What we know about his turnaround comes almost exclusively from his and his wife's respective memoirs. Julia's I Would Live It Again, written a quarter of a century later by an eighty-four-year-old widow, is consumed by another Brownsville injustice, what it did to her husband's career and life. This pain was so fresh in her mind and so important to what she wanted to say that she began her memoirs with Brownsville and President Roosevelt's intention to use Brownsville to destroy Joseph Foraker, as if everything else in her life was the backstory.22 She agreed it was the soldiers’ “harsh punishment” that got his attention.23 Foraker called it “summary punishment” and “drastic punishment,” and because of it he “read with some care the testimony on which the President acted.”24 It was “flimsy, unreliable and insufficient and untruthful.” He spent hours and hours studying “a thickening jungle of newspapers, clippings, letters, and calf-bound books,” as he “gave himself to Brownsville that November.” He reacted to what he so carefully read by speaking softly to himself as unexpected revelations overcame him, and Julia remembered what she overheard. “No, no, that isn't true…. That doesn't follow at all…. No, no, there is nothing in that.”25
According to Foraker, he may have reconsidered the situation when he examined the testimony, but that was not why he got involved with the soldiers. It was affidavits from the soldiers that he claimed “caused me to doubt their guilt and to conclude it was my duty…to cause an investigation” so the guilty could be discovered and punished and the innocent absolved (author's emphasis).26 He further claimed he had learned of these affidavits when they were “announced by the newspapers and that in them every man in the battalion positively and unqualifiedly denied guilt, or any knowledge of guilt.” The only newspaper reports about affidavits that Foraker could have been referring to were on November 25, 1906.27 He would ask for the investigation on December 3, only eight days later (which included the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend). Not much time for him to prepare. Unless he knew before then the affidavits would be forthcoming.
THE NEW YORK TIMES’ report of the affidavits said the black lawyer Gilchrist Stewart obtained them from the soldiers at Fort Reno. Stewart was a real estate dealer, lawyer, and reform Republican. Theodore Roosevelt thought him a “cheap and noisome agitator.”28 Booker T. Washington saw him as untrustworthy, a danger to the Tuskegee Machine, and a man to be watched closely. Washington's man in New York warned him that Stewart was trying to lure the local Colored Republican Clubs to the Constitution League (and away from Roosevelt and Washington) and added that Stewart was “informing both groups on each other's moves during the [Brownsville] investigation.”29 In other words, Stewart worked with Milholland but was a double agent.
Stewart went to Oklahoma to get the soldiers’ affidavits because of Roosevelt's response to the New York County Republican Committee's rebuke. Stewart had cabled the president in Panama about it and in his wire concluded, “Developments and new facts warrant. Ask immediate suspension order.” Unlike the Taft wire after the meeting with Mary Church Terrell, Stewart's got to Panama before Roosevelt left for home, and Roosevelt was able to reply. “Unless facts are shown to be false, the order will, under no circumstances, be revoked, and I shall not for one moment consider suspending it on a simple allegation that there are new facts until these new facts are laid before me. Inform any persons having new facts to have them in shape to lay before me at once on my return, and I will then consider whether or not any further action by me is called for” (author's emphasis).30 Like men hearing only what they want to hear, Milholland and Stewart read this as good news. Roosevelt was willing to listen. Two days later, on November 18—one week before the affidavits were mentioned in the newspapers—Stewart left for Fort Reno to get them and to give Roosevelt his “new facts.” Roosevelt said he wanted them “at once” upon his return to Washington, but Stewart first missed and then disregarded this deadline. Stewart took two more days to have anything at all for Roosevelt, and that was nothing more than a promise to deliver synopses of “the affidavits [of the soldiers] and statements of officers by Saturday, December 1.”31
That would be two days before Congress reconvened, December 3, 1906, a date circled on Senator Foraker's calendar. It seems more likely Foraker, a man addicted to thorough preparation, made his decision before the November 25 newspaper articles about the affidavits and without seeing them, because Stewart did not have them as late as December 1, the date he promised Roosevelt synopses, not the affidavits themselves. Foraker jumped into the Brownsville Incident when he knew soldiers’ sworn denials of guilt would be forthcoming. He knew this because either Stewart or someone else with the Constitution League must have alerted him.
There is evidence this is what happened. Foraker and the Constitution League had worked together before, most recently on the Hepburn Act. And there is evidence they already were working together on Brownsville.32 He and its secretary Andrew Humphrey had been exchanging letters and information. On November 25, Humphrey asked Foraker to send him a copy of the War Department pamphlet, “The Affray at Brownsville.” Four days later he told Humphrey he had been “looking it over with some care [and in it] there are some damaging circumstances, but I think all can be accounted for consistently with the entire innocence of the men, but without positive proof to overthrow these circumstances I hardly know what course should be taken” (author's emphasis).33 Positive proof was what Roosevelt had demanded from Gilchrist Stewart, and Foraker was telling Stewart's colleague at the Constitution League he would need it too.34 Foraker's eye also was on the calendar, and with the Senate convening on December 3, he needed the proof fast.
