Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  TAFT WOULD SAY IT was the Philippines that put him in the White House.68 He was wrong. What did it was Theodore Roosevelt's decision to put him there. Roosevelt believed there was no space between how he governed the country for almost eight years and how Taft would in the future. “He and I view public questions exactly alike.”69 Besides, for Roosevelt, Taft was the last Republican standing. Elihu Root, Roosevelt's first choice, was unelectable. Others on the left were too much to the left. None on the right satisfied him. Foraker made his skin crawl. Taft made sense. As the Black Battalion drilled at Fort Reno in the autumn of 1906, Will Taft still wanted to be on the Supreme Court. But he knew Theodore Roosevelt and Nellie Taft dearly wanted him in the White House. He was coming around to them.

  After a cabinet meeting one day, Roosevelt asked Taft, Secretary of State Elihu Root, and Postmaster General George B. Cortelyou to stay behind and chat about a vacancy on the Supreme Court and the 1908 election. They ganged up on Taft and told him he “stood the best chance among the Republicans.” Roosevelt, realizing he had an ally in Nellie Taft, told Taft he would speak to her. Five days later she was in his office telling him why her husband should not be on the Supreme Court. That morning, Roosevelt had a letter from Taft arguing why he should not be president. The Tafts were a house divided, and Roosevelt knew how to exploit this and get what he and Nellie wanted.

  Answering Taft the next day, Roosevelt said he read Taft's letter as not expressing a preference for the Supreme Court over the White House, which, Roosevelt confessed, he had always thought was what Taft wanted. He now realized that “your decided personal preference [is] to continue your present work” (author's emphasis), and the dilemma for Taft was whether to stay with it (and finish the work in the Philippines) or go on the Court. That decision, said Roosevelt, “no other man can [decide] for you.” A decision about the presidency was another matter, something to think about in the future, but since he had happened to discuss it the previous day with Nellie, “you are the man who is most likely to receive the…nomination and…have the most chance to succeed.” Until then, Roosevelt had an empty seat to fill. If Taft wanted to wait for another chance by not seeking the 1908 nomination, he should keep in mind, “the shadow of the Presidency falls on no man twice.”70

  Roosevelt's cleverness and ability to persuade men to do what he wanted has never been better displayed. He framed the problem for Taft a whole new way by showing it as three choices, not two, and by taking the third, Taft could easily lose both of the other two, one of which was his life's dream. In the letter's last words, Roosevelt piously disclaimed any desire to counsel or influence Taft. “No one can with wisdom advise you.”71

  Not long after this, the Tafts attended dinner at the White House. Roosevelt teased them about the decision as yet unmade. “I am the seventh son of a seventh daughter. I have clairvoyant powers. I see a man weighing 350 pounds. There is something hanging over his head. I cannot make out what it is; it is hanging by a slender thread. At one time it looks like the Presidency—then again it looks like the Chief Justiceship.”

  “Make it the Presidency,” said Mrs. Taft.

  “Make it the Chief Justiceship,” said her husband.72

  Despite this wish, Taft was now letting the winds carry him to where Roosevelt and Nellie wanted. But he wasn't quite ready to tell people. In a letter to Colonel William R. Nelson, founder of the Kansas City Star, after telling the similarly weight-challenged Nelson of recent dietary success, he wrote, “So far as the Presidential election is concerned,…there are a good many reasons which I could explain to you which would militate against [it].”73 But only a couple of weeks later, he had apparently overcome those reasons, assuring Nelson his presidential hopes had the support of another important Kansan, Senator Chester I. Long.74

  Having hooked his big fish, Roosevelt could allow some slack in the line connecting them. The following month, the day before the Brownsville shooting, in a “personal” letter to another Kansan, William Allen White, the influential editor of the Emporia Gazette, he wrote, “Of course I am not going to try to nominate any man. Personally you know how highly I think of Secretary Taft, but I am not going to take a hand in his nomination, for it is none of my business. I am sure Kansas will like him.” Then he added in ink, “He would be an ideal President.”75

