Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  From Foraker's virtual announcement he was running for president to his virtual elimination from that office took only four months. The year that had started with such hopes for Foraker and the soldiers turned to ashes for Foraker before it was barely half over. And Foraker knew it. A race he did not want and a race he thought had been forced upon him by events had brought him disappointment and humiliation and ended in defeat. He knew he had to fight for an office he could not win to keep the other office he already had. And that is the more likely reason he ran for president.

  He stayed in another fight too, the one for the Black Battalion. Would he win that fight? More than likely not. Would it be worth the effort? Decidedly yes, because knew he was right and it was only he who could bring them the justice they deserved. He knew this fight for them would not help him in the Senate race any more than it had helped him win the White House. He stayed in it anyway because it was the right and just thing to do for the soldiers, for the country, and for himself. Any speculation that he began the fight to become President Foraker is not supported by anything he said, wrote, or did. It was never about that.

  IN AN ARTICLE DATELINED April 6, 1907, the New York Times coldly, almost cruelly, told its readers how deep of trouble Joseph Foraker was in back in Ohio and how ignorant he was of this. “The nearest peanut stand man” knew more about Ohio politics than its senior senator. The New York Times was right about the trouble but as ignorant about Ohio politics as it claimed Foraker was. It was only slightly more observant when it stated the obvious, “The all-pervading personality in the White House throws a dark and deep shadow over Ohio politics.” Fearing Roosevelt, people were running away from Foraker.35 This was a drum the Times had been beating for some time now. On March 25 it had drawn a perfectly dismal picture of Foraker's problems. The Ohio rank and file were deserting him. When the toastmaster at a political dinner there mentioned his name, there was stone silence. Taft's name drew shouting, hand clapping, and feet stamping. In Ohio and Washington, Theodore Burton was being groomed as Foraker's successor. The New York Times described Burton as the ablest man in the House of Representatives, an intellect, a fighter with culture and polish, and perhaps most qualifying him to take Foraker's place in the Senate, “outspokenly a Taft man.”36 Now the Times told its readers those still with Foraker saw only one thing that might save him, as it had so often in the past, his ability to draw people to him when he speaks to them. “He can make men forsake their families and their home and their political principles and their bank accounts and anything else of value. He is a wizard and a hypnotist.”

  It is doubtful Foraker was that clueless. For the last two months he had been working constantly on the Senate's Brownsville investigation and getting precious little help from anybody. He could be forgiven for not tending to his political knitting. And then, on that April 6, he got a telephone call about Brownsville, and he wondered if at long last his crusade might be panning out.

  IT WAS A SATURDAY, and a Mr. J. C. Williams, not otherwise identified, telephoned Foraker at his home in Washington to say a “Mr. H. J. Browne had just given him some very important information with respect to the Brownsville matter.” That evening, Williams and Browne, a Washington journalist, came to Foraker's “big yellow house” to talk. Foraker, his instincts pummeled by the god-awful month of March that had just ended, was about to be taken by a con man. Browne played the exhausted Foraker like a fiddle. First he dangled the carrot. “A reliable source” told Browne that seven Brownsville residents had shot up the town. Three of them fled to Mexico, but the other four were still in Brownsville. Foraker had by then come to believe it had been Brownsville people, and he did not have to be convinced this made sense. Then Browne played the reluctant suitor. He had little interest in the matter, but purely in the interest of justice of course, he would be willing to go to Texas and meet the governor, who indicated he might be sympathetic to the idea, to see if he could secure clemency for these four men so they could turn state's evidence. Browne wasn't sure he could get away; he had some business in Washington to look after next week. He would know by Monday if he could go. Sure enough, Monday morning he called Foraker to say he'd taken care of his Washington business.

  Browne's offer came on the heels of Taft's devastating rejection of Cox's offer. It is likely Foraker was vulnerable to any idea that might discredit Taft and his protector, President Roosevelt. The wits of normally shrewd Foraker seem to have deserted him. Without checking in to Browne and who he was, without questioning him to try to learn something about his “reliable source,” without asking someone to see if the Texas governor knew anything about this, without any due diligence at all, Foraker put a check for $500 for “expenses” into Browne's hand and sent him off to Texas. Browne strung him along for another few weeks with “news” from stops in Texas. From Galveston on April 19: “Have been going over the Government's evidence. A flimsier lot of fabrications never was put together.” From Austin the next day: “Have just left Governor Campbell after a very interesting confidential talk…. While reluctant to be put in the position of waiving the laws of Texas, he sees the greater importance of putting a curb on ‘the most dangerous man in the history of America,’ to use his own expression…. Saw Maj. Penrose at San Antonio…. He cleared up several minor difficulties.” (Penrose warned Browne not to go to Brownsville, and when he did anyway, a worried Penrose wrote Foraker, “I have been particularly anxious regarding the Mr. Browne you sent to me, and who went to Brownsville against my best judgment…. I sincerely trust nothing may have happened to him.37) Five days later from Brownsville, where he was staying at the Leahy Hotel: “Louis Cowan, whose house was shot up, is the head devil in this business. He is a renegade Jew, Russian I am informed.” From New Orleans on May 10: “Have cleaned up the Brownsville situation as far as possible there. The Negro troops shot up the town. I can name four of them” (author's emphasis).38 A wiser Senator Foraker said good-bye to Mr. Browne and his $500 (more than $13,000 today). He was not interested in paying for information indicting the soldiers he was defending.39

  Brownsville was taking its toll on this smart, resourceful, and accomplished man. He would not be the last to be taken in by Mr. Browne.

