Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  Roosevelt fretted over this restriction for the rest of his administration. In his 1908 annual message he snorted this benefitted “only the criminal classes,” and “the chief argument in favor of [it] was that the congressmen did not themselves wish to be investigated.”74 He was right. When he proposed members of Congress permit themselves to be investigated but grant themselves immunity from prosecution, they declined the suggestion.

  In 1906 Roosevelt sicced the Secret Service on Joseph Foraker.

  GILCHRIST STEWART AND A man named Richard Le Roy Stokes accompanied Foraker on the train back to Washington. Milholland noted in his diary on Christmas Eve, “Decided to send Stokes to Brownsville armed with letters to US Marshall Houston of Texas.” Milholland didn't know it but Stokes was a spy for Booker T. Washington. At one time Washington's stenographer at Tuskegee, he was sent to New York to work at the New York Age with T. Thomas Fortune in 1905.75 He remained Washington's mole at the Age until the beginning of December 1906, when Fortune had to let him go during one of the newspaper's recurring financial crises prompted by Washington's capriciously opening and closing the money spigot as a way of controlling Fortune.76 While Stokes was at the Age, Washington had trusted him enough to think of him replacing Fortune at the National Negro Business League meeting in Atlanta just before the riots there.77 After leaving the Age, he hooked up with Gilchrist Stewart, the other double agent. According to Constitution League secretary Charles Anderson, “Stewart…informed me that Stokes had played false with both him and the Constitution League…. He had advised Milholland to send Stokes to Brownsville…. Stewart now claims that Stokes has gone over to the other side.78 In fact, he double crossed Milholland, who had given him a letter from Joseph Pulitzer's New York World stating he was one of its reporters. Milholland told him to send anything he learned back to the World. What Stokes sent, and what appeared in the paper on January 14, proved “that the soldiers actually did the shooting—which of course, nobody doubted.”79 Milholland was stunned.

  Booker T. Washington had liberally salted the Constitution League with spies. He himself would take a shot directly at Milholland, who made a fortune supplying pneumatic tubes for moving mail between post offices, when he wrote to Postmaster General George Cortelyou: “[Milholland] who is more responsible than any of the others put together for stirring up trouble against the administration on the Brownsville affair draws the money he is using in this fight from your department. [If it were not for him] the whole Brownsville Affair would have been almost forgotten before this time.”80

  The Stewart-Stokes saga and the letter to Cortelyou are typical of the fanatical attention Washington was by now paying to his enemies within the black movement. He was running a spy network against them. Du Bois, Monroe Trotter, and others for whom the scales had fallen from their eyes when looking at the Wizard would use Washington's inattention to the real problem to snatch the agenda away from him.

  BACK IN WASHINGTON, FORAKER, while waiting for the Senate to reconvene in January and get back to considering the investigation, worked to get whatever mileage he could from the December 6 resolutions, just in case an investigation was not approved. He asked Taft to provide various documents of questionable value to him.81

  A FEW DAYS LATER, John Milholland wrote his New Year's resolutions in his diary: “To get my temper, my passionate nature in hand. To that end, I've appealed to God for divine aid…. To go forward in the Crusade for Justice to the Negro.”82

  “In appointing you, I have only one qualification to make. Colonel [George] Goethals here is to be chairman. He is to have complete authority. If at any time you do not agree with his policies, do not bother to tell me about it—your disagreement with him will constitute your resignation.”

