“The Pres. Back—the Ohio appointment settled.”
Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield,
diary entry for May, 23, 1907
IT MAY HAVE BEEN at their White House meeting to discuss his annual message to Congress, when Booker T. Washington opened his eyes to Negro resentment, that Theodore Roosevelt started to think about mending fences with black Americans.1 He had been able to avoid Brownsville's electoral repercussions by delaying the discharge order until after the 1906 elections. But he had to consider that Negroes had not gotten over Brownsville, and their simmering frustration over it and his hands-off policy during the Atlanta riots had reheated to a boil with his annual message in early December and what he said about lynching and conspiracies of silence. Roosevelt wondered if the collateral damage from all this might lay waste to Republican chances in 1908. Because of the black migration to electoral-vote-rich Northern states, where they could vote and where they could determine winners and losers, black loyalty had to be recaptured. A plan seemed to have gelled in his mind by Christmas Day, when he wrote Washington asking for “the names of…first-class colored men.” They had to live in Ohio, preferably Cincinnati, and, signaling just what he was thinking of, “be up to the standard of an internal revenue collectorship.”2 Washington recommended Ralph Tyler, the Columbus journalist.3
Tyler was a clever man, fast thinking, active in the black civil rights movement but concerned for his own personal future. He had a talent for getting close to middle-level black political operatives such as George Myers in Cleveland and ingratiating himself with white elected officials such as Ohio's senators Foraker and Dick. He always worked hard to get ahead in life and to prepare himself for opportunities that found him. His resourcefulness had impressed W. D. Brickell, owner of the Columbus Dispatch, when he needed a stenographer one night and the only person in the office was the young Ralph Tyler mopping the floor. Tyler volunteered to take his dictation. “You know shorthand, Ralph?” asked Brickell. “Yes sir.” “And typing?” Ralph nodded he did. “You can put down that mop…for good,” Brickell told him. Tyler had a second job waiting tables in the dining car of the Columbus–Cleveland train, and one night he overheard talk of a railroad merger. Surreptitiously writing down shorthand notes on his shirt cuffs, when the train got to Columbus he called the story in to the Dispatch, and the newspaper had a scoop.4 When Robert F. Wolfe bought the Dispatch he continued to employ Tyler as a reporter and a writer and even made him his private secretary.
Tyler had hungered for a political appointment for some time. Shortly after the Ohio Republican Convention in Dayton the previous September, when Foraker seemed to have decisively turned back Theodore Burton, Tyler met with Ohio senator Charles Dick. Dick confided “he was glad the fight had been made on him and Senator Foraker” because with their triumph they now could “accomplish something for their friends. Ralph,” Tyler quoted Dick as saying, “when this campaign is over I am going to secure you a consulship, or something equally as good, and Senator Foraker is with me. We…now believe we will secure something for you, as you deserve it.”5
On Friday, January 4, Tyler got a letter from Roosevelt asking him to come to the White House. Traveling from Columbus through New York (“to throw the natives off the scent”), Tyler arrived at the White House on Monday at 11:00 a.m. to meet with President Roosevelt and his secretary William Loeb.6 To George Myers in Cleveland, Tyler wrote, “Now in my interview with the President, he stated that he had an opportunity to appoint a colored man to the position of Collector of Customs at Cincinnati, and was going to do so; and that I was the man he had in view. He asked me if I thought that Foraker or Dick would oppose my confirmation. I advised him I could not see how they could, as our relations were of the most cordial. This pleased him, and turning to Loeb he said: ‘Mr. Loeb this is our man. We will start with him.’ At the conclusion of the conference, he asked me to go over and have a chat with Longworth, giving me a letter of introduction and saying that he did not want Longworth to think he was just sloughing over his head.”7
From the beginning and the request to Washington for names of potential appointees, the entire affair might have been a charade, a trick played on Washington, Tyler, and the Negro community, with Roosevelt having no intention of following through.8 A clue is Roosevelt's instruction to Tyler to go see Congressman Nicholas Longworth. Historian Emma Lou Thornbrough believed Longworth did not want Tyler, and neither did many other Ohio politicians.9 But it made no sense for Longworth publicly to oppose Tyler's appointment. Why antagonize the black voters who made him the winner this past November? If Longworth told Tyler the appointment was fine with him, but it was all “the others” who opposed him that he was worried about, then Roosevelt and Longworth could use “the others” as an excuse not to close the deal with Tyler. The circle would be squared: blacks would be more favorably disposed to Roosevelt, Longworth, and Taft (perceived by blacks to be Roosevelt's hatchet man on Brownsville); this would peel black support away from Foraker; and Roosevelt would have an excuse to disappoint Tyler, who, understanding politics, would not raise a ruckus.
