the resolution; there was unanimous approval; end of story.55) Stewart wired Roos
evelt the next day about the Republican Committee's resolution along with a plea to reverse his action. Angrily Roosevelt fired back in his own telegram, “Unless facts as known to me are shown to be false,” nothing would be changed. If Stewart or anyone else had such facts, “have them before me at once on my return.”56 The Brownsville Incident was awake, opposition was strengthening, and Roosevelt would return to an increasingly difficult problem.
ON NOVEMBER 9, THE day Roosevelt left for Panama, Military Secretary Ainsworth sent a telegram to General McCaskey at the Department of Texas. “Orders will be sent today directing discharge without honor of all enlisted men of Twenty-Fifth Infantry present at Fort Brown at time of disturbance there.” It was marked “Confidential” because he feared violence when the soldiers learned what would be done with them. Ainsworth ordered a battalion from the Twenty-Sixth Infantry commanded by a “discreet officer” to Fort Reno to keep an eye on the black soldiers until they left the “country” and there was no danger of trouble from them. The black soldiers were to be disarmed when these white troops got there. Discharges and final payment of what was owed the soldiers were to be staged “so that no large body shall go on same train or at same time.” The whole process was to be expedited and over with quickly.57
On November 11, the Twenty-Sixth Infantry arrived. General Garlington's threat was about to be made good. Testimony a few years later from Private Boyd Conyers of Company B, a young soldier from rural Georgia, captures the soldiers’ despair, hopelessness, and shuddering fear of the darkness about to descend on them and their families. “When we was to be disarmed the soldiers fell about on their bunks, and it was one of the saddest things I have ever seen in my life. The soldiers were crying, even Mingo Sanders was crying and his wife was screaming, when we was disarmed. I never experienced such sadness in my life.” Private Conyers's certainty that no man in the Black Battalion had anything to do with the shooting in Brownsville became unshakeable. “I believe if any man had been implicated in that shooting he would have told something about it. I know I would.”58
WITH ONLY DISCHARGE AHEAD of them, the soldiers kept drilling. Their behavior was, according to Major C. J. T. Clarke, the “discreet officer” from the Twenty-Sixth Infantry, nothing less than excellent.59 “As they were paid off and dismissed they remained orderly and well-behaved. None displayed any ugly feeling. Their officers were mute.”60 Major Penrose was with his soldiers to the end, and many came up to him to say good-bye. In El Reno, while awaiting the trains to take them to their hometowns or wherever they were going to restart and rebuild their lives, the now former United States soldiers comported themselves properly. The El Reno police chief had no call to report any misbehavior, no soldier needed to be arrested, and there was no instance of drunkenness or any misconduct. “He would hardly have known the men were being discharged during this period.”61
By November 27 it was over. Every man was gone.62 “Here goes the last of the best disciplined, best behaved, best regulated battalion in the United States Army,” Major Penrose told a reporter for the Washington Herald. When asked if this was for publication, the bitter officer said it was and added, “I will add there was but little evidence to convict these brave men.”63 “The discharged soldiers feel that when Mr. Roosevelt hears their side of the story he will grant them a hearing.”64 In Washington, Senator Foraker believed so too. “I was all the while hoping that with the truth established…the President would in a manly fashion undo the wrong he had done.”65
That night, President Roosevelt returned to the White House and Brownsville.
“[My enemies] will, as usual, try to blame me for all of this. They can talk; I cannot, without being disloyal to our friend, who I mean to stand by throughout his administration.”
Booker T. Washington in a letter to
Charles W. Anderson, November 7, 1906
ROOSEVELT HAD IGNORED BOOKER T. Washington's warning of danger on October 30, 1906, but Washington, sure Roosevelt was committing a blunder, kept at it.1 A few days after their meeting, he sent a newspaper clipping “from a recent address delivered in Montgomery in which I spoke out against Negro crimes, even more strongly than you have done” (author's emphasis). With his bona fides thus reconfirmed, he segued into what he knew Roosevelt considered the Negro crime of the moment—Brownsville. “If you possibly can avoid doing so, I very much hope you will not take definite action regarding the Negro soldiers in the Brownsville Affair, until your return from Panama.”2 A thoroughly irritated Roosevelt replied dismissively, “I could not possibly refrain from acting as regards those colored soldiers. You can not have any information to give me privately to which I could pay heed, my dear Mr. Washington.”3 The matter was closed. The Wizard's influence with Roosevelt was cresting quickly, and Roosevelt was in danger of becoming a pariah to black Americans.4
IF WASHINGTON SUPPORTED ROOSEVELT, his good standing with him might survive. But his position as the nation's recognized black leader, already increasingly rocked by Du Bois's attacks on him for not making life better for Negroes, might not. He would be a victim of Brownsville just as surely as the soldiers were. Still, as much as he disagreed, he knew he could not cross Roosevelt, so for himself as much as anything else, he would not give up trying to change Roosevelt's mind. He would have to work through someone else, Secretary of War William Howard Taft.5
Taft was returning from a tour of the West November 17; Roosevelt was due back at his desk on November 27. Washington would not have much time. But Washington correctly suspected Taft did not agree with Roosevelt's shortcut justice and thought he might be offended by the injustice of the discharges. Because he was out of Washington, DC, and not involved in Brownsville, Taft knew little of its details and was therefore a tabula rasa on which Washington could persuasively press his own ideas and suggestions.