  Theodore Roosevelt's charge to new

  members of the Panama Canal Commission, from

  David McCullough, The Path between the Seas

  ON JANUARY 3 THE Senate reconvened after the holidays and picked up where it had left off in December. Before Foraker could present his case, senators sat through Charles Culberson of Texas raging for two hours against the very idea of blacks in the army. When he finished, Henry Cabot Lodge offered an amendment to Foraker's resolution, which presumed “the President [acted within] his constitutional and legal authority as Commander in Chief.” This would be voted on before a vote on Foraker's resolution, and to vote against it would be to deny Roosevelt's authority. Roosevelt and Lodge knew even Foraker was not willing to go that far, and the amendment would pass and become part of Foraker's resolution. If Foraker's resolution then passed, no matter what an investigation turned up, the discharges could not be overridden because Roosevelt's authority to order them would be undisturbed. This, said the New York Times, “was a very shrewd move, which [put] Mr. Foraker badly in the hole.”1

  Actually it was a blunder, and the New York Times corrected itself the next day. In an editorial it called Lodge's amendment “irrelevant, impertinent, and incompetent.” The Senate could keep presidential authority out of the discussion simply by saying it was not pertinent to the Foraker resolution.2 Besides, Foraker's resolution did not question Roosevelt's authority; it limited the investigation only to “facts.” He knew all along it would be easier to get his resolution adopted if it did not question “presidential authority.” On Sunday there were rumors some senators were asking Lodge to withdraw his amendment to avoid any constitutional discussion.3 They feared it might establish a precedent diminishing Congress's power. Not wanting a fight with Republican senators, one he (and Roosevelt) might lose, Lodge withdrew his amendment. Roosevelt, who had a deaf ear to the crescendo against him by party regulars from his double-cross the previous spring over the Hepburn Bill, was perhaps more sensitive to it now.4 Lodge and Roosevelt caving in was seen for the defeat it was.5

  While Lodge was speaking to the Senate, Wisconsin's Robert La Follette was tending to correspondence with an ear to the debate. In a letter to his wife written on US Senate stationery, he told her what he was seeing and hearing.

  Monday afternoon,

  Dear Ones at Home,

  The Senate is in session and Lodge is speaking in support of the Pres. in dismissing the Colored Troops. The galleries have been crowded all day. It is strange what interest the people have manifest in this subject. No legislation last session drew larger crowds.

  …

  Lodge has just finished and has made a very good speech. Foraker is getting up to reply to him. He sees this as I. Gives him the chance to slap the Pres & Taft—who supports the Pres. He also sees a chance to get the colored people with him. He is really a candidate—everyone thinks—or ready to be one. He is showing great feeling in his talk…. As a speaker [Foraker] has shown off to a better advantage than at any time I have heard him.6

  NO ONE EVER EXPECTED to see what happened a few days later. Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, who yielded to no man in racist views, was going to speak and, of all things, defend the black soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry. Negroes wanted so badly to hear it, they lined up early in the day to be allowed into the Senate's public galleries, and so many of them made it in, the “galleries looked dark brown from the other side of the Chamber.” Northern Republican senators gave passes to black friends, who thus were admitted to the reserved galleries, where they sat “cheek by jowl” with white matrons there courtesy of Southern Democrats.7 The Washington Post would report Tillman was, when he spoke off the cuff without his notes, “lurid, vehement, and picturesque and always entertaining.”8 His siding with Negroes may have been what brought the people in, but for Tillman the soldiers’ plight was merely a sideshow. His real interest that day was, as it always was, pummeling President Roosevelt and expressing his own primitive, even for those days, views on race.

  Tillman's face was deformed by a missing left eye. When he was seventeen, the left eye had to be removed from its socket when infection set in from a swim in a millpond in rural South Carolina.9 He wore no patch over the hole, and photo
s of him generally show his right profile. It was as if, with only one eye, he saw only half the world, and there was no room in it for any but white people. A lifetime of abusive racism warped his mind just as the missing eye deformed his face.10 Only two colors—black and white—were permitted by his remaining eye to pass into the darkness of his mind, and everyone he encountered was tested by this stark duality. That which was white was biologically superior and developed, civilized, talented, decent, and diligent. That which was black was barbarous, savage, low, and degraded.11 For Tillman, Brownsville showed Negroes and Roosevelt at their worst, but Tillman could use each to go after the other.12 If he had to form an alliance with blacks and Joseph Foraker to bludgeon Roosevelt, so be it.13