The story broke on January 30 in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Several problems worked against Tyler; one was that he was not from Cincinnati. The collector traditionally lived there. But what really mattered to Roosevelt was that Cincinnati was Foraker's hometown and where he wanted to show his friendship for Negroes. Roosevelt wanted to “hand Senator Foraker a lemon” with the appointment of a distinguished member of the colored race in Ohio.10 When Foraker heard Ralph Tyler was being considered, his anger was “vigorous.” According to the New York Times the only part of his comment that got past the censor was the sarcastic reference to “the Senator for Ohio, Booker Washington” for having been the patronage angel recommending Tyler to Roosevelt. In the end Roosevelt reappointed Amor Smith Jr., former mayor of Cincinnati and a man recommended by Foraker.11
Washington biographer Louis Harlan suggested Washington was just as happy Tyler was not appointed. He arranged for him to get a job as fourth auditor of the US Navy (actually in the Treasury Department) so he could keep an eye on the man whom Roosevelt, against Washington's recommendation of another man, made register of the US Treasury, the highest traditionally black-held position in Washington.12 And the record suggests this is what Tyler did.13
GEORGE MYERS MOVED TO Cleveland from Baltimore when he was twenty years old to work in a hotel barber shop. He cut Senator Mark Hanna's hair, and on him Myers stropped his political skills. When a real estate developer built a new and lavish hotel, the Hollenden House, and wanted an equally lavish barber shop for its clientele, he loaned Myers the money to set one up. It thrived and soon became one of the places to go to talk politics—and get a shave and a haircut of course.14
Myers was a Republican fiercely loyal to the party and to Mark Hanna. He lost interest in actively working what he called “the game” after Hanna's death in 1904 but stayed close with Republican bosses in Cleveland and mentored the next generation of black leaders, including Ralph Tyler. Though Brownsville may have soured his opinion of Theodore Roosevelt, he remained a loyal Republican and worked to keep Negroes in the party and working for it. Because he would accept nothing less than full participation for Negroes in political, social, and economic America, he kept his distance from Booker T. Washington and his accommodation policies. On all other issues, he was “Old Guard” and already kindly disposed to Foraker. Foraker's support of the Black Battalion made him even better.15
On April 11, 1907, Myers wrote to Tyler ostensibly to congratulate him on his federal appointment but really to point out some of the facts of life as he saw them. “No action at this late day of any nature could stem the onward rush of the ‘Black deluge’ in Ohio for Foraker…. I am writing you…to demonstrate the futility of the President to corner or stop the stampede of the colored voters of Ohio by your appointment, and to show you what a gigantic and futile task you will have upon your hands if he contemplates using yo
u as the means.”16 Myers's prediction to Tyler was wrong. He had been just as wrong back in January when he wrote Senator Foraker to say, “The President [thinking of appointing Tyler is] to embarrass you…and to regain the support of the colored voters of Ohio. In the first, he may be successful, but in the second, never.”17 By the spring of 1908, just in time for the Republican nominating convention, blacks were securely back in the party's fold.18 But black factionalism was exhibiting itself in the Republican Party and inserting itself into the friendship between Myers and Tyler.