  Knowing Nellie Taft suffered a case of the vapors whenever someone else's name was mentioned for 1908, during the 1906 fall campaign he spoke to her glowingly of Charles Evans Hughes's campaign for New York governor, sure she would misunderstand this as a possible endorsement of the New Yorker and get to work on her husband. Sure enough, she told Taft. Never one to push, Taft wrote Roosevelt, “Mrs. Taft said that you might…have to support Hughes for the presidency…. You know what my feeling has been in respect to the presidency, and can understand that it will not leave the slightest trace of disappointment should your views change and think it wise to make a start in another direction.”76 Roosevelt must have sighed heavily. It was a good thing Will Taft was working on his diet; he would need a lot of pushing.

  IN A CHAPTER CALLED “Surrender” in his Taft biography, Henry Pringle wrote that is exactly what Taft did as early as the summer of 1905.77 It is hard to imagine, nervous as they may have been when occasionally Taft looked to be falling off the wagon, that two people as perceptive as Theodore Roosevelt and Nellie Taft did not see it and start measuring Cornelia's pedestal in Columbus to see if there was room on it for one more jewel.

  “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap.”

  George Bernard Shaw, preface to

  Man and Superman: A Comedy and Philosophy

  THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ROOSEVELT and Foraker burst like overripe Ohio buckeye nuts in the spring and summer of 1906. It was bad enough when Foraker was the only Republican senator to vote against Roosevelt's railroad rate-setting Hepburn Act, but it got worse in September when he sent a telegram to Roosevelt cautioning against acting in Cuba on his own. “I do not like Foraker's action at all,” Roosevelt wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “He is a very powerful and very vindictive man. It is possible…that he intends to fight me hereafter on every point, good or bad.”1 Their disagreement was more than petulance or personal pique. Foraker's disapproval of Roosevelt acting in Cuba without consulting Congress reflects how uncomfortable he was with Roosevelt's expanded view of the powers of the presidency and is seen in the arguments he made against the discharges of the Brownsville soldiers.2

  Roosevelt's displeasure with Foraker had been sensed quickly back in Ohio by those who counted most, other politicians. Blood was in Roosevelt's eye and dripping into Ohio's power struggles. The opportunistic Congressman Theodore Burton from Cleveland believed that by antagonizing Roosevelt, especially when he opposed the Hepburn Act, Foraker had committed political suicide, and now “only a ‘little shove’ was necessary to shove him over the precipice.”3 In an August speech in Cleveland, he spoke of the way Foraker had split himself from Roosevelt's legislative programs and suggested such disloyalty merited only a barely lukewarm endorsement for the 1908 Senate race at the party's state convention in Dayton in September.4 Foraker was unconcerned and was going to skip Dayton and stay with his family at a rented summer cottage in Sea Bright, New Jersey. But early in September he was alarmed by a warning from an acquaintance in Columbus. “Many of your former friends here have deserted you—some—a few—because of your attitude towards the rate bill, some because of your co-operation with [Senator Charles] Dick [Ohio's other senator], some because they think you are down, some for other reasons. I have also talked with some from other parts of the State, and they describe the situation where they are, in about the same way.”5 Foraker changed his mind and got to Dayton just as the convention was gaveled to order.