  It was the brutal, unimaginably bloody, stomach-turning, savagely cruel violence that set him apart from any well-formed human being, and he was only too ready and too happy to visit it on blacks. On the Fourth of July in 1876, Captain D. L. “Dock” Adams, a black Union Army veteran, led a black state militia company in the Independence Day parade in Hamburg, South Carolina. The small town across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia, was a showpiece for black advancement during Reconstruction. What happened forecast the end of both. Depending on which version you believe, either a carriage with two young men from well-to-do white families deliberately drove through the militia's columns, or the militia deliberately refused to allow it to pass.14 Ben Tillman, who was then twenty-nine, lived not far away in the town of Edgefield and was the commander of its paramilitary unit dedicated to terrorizing Republican officeholders and restoring white rule in South Carolina. He chose to believe the white men. He led his troublemakers to Hamburg and joined other whites in the coldblooded murder of the black militiamen. They then burned the town to the ground.15 John Hope, who in 1906 was the president of Atlanta Baptist (now Morehouse) College, was then eight years old and living in Augusta. He recalled hearing men shout from across the river, “This is the beginning of the redemption of South Carolina.”16 Tillman, no doubt exaggerating his part in the massacre, would later say the leading white men of Edgefield had decided to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson by killing as many of them as was justifiable.17 In post-Reconstruction South Carolina, this was a boast and a career boost, and it was certainly that for Ben Tillman. The Hamburg Massacre and how he described his part in it made him a leader of the white supremacy movement in the state.18 He was admired and supported by white farmers and workers he said he would protect from aristocratic whites (the so-called Bourbons: bankers, merchants, and landowners mostly from the Low Country and around Charleston) and, most important, from blacks. In 1896 the farmers and workers elected him to the US Senate.19 Five years later, Roosevelt's dinner with Booker T. Washington would drive him to say, “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”20 Five years after that, he would defend the rights of 167 black soldiers against an evil just as great: Theodore Roosevelt. Tillman had no interest in clearing up what happened in Brownsville and bringing justice to it, but like an actor on a stage, he used the soldiers as handy props to help him better play his role bedeviling Roosevelt.21

  HE ADMITTED THE “RIDICULOUSNESS of the situation,” he told the Senate: the Negro soldiers being defended by him, “who is supposed to have a broiled negro for breakfast [here the Congressional Record indicates ‘laughter’], who is known to justify lynching for rape, and whose attitude is one of not hatred toward the negroes, but of a feeling akin to it, in the belief that white men are made of better clay than negroes and that white men alone are entitled to participate in government—I say this alliance is an odd one.” He immediately attacked President Roosevelt. “The President of the United States has…dealt with certain men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry very unjustly…. Even he has no right nor any authority to punish an innocent man because some men have been guilty.” “I see nothing in this oath of enlistment which makes it obligatory upon a man…to tell something that he does not know or to tell something that might incriminate himself. The Constitution, I believe, protects a man from being compelled to answer questions like that.”22

  He agreed it was soldiers who shot up Brownsville and committed murder. “I have no more doubt that the negro soldiers did these infamous things than that I am alive and standing here.” He also agreed there was a conspiracy of silence. “Every man familiar with the negro character knows that they will bear torture with stoicism in defense of one another rather than act as traitors…. It is inherent in their nature and can not be eradicated by discipline or anything else. Then why upbraid the poor negro and punish him because he is true to his nature and his race and color?”23 The real responsibility lay with President Roosevelt, who encouraged them “to be satisfied with nothing less than absolute equality everywhere [and] they naturally were upset when the bitter, vindictive, nigger-hating Texans” refused to treat them this way.24 [Roosevelt] should have been “happy and proud to see how well they had learned the lesson.”25 “The whole issue involved is one of race, and the President is more responsible than any other man for the position the negroes in the South have taken on the question of negro rights. He gave recognition to Booker Washington in a social way.”26 Tillman went on to predict a race conflict in the near future. “With a negro majority of 225,000 in South Carolina, a race conflict is inevitable, and when it comes, those in Colorado [a reference to Colorado Democratic senator Thomas M. Patterson, who earlier that day had tangled bitterly with Tillman] who stand off and theorize will not be there to participate on the throat-cutting or get their throats cut.”27 “America for the Americans, and this is a white man's country and white men must govern it.”28