On May 23, 1907, Secretary of the Interior James Garfield would note in his diary “the Ohio appointment settled.” Nine days later, Ralph Tyler was writing to George Myers on “Treasury Department” stationery.19 And President Roosevelt was using small, mostly public-relations-type steps to regain black support. An eleventh-hour addition to a list of black army officers (there were only twelve in the entire army) added the name of “2nd Lt. John E. Green” and posted him to the Twenty-Fifth Infantry. He would be the regiment's first black infantry officer.20 On January 28 Nick Longworth brought a delegation from the Colored Industrial Education Association to the White House to meet his father-in-law and ask him to attend its fair in Columbus the next summer. Roosevelt had a conflict and seemed sincerely regretful when he asked them to change the fair's date to accommodate his schedule. The delegation said it would try and left happy and delighted.21
ON DECEMBER 6, THE day the Senate voted for the Penrose and Foraker resolutions, Mingo Sanders presented himself at the War Department to apply for his own government job—as a reenlisted first sergeant in the Twenty-Fifth Infantry.22 He hoped to see Secretary of War Taft but was unable to and had to leave disappointed.23 The next day he returned accompanied by (former) Private Elmer Brown. Both men wore their army uniforms with service stripes indicating twenty-six years for Sanders and sixteen for Brown. Secretary Taft, pleading his work on his annual report and having to be at the White House for a cabinet meeting, would not see them. But fifty more former soldiers had descended on Washington to apply for reenlistment. All filled in enlistment forms for first-time enlistees and were told they would be held until President Roosevelt decided what to do.24
On December 11 Taft distributed his guidelines for reenlistment applications, and the next day six more soldiers showed up at the War Department. They were allowed to file their applications when they gave assurances they subsequently would submit evidence to justify their innocence.25 Accepting the applications was one thing; considering them was something else, and until President Roosevelt sent the information requested by the Foraker and Penrose resolutions, the War Department would do nothing.
On January 24, ten days after the president delivered the Brownsville information, Mingo Sanders was back at the War Department pursuant to a summons to meet with General George B. Davis, the army's judge advocate general. Sanders was hoping his reenlistment application had been approved and he would be welcomed back into the Twenty-Fifth Infantry.26 This time he was accompanied by N. B. Marshall, a black lawyer. When General Davis asked Sanders to take an oath, Marshall refused to allow it. Inexplicably, Marshall would not permit Sanders to return to the army until the Senate Military Affairs Committee completed the investigation of Brownsville as ordered two days earlier. He feared the army would post Sanders to Alaska or some other faraway location to keep him from the committee. Marshall's logic is difficult to divine. The longer his client stayed out of the army, the harder it would be to get back in. Even if the army sent Sanders to Alaska, if the Senate committee wanted him to testify before it, the army would send him back to Washington right away. Marshall need not have worried. The application had not been approved, it was only now being looked at, and the oath was not the enlistment oath but one as part of an examination for evidence to consider his application. The army was mystified why Sanders was not cooperating in his own application. Meanwhile, Sanders and Marshall left the War Department to tell Senator Foraker the army wanted Sanders back in. Foraker was overjoyed, only to be disappointed when he learned the truth.
CAPTAIN EDGAR MACKLIN, FORMERLY commanding officer of Company C, was managing the Fort Reno Post Exchange (PX) while awaiting his scheduled court-martial. PXs generated a lot of cash receipts, and on December 21 Captain Macklin, unable to get to the bank in El Reno in time to make a deposit, had $1,500 of PX money in his quarters.
He and Mrs. Macklin were eating supper when someone tried to enter through a side door. “I have a message for you,” whoever it was called into the quarters. Immediately, a black man wearing a mask broke in and, pointing a pistol, demanded “all the money you have got.”27 Macklin scuffled with the intruder to get the revolver away from him, but the man fired twice, and Macklin was wounded in his belly and jaw. Mrs. Macklin raced upstairs to get a pistol, but when she got back downstairs the intruder was gone. Her husband's wounds were serious but not fatal.28
Suspicion fell on the Brownsville soldiers. Was someone trying to prevent Macklin from testifying against the soldiers at his court-martial? This seemed unlikely. Macklin had defended them since the shooting, and there was no reason to think he would change his story. Besides, he was well liked by his troops and considered a good officer by them. The night he was attacked, an army campaign hat had been found outside Macklin's quarters with the number 25 and the letter D outlined on it. But such hats were for sale at shops in El Reno, and the soldiers of Company D had already been discharged and sent away. Because of this and the demand for money, few people believed the intruder was one of the discharged soldiers.29
Macklin's court-martial, scheduled for January 4, 1907, had to be postponed until February 4. That same day the Senate Military Affairs Committee began its hearings into the Brownsville Affair.