  Though he was not scheduled to speak, after a very long opening speech by former Ohio governor Myron Herrick (one of the insu
rgent leaders), cries from the delegates and galleries for a Foraker speech lifted him from his seat and carried him to the podium. Speaking with heat that night, he incinerated Burton's scheme. Delegates saw him as the old Foraker, eloquent and aggressive, and his name was “on everybody's tongue.”6 There were demands that the convention “adopt a resolution then and there endorsing [him] for the Presidency in 1908,” but using a technicality that made such a resolution inappropriate, Foraker discouraged it. He enjoyed the success of the moment and heard from, among others, Vice President Charles Fairbanks, his longtime friend from their days at Ohio Wesleyan University. Fairbanks was thinking there might be a way he and his family could move into the White House when the Roosevelts moved out and therefore was careful to exclude himself when he wrote, “I found Mrs. Fairbanks and [son] Freddie had saved your speech which they read with delight. They most heartily rejoice in your triumph.”7 Foraker's success was not the end of it. He may have foiled Burton and the insurgents at the convention, but they and President Roosevelt would not stop working against him, and Foraker knew it. He also knew Roosevelt had twisted Burton's arm to run for Cleveland mayor the following year to pump up his résumé for his shot at Foraker's Senate seat. Further presidential plotting against him could be expected on behalf of Burton and Taft. Foraker could consider the capriciousness of timing. A person's life moves on parallel yet unsynchronized tracks. An opportunity can be there when one is unprepared for it but gone when he is ready. Proffered help and assistance could not be tucked away in a political piggy bank and saved. As a younger man, he had many friends. Now they were not there for him. He had been a man with a future. A few quick years later, he had only a past and maybe not even a present. Could his seasoning and skills bring him to that high office he turned down when it was offered eighteen years earlier? Could they keep him in the Senate? The politician in him controlled his thoughts. There were two years until both elections; he had time to get control of the situation. But for which office? Taft was, for the moment, his only competition for the White House, and unless Taft held to his Supreme Court dream he would be hard to derail. Should he settle instead on returning to the Senate, he had an ever more crowded field to contend with, and they were still sharpening their knives after Dayton. What—or who—could hold them at bay? There was only one man. Theodore Roosevelt. The same man who wanted Taft to succeed himself in the White House and Burton to succeed Foraker in the Senate. But why would Roosevelt help Foraker? The answer was because it would help Taft too. Roosevelt would cast off Burton if necessary to help Taft. If Foraker put up a good fight for the presidential nomination, Roosevelt might accept his decision to stay in the Senate if he stepped aside for Taft. It would ensure Taft's nomination by clearing Foraker off of the road before the nominating convention. It was something to think about.

  SEPTEMBER MAY HAVE ENDED with a hopeful sign for Joseph Foraker, but for John Milholland it was a time of continuing anguish over race in America. On the day Foraker spoke so well at the Ohio Republican convention, Milholland told his diary that on “the Negro question…The Republican Party is morally dead—almost.”8

  The tinkering and inventive Milholland had developed a system for moving mail through large cities by a system of underground pneumatic tubes. In 1897 he signed a contract with the Post Office to operate a system in New York that eventually would run throughout the city.9 His business expanded to Philadelphia and elsewhere. With this success, he was able to turn to what became his life's work. “My time has come at last to lead this Crusade for the Negroes’ Political and Civil Rights…the Issue, the Supreme Moral Issue of the Hour in this Republic. Oh let me be free, Good Lord, that I may free others!”10 As his vehicle for this struggle, he founded the Constitution League in 1903 to “attack disfranchisement, peonage, and mob violence by means of court action, legislation and propaganda” and to reject Booker T. Washington and his program.11

  He had always been a Republican, but by the early 1890s Milholland was fed up with its “machine politics” and set about restructuring the party in New York. It was inevitable he would fail and just as inevitable he would cross paths with Theodore Roosevelt. In 1892, as supervising immigrant inspector at Ellis Island, Milholland tangled with Cornelius Bliss, the machine's leader in the Eleventh Assembly District, and learned a thing or two about how things were done in New York. Bliss took their dispute to Washington, DC, and got Milholland fired from his plum patronage post. Unaware still just how the system operated, Milholland compounded his blunder with Bliss and appealed his dismissal to the Civil Service Commission headed by Theodore Roosevelt. “It will give [Roosevelt] an opportunity to make one of his thorough investigations to see if there has been a violation of the spirit and letter of the civil-service law in the Eleventh District,” the New York Times predicted.12 Roosevelt disappointed Milholland and the New York Times by expertly dodging the problem. The chastened John Milholland went back to editing the New York Tribune and wondering about Theodore Roosevelt.