  Every one of the Black Battalion's supporters agreed with Tillman's accusation that Roosevelt railroaded the soldiers. Nasty language aside, Foraker himself could not have said it better. But it came from a man who, later that day, when the debate turned to lynching and the South, would say, “As long as the negroes continue to ravish white women we will continue to lynch them.”29 This was why President Roosevelt called Tillman “one of the foulest and rottenest demagogs in the whole country.”30 This was Foraker's and the soldiers’ ally. Senator Foraker must have shaken his head. Was Tillman's vote for his resolution worth it?

  AS EVERYONE WAITED FOR Roosevelt's next message with its report from the Purdy-Blocksom investigation, Foraker's resolution was held aside as Republicans tried to maintain the presumption of presidential authority, and Democrats came up with tactics to harass them. On January 11 Assistant Attorney General Milton D. Purdy met with President Roosevelt at the White House to go over his and Major Blocksom's investigation. It supported Roosevelt's conclusions. Roosevelt would use it in his special message to the Senate when it convened four days later on January 12.31

  President Roosevelt's second message in twenty-six days about Brownsville was a world apart from his first.32 There was no bombast and he presented his evidence coolly and in an organized, step-by-step manner. Particularly effective was his—really Taft's—astonishment that anyone could seriously consider the townspeople shot up their own town. “The only motive suggested as possibly influencing anyone else was a desire to get rid of the colored troops, so strong that it impelled the citizens of Brownsville to shoot up their own houses, to kill one of their own number, to assault their own police, wounding the lieutenant, who had been an officer for twenty years—all with the purpose of discrediting the negro troops. The suggestion is on its face so ludicrously impossible that is difficult to treat it as honestly made.” The soldiers’ defenders never would be able effectively to counter this argument.33

  The message made a point of discussing the shells found on the ground that implicated the soldiers since they were from the army's Springfield rifle. Yes, they could also fit in a civilian Winchester rifle, “but…rarely if ever go off.” Bullets �
��picked out of the buildings” had four lands; had they been fired from the Winchester, there would have been six. A bullet from a Krag rifle would have four lands, but the Springfield's cartridge would not fit into a Krag. By elimination, therefore, the only rifle that matched the shells and the bullets was the Springfield.34

  Roosevelt's witness list shrank from twenty-two in December to only twenty in January, and in a nod to Foraker's dramatic countdown to eight witnesses even fewer were eyewitnesses, but still twice as many as Foraker's (Roosevelt had sixteen, fourteen of whom saw Negro shooters and two who saw only that the shooters were soldiers). However, in a highly inventive category he called “earwitnesses,” Roosevelt placed four other civilians. So he was up to twenty, close enough to his original twenty-two to not be called a liar. He also had twenty-five more he called “corroborative.”35

  In a departure from the standard of proof required in a court of law, Roosevelt's message abandoned “beyond a reasonable doubt” and adopted “beyond possibility of honest question.” He claimed the evidence as a whole met this standard and so did the testimony of the witnesses, even with “a conflict on some of the minor points.”36

  Just before ending, he said of that part of Special Orders No. 266 debarring the soldiers from future civilian employment with the government, “I am now satisfied [it] was lacking in validity…and I have directed that such portion be revoked.” He ended with reference to his authority: “The order was within my discretion, under the Constitution and the laws, and can not be reviewed or reversed save by another Executive order. The facts do not merely warrant the action I took—they render such action imperative unless I was to prove false to my sworn duty.”37 With a gesture to any soldier who can clear himself of guilt in the shooting or the cover-up, “I will take what action is warranted,” without saying what it might be, and emptying this of any value he added, “Any such man [has] the burden of this clearing himself.”38