“My official interest in this matter will soon terminate, but I shall have the comfort in retiring from public service of a well founded conviction that the action of the President relative to this class of lawlessness will be sufficiently rigorous.”
Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen
Hitchcock in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt,
November 30, 1906
SENATOR FRANCIS E. WARREN was said to be the richest man in Wyoming.1 He made money in every sort of venture, from real estate development to municipal utilities.2 He built and owned opera houses, theaters, office buildings, and residential housing. His retail shops sold “carpet, sewing machines, works of art, pianos, and other furniture” to the wealthy living on Cheyenne's “Millionaires’ Row.”3 In the US Senate he saw to it that practically every town in Wyoming got floods of federal funding for public works and army posts to protect them. When the army located Fort D. A. Russell near Cheyenne, the Denver Post noted “Denver would lose at least $2,000,000 per year.”4
Ever more federal money was needed in Wyoming because Warren believed, even after statehood, the state was something akin to a ward of the federal government. Sparsely settled, its natural resources awaiting the technology of later generations to be profitably developed, and its economy imbalanced with ranching and agriculture, the state could not otherwise sustain itself. “Happily, Wyoming, like so much of the American West, did not have to rely solely on the personal resources of its citizens. The federal government stood ready, if solicited, to dispense its bounty through a variety of subsidizing devices.” Francis Warren was ever unafraid to make the solicitation.5 One “subsidizing device” was the tariff on imported wool, and for fighting to keep it at staggering heights, Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver of Iowa said Warren was the “greatest shepherd since Abraham.”6 With his own sheep ranches the foundation of his wealth, this profited his state and his wallet.
Warren was born and raised in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts about thirty miles from W. E. B. Du Bois's birthplace of Great Barrington. Sixteen when the Civil War began, he enlisted in the Forty-Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and at the battle of Port Hudson he was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroic bravery. After the war he tried
to raise cattle back home but gave it up to move west and settle in the Wyoming Territory. After holding a series of local elective offices, he was appointed territorial governor by President Chester A. Arthur. With statehood in 1890 he was its first elected governor, and then its first US senator. When the Senate approved the Brownsville investigation, he chaired its Military Affairs Committee in charge of it.7
HIS CAREER HAD BEEN nagged by questions of impropriety, many the kind easily brushed under the carpet if the right political party happened to be in control. In 1905 Warren was accused of having his son and brother-in-law on the Senate's payroll, although neither lived in Washington or was seen doing any work. Senator Warren simply denied the charge and it went away.8 There were allegations that through his influence his electric company secured the contract to provide electricity for Fort Russell in Cheyenne. He survived this one too.
Long whispered about were more-serious allegations that he illegally fenced government lands to graze his flocks. This was common in the high desert West, where raising cattle was a risky business. (If any man knew that, it was Theodore Roosevelt. The dreadful winter of 1886–87 devastated his herds in Dakota while he and Edith were enjoying their honeymoon in delightful Italy. It ended his ranching days.9 That same cold winter affected Wyoming.) Lack of water was a constant problem.10 While Warren was territorial governor he reported that “probably four times as many cattle die from want of water as for want of food.”11 To gain an edge ranchers grazed their herds on government land for the water on it and soon came to think the right to do so was their due. To keep other herds away, they saw no problem with fencing this government land. Anyone who tried to cut down the fences had better be “bulletproof.”12 It became a bitter political problem. In 1886 the Interior Department specifically named Warren as an illegal-fencing offender.13 The next year, forty-six black soldiers came to remove his illegal fences, but they never were allowed to finish the job. Warren was still at it fifteen years later when it was reported there still was “illegal fencing of up to hundreds of thousand of acres of government [land] by the Warren Livestock Company, [including] a large pasture in which may be found the city of Cheyenne” (author's emphasis).14
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 31
