Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS spend what seems to outsiders an excessive amount of time on matters with no discernible importance to the American people. On Wednesday, for example, before it could take up the Brownsville resolutions, the Senate first had to receive an estimated accounting for eighteen dollars of expenses in making the proper returns for the Salmon Lake voting precinct in Kougarok District, Alaska; accept a publication from the Austro-Hungarian ambassador describing the new Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest (and, appropriately, refer it to the Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds); consider a report “in detail” on receipts and expenditures of the Government Hospital for the Insane; and accept eight petitions asking for investigations into conditions in the Kongo Free State (one from the Patrons of Husbandry in Walpole, Massachusetts). Waiting patiently for the Senate to work itself through business such as this, at long last Senator Foraker was able to bring up his resolution and ask that it be voted upon.

  The vice president had the clerk read both Senator Penrose's and Senator Foraker's resolutions, thereby bringing both before the Senate. Rising to this challenge, Foraker noticed that Penrose was absent from the chamber, and rather than taking up the Penrose resolution while its author was not there, he would like his considered independently.54 Not so fast, Warren of Wyoming said in not so many words. He wanted to offer his own substitute resolution combining the two from Monday and incorporating Foraker's “exactly as it now reads, excepting that it calls on the President for all the information.” Foraker, not caring to depend on Roosevelt's good humor or unilateral interpretation of what he had to do, demurred. “I do not care to call upon the President about the matter. I do not feel disposed to bother him any further. All I want is certain specific information, which is on file in the War Department, in the custody of the Secretary of War, and I specify what it is we want.” He had no objection to the Senate adopting Penrose's at another time, but he would like his own adopted now.

  Roosevelt's chief protector Lodge came to his feet. He professed to want both the Penrose and Foraker resolutions, but advised the Senate be “a little more considerate” of the absent Penrose and not ignore his while approving Foraker's. The other Pennsylvania senator (and Roosevelt's former attorney general) stood up to play his role in frustrating Foraker. Knox pointed out Penrose was not only absent, but also his resolution's “parliamentary status” had been changed by Foraker asking that his “substitute by amendment” be characterized as an “independent substitute.” Warren, to muddle Foraker's concentration by bringing up the question of which committee the proposal or proposals ultimately would be sent to, proposed the one he chaired, the Military Affairs Committee.

  Vice President Fairbanks, no longer confused as he was on Monday, kept his eye on the ball: keep Foraker's resolution away from a vote. He agreed with Senator Knox; Foraker's resolution must be put off. Foraker tried one last attempt to get a vote. He reminded the vice president that if unanimous consent was given by the senators present, the vote could be taken. No doubt gazing across the Senate podium in the direction of Senator Knox, Vice President Fairbanks asked if there was an objection. Knox dutifully replied, “Mr. President, I rise for the purpose of making an objection.” Game, set, but not quite match. Roosevelt's men were not yet finished with the crestfallen Foraker.

  It had become a game of hiding the pea under the walnut shell. Foraker was unsure who next would say something to throw him off track. Senator Culberson of Texas, who never wanted the Twenty-Fifth Infantry at Fort Brown to begin with, wanted his own amendment to Foraker's resolution; Senator Warren interrupted to ask whatever happened to the amendment he offered a little earlier. Fairbanks wasn't sure but in the meantime wanted to hear what Culberson had to say. The Texan, still angry that the twelve men in confinement at Fort Brown were kept from Texas Ranger McDonald, wanted to see the order to this effect to Major Penrose. Foraker, knowing he was beaten, if for only that day, responded with fatigue, “Mr. President, if I have the power to do so, I accept the amendment.” He saw no reason to light another fire that might burn away his chance of getting the investigation. Spooner got in his own last lick and said he had never heard of a resolution taken up when its author is absent from the Senate. Foraker, who did not want it taken up that day and suggested it be considered only so there would be no argument it was not, agreed to postpone both until the wayward Senator Penrose presented himself. Finally, Warren, still mindful his amendment somehow had been ignored, asked that it be dealt with. Vice President Fairbanks, knowing Warren had no real interest in seeing it passed now that Foraker had been stopped for the day, ordered it to “lie on the table,” that is, to live in a sort of halfway house in which it could die or be resuscitated if needed.

  PROCEDURALLY, THE DAY ENDED pretty much as it began. Neither resolution had been passed; neither had been killed. It is clear from the comments by the other senators and the amendments they offered to it that they would vote for Foraker's resolution and it would pass. Penrose's would too, but that was acceptable to Foraker so long as his retained its punch. But if he did not know it before, he certainly realized now what he was up against. He was opposed by the cleverest and most experienced senators, those who knew the Senate's rules and procedures as well as they knew the names of their wives (and might exhibit greater fidelity to the rules), each supporting the other, and all supporting President Roosevelt. And President Roosevelt supported them.

  Foraker was alone.