  In 1894, still knee-deep in efforts to correct inadequacies in the Republican party, Milholland was elected president of the New York County Republican Committee. Elected with him as the committee's recording secretary was a black man, T. Thomas Fortune, the editor of the New York Age. Fortune was as militant then as W. E. B. Du Bois would become. As early as 1882 he argued before the Colored Press Association that the Republican Party was ignoring the principles of Lincoln and abandoning Southern blacks to their fate in the post-Reconstruction South. Milholland's association with Fortune exposed him to this sort of thinking and shook his faith in the Republicans’ ability or desire to help blacks in any meaningful way.13

  Originally respectful to Booker T. Washington, Milholland became disillusioned with him for selling out his own race by accepting a quasi-permanent denial of Negro equality and voting rights. “You will pardon me from saying it, the most enlightened sentiment is not reflected in the course you have marked out,” he wrote Washington.14 In 1906, before the shooting in Brownsville, his Constitution League held a meeting at Cooper Union in New York to “protest against disfranchisement of the negro in the South.” Milholland reached beyond his own organization for the conference's speakers, and among others he asked Kelly Thomas of Howard University and W. E. B. Du Bois, then of Atlanta University. There was no one from Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Machine.15 With Brownsville, their break became final.16

  Milholland's break with Theodore Roosevelt came much earlier, in 1896. It was an election year, and Milholland was threatening to bolt the party, thereby jeopardizing the Empire State's big basket of electoral votes. Theodore Roosevelt, now New York City police commissioner, tried to stay out of it but could not shield himself from Milholland's hostility. Milholland's irritation with the party had to do with fraudulent voter enrollment, but Roosevelt took it personally and saw it as something between Milholland and him. He wrote Lodge that he had broken with Milholland over this intraparty squabble, which he characterized as “a very ugly fight. Of course it began when I refused to give [the Tribune the police department] advertising, and let it out by open bidding.”17 In time Theodore Roosevelt came to personify for Milholland the denial of human and constitutional rights, the debasement, and the humiliation black Americans had to deal with. On October 10, 1906, his diary condemned Roosevelt for interrupting a meeting at the White House to shake hands with Sheriff Joseph F. Shipp of Chattanooga, who had been charged with contempt of the US Supreme Court for his complicity in the lynching of a black man whose appeal had been before the Court. When in Washington for the Court's oral argument, he and the others were invited to the White House to meet President Roosevelt, and in his diary Milholland wrote, “Roosevelt shocked me into profanity by shaking hands with the 27 Chattanooga Lynchers yesterday.”18

  The Brownsville Incident was one more Roosevelt outrage. Milholland resolved to do something about it.

  UNLIKE JOHN MILHOLLAND, FOR Joseph Foraker the Brownsville shooting initially held little interest.
Reading about it in the newspapers he was sure, like almost everyone else in the country, that the soldiers had done it and claimed to not give it further thought. About three weeks before President Roosevelt ordered the discharges, Foraker decried the lack of black progress since the Civil War. “In every war through which the country has passed, so far as we have permitted them to do so, [the black man has] borne an honorable part.” Referring to the possibility of troops going to Cuba to protect the tottering government there, Foraker said, “It is even more important to protect [black] Americans in America.” Despite his allusion to black soldiers, he neither mentioned Brownsville nor made any connection to it.19

  Then came Special Orders No. 266, and the protests put Brownsville back on the front page. Negroes, sensitized to injustice after thirty years of Jim Crow discrimination, were united in anger. Almost exclusively Republican, they directed it at President Roosevelt. Since the convention in Dayton two months earlier and Roosevelt's unseen presence there, Foraker had been seeking something that might sap Roosevelt's influence on his 1908 prospects. He gave Brownsville a second look. The discharges seemed harsh; it was improbable every man in the regiment could have been involved, and none had been convicted or even charged with anything. This could be what he was looking for.

  In his memoirs, Foraker declared that his change from uninterested observer to crusader for the soldiers was sparked by a righteous anger over their treatment. At the time, the press and politicians, including President Roosevelt, saw a more pragmatic impulse: “[Foraker's] own presidential aspirations.”20 Brownsville historians accept both reasons.21 A narrative of the Brownsville incident is incomplete and meaningless without looking into Foraker's motives. Was he a sincere advocate for the soldiers or a determined politician out for himself? Or both?