NOVEMBER 29 WAS THANKSGIVING. The White House visitor log for the day shows no meetings or callers, as President and Mrs. Roosevelt and their family enjoyed the holiday. Two days earlier the president had attended to thank-you notes to Horace Voss of Westerly, Rhode Island, for his gift of the Thanksgiving turkey (“The White House Thanksgiving would be not quite regular without your turkey.”) and Senator John Kean for the roast pig he presented to the First Family.35
Before sitting down at the table to enjoy them, he looked over the telegram from Gilchrist Stewart that arrived earlier that day. Four pages long, it set out what Stewart said he had learned in his investigation and promised affidavits to support his conclusions, which he would present in two days at the White House. This was hardly the “new facts” Roosevelt had demanded. Worse, it was inexcusably sloppy. It incorrectly referred to the soldiers as members of the Third Battalion (it was the First Battalion), said a customs inspector knocked Private James Reed into the Rio Grande (there was no Private James Reed; there was a Private James Reid in Company B, but the dunked soldier was Private Oscar Reid of Company C), more than once misspelled as “Howd” the last name of Company D's Private Joseph Howard, and thought Private Frank Lipscomb was Private Liscomb. Stewart proffered as new evidence soldier and officer testimony already known along with the inferences he drew from it. It was woefully, almost embarrassingly, inadequate, and nothing at all what Roosevelt told him he wanted.36 If this was all the Constitution League and Stewart had, Roosevelt knew he had nothing to worry about. Stewart's investigation could be swatted away. But Roosevelt still had to face down the Senate.
His eye lingered over the synopses of the affidavits. An affidavit is a written statement made under oath. Because any false statement in it may give rise to a criminal charge of perjury, it has greater weight in a court of law and a greater impact in general on anyone reading it. To effectively counter what it says, one needs at the least a statement also made under oath, that is, another affidavit. Roosevelt understood this and reached for a sheet of paper and wrote a memorandum to Taft. It was short and emphatically insistent. “We must not fail to have a full set of affidavits in the Brownsville matter when Congress meets [author's emphasis]. Very important [Roosevelt's emphasis].”37 Roosevelt was not lulled into inaction by Stewart's ineffective efforts. He was aware of the situation, his opponents’
advantages, and what he had to do to confront them, and he was planning his own course of action. He was only starting.
The Senate would convene four days later.
“[Booker T. Washington's] doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro Problem to the Negro's Shoulders…when in fact the burden belongs to the nation.”
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Washington
and Others,” in The Souls of Black Folk
ON DECEMBER 6, THE day the Senate voted to accept both the Penrose and Foraker resolutions, Mary Church Terrell wrote to First Sergeant Mingo Sanders on Washington, DC, Board of Education stationery, asking him to come to her home (she helpfully penned the address beside her printed name on the letterhead).1 Realizing Sanders might not know who she was, Terrell told him of her role in Secretary of War Taft's suspension of the discharges. When they met, it seemed to her that his countenance was as “unruffled and as free from any trace of melancholy as is one of Raphael's angels” and his attitude as “serene and mild as a May morning.” He told her it was because “I know that I am innocent and I am sure the other fellow is just as innocent as I am.”
As a young boy watching a military parade in Charleston, South Carolina—the prettiest sight he had ever seen—“I made up my mind right then and there that I would be a soldier some day.”2 It was a good choice of career for a black man not well educated and with few job skills. Sanders's entire career was with the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, from his first duty assignment at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, to Cuba, the Philippines, and finally Fort Brown. He saw combat overseas, tangled with Indians in the West, endured boredom at garrison duty, and along the way trained other soldiers in the ways of the army. Mrs. Terrell wrote, “He has been a veritable father to the young men of his race, who have enlisted in the army.”3 But he was not able to protect his family of soldiers—or himself—from Special Orders No. 266.
WHEN W. E. B. DU BOIS predicted that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” he added it was “the question as to how far differences of race are going to be made…the basis of denying…the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.”4 When he said this in 1900 he had not yet fully embraced agitation and confrontation as the way to deal with this problem. Nor was he persuaded that Booker T. Washington's answer was wrong. But he was getting there, and when he did, the two men would lead the opposing sides within the Negro community. The fracture was called factionalism. As already explained, Booker T. Washington believed his accommodation might not solve the problem, but for the time being it kept things from getting worse and over time would make them better. W. E. B. Du Bois scoffed at this. Things were getting worse, much worse, and what Washington offered was “hypocritical compromise.”5 Their split became bitter and personal and played itself out over Brownsville.
Washington and Du Bois split on three basic issues. Both knew education was the path to full racial equality, but they differed on what kind. From his own experience Washington was sure one that trained the race for entry-level jobs and developed personal habits, everything from personal hygiene to a strong work ethic, was the answer. Du Bois agreed, but Negroes with greater talent and intelligence, who made up what he called “The Talented Tenth,” were entitled to more. They should be able to go to college and beyond and become professionals, scholars, and people of letters and science. They would use advanced education for the benefit of the entire race.6
Washington and Du Bois also disagreed on the necessity for equal political rights and social integration for blacks. In his Atlanta Compromise of 1895 Washington hinted that the right to vote and participate in American democracy be shelved until his industrial education developed black men and women into more useful citizens. In return for these concessions, whites would permit the advance of black Americans and allow them the security of a peaceful life. When whites in both the North and the South cheered these ideas and accepted Washington as the race's leader, he thought they were agreeing to the bargain. But in practice they accepted only what the Negro gave up. When Washington realized this, it was too late for him to change. He was by then a “player” and wanted to stay in the game. Du Bois, always the outsider, saw from the beginning whites would not give in.