  THURSDAY WOULD BE THE day of decision. It began, however, not with Brownsville but with a lengthy debate on the canal across Central America, forced on it by Alabama senator John T. Morgan, the Confederate cavalry officer who led the charge at Chickamauga that Foraker missed by his stroke of good fortune. By 1906 Morgan was eighty-two years old and had been in the Senate for the last thirty years. Canal historian David McCullough quotes Senator Shelby Collum of Illinois on crossing Morgan: “He was so intense on any subject in which he took an interest, particularly the interoceanic canal, that he became vicious toward anyone who opposed him.”55 He had strongly favored Nicaragua as the site for the canal, but by now that battle had been lost for some time. Morgan was expressing his unyielding frustration in a resolution seeking to “bring the alleged corporation of the Panama railroad within the direct control of the United States Government.”56

  When at last Morgan concluded his speech, Foraker asked to bring up the Penrose resolution, which, since his was considered to be an amendment to Penrose's, brought his resolution up for discussion as well. Penrose, in the Capitol but not the Senate chamber, rushed in to find his resolution before his colleagues.57 He agreed his and Foraker's resolution could be considered separately and asked for unanimous consent to permit this. Things seemed to be going Foraker's way, as if Penrose's presence calmed the Senate in the way an itching palm would be greased to tranquility by a fifty-dollar bill slipped into it. Then an inflammation from Senator Spooner caused a new itch. Did not the Penrose resolution imply that but for its passage the Senate would not be entitled to the documents it requested? Foraker responded that is why he did not want the two resolutions combined. He feared the request from Penrose to President Roosevelt would weaken his demand to the secretary of war. Colorado's Henry M. Teller, who switched parties twice while in the Senate, from Republican to Silver Republican (his fortune was in silver mining) to Democrat (which he was by now), wondered aloud what difference it made. A president could tell the secretary to ignore a demand made upon him, and that would be the end of it. Thomas H. Carter of Montana began to say something potentially supportive of Foraker, when Foraker, who missed something Carter said, interrupted to ask what it was, thereby offending Carter. Culberson of Texas disputed the weight Foraker gave to some evidence. Ben Tillman wanted to know why Foraker had the War Department pamphlet, but he did not and had to learn it existed in the morning's newspapers.58 Penrose got up to say Spooner's comments made no sense to him. The Pennsylvanian added, with no segue from what anyone else was saying
, but merely to show he was close to the black community and independent from Roosevelt, “I introduced the resolution without guile, out of a natural relationship to a large colored constituency in the State of Pennsylvania, whose race prejudice has been aroused and who felt that perhaps an affront had been put upon them.[59] I did not know that I was going to create such a disturbance in the minds of some of my colleagues as was developed when I heard the anguished tones of the Senator from Ohio informing this body that he had a similar resolution which he would like promptly to get before us.”60 Foraker asked him to repeat the adjective that described his tones; he did not hear it clearly and thought Penrose said “angry.” Now it was Penrose's turn to be defensive. Foraker tried to calm him down, but Penrose burned even hotter, at one point refusing to yield the floor to him.

  Interruptions interrupted interruptions. Sore feelings had to be soothed. Potentially misunderstood arguments had to be restated. A session that had begun calmly was in bedlam.

  Then Senator Foraker brought it back to order and gave it purpose. He pointed out the consequences of doing nothing. It would act as precedent to restrict Congress's ability to act as a check on the executive office. He did not introduce his resolution on Monday because it involved race. Deliberately addressing the Senate's institutional touchiness, he said the bigger question was the president's authority. “If the President may disband one company he may disband three, as he has done here, and if he may discharge a whole battalion, he can do away with a regiment if he so likes, and if he can do away with a regiment, a brigade, and, as I say, the whole Army.” Beyond that, “The broader question is one of constitutional right…. No such discharge can be granted by any order…when as a result of such discharge punishment is inflicted as though it had been in pursuance of the sentence of a court-martial.”61

  Penrose, to conclude the matter, asked that both resolutions be approved. Foraker, still irritated by Penrose's refusal to yield to him earlier, did not yield. “I will be through in a little bit, and the Senator can then take the floor and deal in questions of anguish and anger as he may see fit.”62 Senator Teller helped out by telling his colleagues they simply did not have the information needed to discuss the Brownsville Incident intelligently and the only question was how they would get it. Even Roosevelt's defenders were past worrying whether there was any merit in discussing the difference between a president being asked and a secretary of war being directed. Along with Culberson's amendment asking to see the order denying Ranger McDonald custody of the men he sought from the army, both resolutions were passed.

  STRICT COMPLIANCE WITH THE Foraker resolution soon would inundate the Senate with paperwork. According to the Dayton Daily News, Taft would be forced by Foraker's resolution “to send to the Senate everything in the war department bearing upon the case—all of the correspondence, all of the reports of officers, all of the investigations made, the record of every man dismissed, the military history of each, the files of all the companies, and every blot of ink that in any way touches the merits of the controversy.63 This cut two ways. Senators would be overwhelmed by this flood and unable to use it effectively against Roosevelt. But Senator Foraker could be counted on to study this rockslide carefully, ferret out those crystals helpful to him, interpret them favorably to the soldiers and in a way showing Roosevelt at his worst, and prevail upon the Senate to ask for more. He was a member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, ground zero for the paperwork, and if he got the Senate to take another step no doubt it would delegate to that committee the responsibility to undertake further investigation and take appropriate action. Its chairman, Francis Warren of Wyoming, had shown no sympathy for Foraker's position. In fact, he would be identified in the Washington Herald the next day as a leader of those who spoke against him.64 Still there was no telling where things would lead. Later that day President Roosevelt asked Senator Warren to stop by the White House.