On November 20, Roosevelt was cruising home. “Our visit to Panama was most successful as well as most interesting,” he wrote that day to his son Kermit.6 That same day, Washington sent a “Personal and Confidential” letter to Taft. As was his style, he began obliquely. He politely asked if the War Department intended to “enlist additionally colored soldiers to take the place of the three companies which were dismissed?” “I very much hope, by the time the President returns, some plan will have been thought out by which to do something that may change the feeling of the colored people now as a whole have regarding the dismissal of the three colored companies. I have never in all my experience with the race, experienced a time when the entire people have the feeling that they have now in regard to the administration.”7 This gentle threat would remind Taft that he was part of the administration, it was in his name Special Orders No. 266 was issued, and whatever angers, disappointments, and frustrations the Negroes had would touch him as well.
Washington was playing a clever game here. Changing Taft's and Roosevelt's minds would be a complete victory; exerting any influence on Taft would build political capital for the future; getting the Black Battalion rebuilt would look good for now. (On the last point, Washington had better hopes of success. By law the Twenty-Fifth Infantry was Negro; the army could hardly do anything else than rebuild it as Washington was suggesting.) In all this Washington was careful to wall himself off from Roosevelt's wrath. If Roosevelt lashed out, it would be at Taft. Washington was merely pointing out the political implications to Taft, something Roosevelt, politician par excellence, might understand and forgive.
Three days earlier, as Washington knew, Taft had in fact decided to suspend Special Orders No. 266. Brownsville historian John D. Weaver credited Mary Church Terrell and John Milholland of the Constitution League with nudging Taft toward that decision, and he was close to the truth. On Saturday, November 17, the day after the discharges began at Fort Reno, Milholland made a long-distance telephone call to Mrs. Terrell in Washington and asked her to go to Taft on behalf of the Constitution League. She would be glad she went.8
Mrs. Terrell met Milholland when both were in Europe in 190
4. She had spoken in Berlin to the International Congress of Women about the place of who she called “colored” women in America, and because she was fluent in German she was the only speaker able to deliver her address in the language of the host country. According to the Washington Post, she was the “the hit of the congress.”9 Returning home via London, she met William Thomas Stead, English journalist and editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, who arranged for Mrs. Terrell to dine with John Milholland.10
Her father was Robert Church, a former slave who became wealthy investing in Memphis real estate. When she was six, he sent Mary to Antioch College Model School in Ohio and then to Oberlin College, also in Ohio, where she majored in classics. Her freshman year she was named the class poet and later was editor of the Oberlin Review. She stayed at Oberlin for a bachelor's and a master's degree and then taught at Wilberforce, America's oldest private black college.
Ohio could not hold her, and in 1887 she left for Washington, DC, to teach Latin at M Street Colored High School. A year later, she went to Europe, where the absence of racial discrimination almost persuaded her to stay. As she later wrote in her autobiography, “I knew I would be much happier trying to promote the welfare of my race in my native land, working under certain hard conditions, than I would be living in a foreign land where I could enjoy freedom from prejudice but where I would make no effort to do the work which I then believed it was my duty to do.”11 She returned to America and M Street High School and reunited with teacher and former suitor Robert H. Terrell. His father, “Faithful Harrison” Terrell, had been President Grant's manservant, and in the summer of 1883 Grant helped young Robert get a job at the Boston Customs House to earn money for his senior year at Harvard University. “I should feel an interest in any young man, white or colored, who had the courage and ability to graduate himself at Harvard without pecuniary aid other than what he could earn,” Grant wrote.12 When Robert and Mary married in 1891 he decided to change careers and become a lawyer. In 1910, President Taft would appoint Robert Terrell to the District of Columbia Municipal Court, making him the first black judge in the nation's capital.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 15