The third issue was how to deal with whites. Washington was not one to push ahead with sharp elbows. It would only antagonize whites and without white support, the race would go nowhere. Du Bois saw the necessity of support of whites as an illusion. Equal rights should be demanded now and white sensitivity be damned.
One man was willing to accommodate himself to reality and be patient. The other would confront the reality and demand the vision right now.7
DU BOIS WAS A sociologist, a teacher, and a writer, formally educated at Fisk University, Harvard University (both schools awarded him bachelor of arts degrees), the University of Berlin, and again at Harvard for his doctorate. Informally he acquired an education in racial denials from experiencing them. Fortified by both educations, he decided to topple Washington.
He was born into what was for that era the integrated society of Great Barrington, Massachusetts.8 His grandfather Alexander Du Bois was the son of the white James Du Bois, whose family in New York had remained loyal to the British crown and was rewarded with property in the Bahamas. James ran the family's plantation there and acquired a black mistress, with whom he had Alexander. He took Alexander and a brother back to New York for schooling, and after his death the white Du Bois family disowned them. Alexander's son Alfred, who like his father could have passed for white, was a rootless, wandering man, who tried and failed at many low-rung occupations. He happened to be in the Berkshires, where he met and married Mary Burghardt, whom their son William Edward Burghardt Du Bois described as “dark shining bronze.”9
Du Bois's first awareness of racial differences came when he was ten years old. He and his white playmates decided to exchange visiting cards, as they saw adults doing, and one girl “refused my card—refused it peremptorily…. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others…shut out from their world by a vast veil.”10 He progressed from this realization of being different to seeing the harm it caused Negroes, to believing there was little to be done, to understanding something needed to be done, to thinking as did Booker T. Washington that gentle persuasion might work, and to putting his faith in the Tuskegean. For a while. When he got to know Washington better, he did not like him. When he understood what he saw as the failure of Washington's accommodation idea, he liked him even less, and he broke away to clear the road ahead by agitation.
IN 1899, WHILE DU Bois taught sociology at Atlanta University, he and Washington worked together to defeat a bill in the Georgia legislature that would make it impossible for Negroes to vote. On paper, its qualifications for voting applied to blacks and whites, but the exceptions, most notoriously the “grandfather clause” that waived these barriers for Georgians whose grandfathers had been qualified voters, applied unfairly to blacks whose grandfathers had been slaves and therefore were unable to vote. In a petition to the Georgia legislature Du Bois pointed to this and other tricks hidden in the manipulations of other provisions and lobbied for its defeat.11 Washington, working in tandem with him, gave an interview to the Atlanta Constitution and made the same arguments. The legislation was defeated (with help from upper-class whites fearful of a deluge of newly enfranchised white “redneck” voters), and the effort reinforced in Du Bois the need for continuous efforts just to keep white racism at bay and the futility of making any progress at all by an accommodation with it.
Washington meanwhile thought they had worked well together on this project and decided to offer Du Bois a position at Tuskegee. But it ran aground on clashing egos and misunderstandings, and the opportunity to talk about their different ideas and shake off their mutual suspicions and dislikes was lost.12
Two years later, however, when Du Bois was upset that the Rhodes Scholarship Foun
dation would not include Atlanta University in its scholarship conference for Georgia colleges, he turned to Tuskegee for help. Washington went to bat and wrote Du Bois that black college men would be considered in the future.13 But though they were cordial with each other and again worked well together, Du Bois remained uneasy over Washington's insistence on farming and industrial education for Negroes and his indifference to higher education for the race. He also resented the Tuskegee Machine's political machinations that Washington kept to and for himself. Du Bois wasn't the only one.
CENTERED IN BOSTON WAS an informal group of “talented tenth” blacks already combative with Booker T. Washington. It was known as the Boston Radicals, and its leader was William Monroe Trotter, a graduate of Harvard and the first black elected to the honor society Phi Beta Kappa there. Trotter sneered at Washington's pretensions as an educator. He agreed with Du Bois that they were only a cover for his acquisition of political power, which he used for his own ends primarily and the good of others only as an afterthought and when necessary to preserve his position. Washington and his Tuskegee Machine were no better than the political bosses and their rings in Northern cities, and the machine's national presence through President Roosevelt made things worse. In 1901 Trotter established the Boston Guardian. From its beginning it was bitterly anti-Washington, and Trotter made no apologies for what his newspaper said and how it said it.14 Its “articles, editorials and cartoons flayed Washington with his pose of morality.”15 Washington was called a coward and a self-seeker, even a liar. One cartoon showed him as “Mammy” at an ironing board, taking on too many tasks and doing none of them well.16
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 20