  And so John Milholland's extraordinary week ended victoriously for him, Senator Foraker, and the soldiers.

  “We are not better than our fellows, Lord, we are but weak and human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed: curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home.

  Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!”

  W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Litany of Atlanta”

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT MADE NO direct mention of Brownsville in his annual message to Congress on December 4. He planned to deal with it later that month in a special message. In the meantime, lynching was very much on his mind. His address devoted some time to it and seemed, without saying so, to connect it to Brownsville through the idea of conspiracies of silence.

  He told Congress, and through it the American people, there were two problems with crime in the black community: black criminals and other blacks who hid them. When he said the crime that most often led to lynching was black men raping white women and came within a breath of blaming the accused black men for their own lynching (most of whom, like the Brownsville soldiers, had never been tried in a court of law), the reaction by Negro leaders and others was seismic. For him to say the crime of rape was primarily a black-on-white problem was delusional, and to ignore the racial undertone to the crime of lynching was blindness. So soon after the Brownsville discharges, this message to Congress prompted black Americans to rethink Roosevelt, his party, the man now seen as his minion, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois.2

  THERE IS NO CRIME in American history as chilling as lynching. Human degeneracy continues, but few group acts can compare with it. Behaviors such as parents encouraging their children to engage in suicide bombings against innocent people and Nazis murdering six million men, women, and children because they were Jewish (or performing gruesome experiments on them in the name of medical science) are comparable, but these are no longer ignored or excused by civilized people or tolerated in civilized nations. Lynching was. Before he talked about it, President Roosevelt might have done well thinking more about what it was. Kelly Miller, a president of Howard University, said this:

  The cruelty and barbarity of lynchings are indescribable for horror and atrocity…. Victims have been drowned, hanged, shot, burned alive, beaten to death, dismembered while thousands gloated over their groanings with ghoulish glee. Women with child have been disemboweled in the public gaze. The United States enjoys the evil distinction of being the only civilized nation of the earth whose people take delight in the burning and torturing of human beings. No where else in the civilized world do men, women and children dance with glee and fight for ghastly souvenirs of quivering human flesh, and mock with laughter the dying groans of the helpless victim which sicken the air while the flickering flames of the funeral pyre light up the midnight sky with dismal glare.3

  Miller was right, but even this fails to describe the horror. But he was wrong when he said only Americans “take delight in the burning and torturing of human beings.” He should have known that the Imperial Russia of his day was just as bad. Describing a 1906 massacre of Jews there, only one of the recurring pogroms egged on by the czar's government, a clipping from the New York Times pasted by Mark Twain into a draft of his autobiography reads in part:

  Merely saying that the bodies were mutilated…fails to describe the awful facts. The faces of the dead have lost all human resemblance. The body of Teacher Apstein lay on the grass with the hands tied. In the face and eyes had been hammered three-inch nails. Rioters entered his home, killing him thus, and then murdered the rest of his family of seven. When the body arrived at the hospital it was also marked with bayonet thrusts.

  Beside the body of Apstein lay that of a child of 10 years, whose leg had been chopped off with an axe. Here also were the dead from the Schlacter home, where, according to witnesses, soldiers came and plundered the house and killed the wife, son, and a neighbor's daughter and seriously wounded Schlacter and his two daughters.

  I am told the soldiers ent
ered the apartments of the Lapidus brothers, which were crowded with people who had fled from the streets for safety, and ordered the Christians to separate themselves from the Jews. A Christian student named Dikar protested and was killed on the spot. Then all the Jews were shot.

  In this one pogrom in Bialystok, encouraged by the police and civil authorities, as many as two hundred Jews were killed.4

  W. E. B. Du Bois said the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line. He died in 1963, two-thirds of the way into the century, and by then he would know of the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Turks during World War I; the starving of the Ukraine by Stalin in the early 1930s; the Rape of Nanking a few years later, where Japanese soldiers used Chinese babies for bayonet practice; and the Holocaust by Nazi Germany.5 Had he lived a little longer he would been witness to the death of millions by Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide in East Africa, and Saddam Hussein killing human beings in shredders designed to tear apart metal. By the twenty-first century, Du Bois might have changed his mind and said the problem of the century just passed, as it has been since history was recorded, was the way humans treated other humans.

  But of course America should have been different. It should have been better. Even the Russians pointed out the hypocrisy to the Americans. In a letter to Jacob Schiff two weeks before the Brownsville shooting, Roosevelt mentioned a letter from the American ambassador to Russia: “The [Russian] Minister of Foreign Affairs refuses definitely to discuss, even informally, the Beilostok [sic] massacre, and claims that we have no more right to meddle in the matter than they would have to take up the lynching of negroes with us.”6