  THE OTHER SIGNIFICANT EVENT in the history of the Brownsville Incident to take place on February 4, 1907, along with the opening of the Senate Military Affairs Committee hearings, was the court-martial of Major Charles Penrose, the commanding officer of the Black Battalion. Captain Edgar Macklin's trial was to have gone first but was postponed to allow him to heal from his shooting wound. Both men were charged with neglect of duty and both were found not guilty. Penrose was found guilty of a reduced charge of allowing, by failure to adequately direct Macklin to be especially vigilant on the night of the shooting, the shooting to take place, but the court-martial specifically found no criminality in this. Significantly, both courts-martial assumed it was the Negro soldiers who shot up Brownsville, and the Penrose court-martial recognized this as a fact in its finding.40 Because no question was raised about who the shooters were, nothing came out of the courts-martial that would assist Senator Foraker at the committee hearings.

  With a trial, the assistance of counsel, and the right to confront and cross-examine witnesses and present their own, none of which the 167 black soldiers had, their white officers were acquitted. Some of the witnesses who helped acquit them were the soldiers whose statements exonerating themselves were thought to be part of a conspiracy of silence and not believable, and therefore unable to keep them in the army.

  After their acquittals, both officers would say they had changed their minds. They no longer believed their soldiers had anything to do with the shootings in Brownsville.41

  “It is the law of human passion that friendship which lapses or seems to lapse begets the bitterest hate.”

  Kelly Miller, “Roosevelt and the Negro,”

  in Race Adjustment: Essays on the Negro in America

  OVER THE WINTER AND spring of 1907 Forak
er's attention could not focus solely on Brownsville. His presidential hopes, sincere or tactical, were dimming. He knew it and so did President Roosevelt, who fumed at the potential damage Foraker was doing to Taft in the November election. On June 26 he wrote to his son-in-law Nicholas Longworth to complain, “That scoundrel, Foraker, is doing all the damage he can with the negroes.” But he saw a bright side to this. “When the report of the [Military Affairs] committee comes in the Democrats of the Committee will take such an extreme position as to make the colored men who have even the slightest shred of common sense realize where their true friends are.”1 By supporting Foraker on Brownsville, the Democrats were cutting their own throats in November. The next day Taft came to the summer White House in Oyster Bay for a little spine stiffening, and as soon as he left, Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge, “Taft, thank Heaven, is up to making an aggressive fight against Foraker, and anything you think he ought to say on the subject of Brownsville you can confidentially send him.” Roosevelt was now so sure Brownsville was dealt with and safely put to rest, he added to Lodge, “I have half a mind, when I speak at Canton next October, to touch on the Brownsville case myself.”2

  FOR FORAKER'S CHANCES, OHIO'S summer was as cold as the winter and spring. Speaking at the Logan County (Ohio) Chautauqua at the end of July, he denied he was a candidate, but not with any finality. He made it clear he soon might be taking on his enemies by name. For Roosevelt he had advice that seemed to apply to the Brownsville soldiers and himself, “The big stick won't work with any free-born American citizen.” Obliquely referring to Brownsville, he took a moment to defend the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as being part of “the great work of establishing the doctrine of human equality before the law for all men.” He pummeled both Taft and Burton on the tariff issue, trying to show there was life in his political career yet.3 But on July 30, the day after his “virtual announcement,” when the Ohio Republican State Central Committee endorsed Taft for the White House but refused to endorse Foraker for Senate, Foraker was a dead man walking.4 He campaigned throughout the state as if he did not know it. As if to show he was not afraid of what President Roosevelt would do to him, he picked every issue that divided him from Roosevelt and Taft and defended himself. “In the Brownsville matter I had no purpose except to secure for a lot of helpless men, who had been branded as criminals and discharged without honor from the United States army, a chance to be heard in their own defense, a right that no American, no matter how humble he may be, should ever be denied.” He spiced this up with something more searing, “How about then 10,000,000 black people in America who never drew a disloyal breath, who are openly and defiantly being denied their constitutional rights of citizenship? What are the views of an aspirant to the Presidency about the new rebellion that has broken out in the Southern states, notably North Carolina and Alabama, in the form of an open defiance of the authority of the United States Courts?”5 With these two issues sure to ring a bell with Ohio's black voters, Foraker was trying to cleave them from Taft and the Republicans, thereby hoping to gain back some of the ground from when the state committee would not endorse him for the Senate. Foraker was a man running for office, but not the same office Taft was going after. He wanted not to be eliminated from public life and to stay in the Senate. Shaking the trees in Ohio might shake Taft to his senses and realize it was better to make sure people saw Ohio strongly supported him, and if he had to agree to support Foraker for the Senate, it was a reasonable price.

  FORAKER'S POLITICAL CAREER WAS not the only thing stumbling through the summer and into autumn. The American economy was shakier than it had been since the Panic of 1893, and Roosevelt had few ideas for what to do about it. The term Panic was used to describe the aftermath of a sudden event generally not foreseen, such as a stock market crash or the failure of a large and influential bank that abruptly roiled financial institutions, such as banks as a group, brokerage companies, and underwriters, then quickly spread throughout the economy. When the stock market crashed a generation after Brownsville, panic seemed inadequate to describe the devastated economy it spawned and too frightening to the general public, and the more comforting depression was used in its place. That depression was so disruptive and so resistant to government efforts to cure it, it was transformed into the singular “The Great Depression,” and thereafter what might have been a panic or a depression was called by the gentler and less disturbing term recession.6 (The preference for soothing language made a sudden about-face in 2009, when the government felt recession would not justify what it wanted to do to the American economy wrecked by the subprime mortgage crisis, and it chose to call the resulting recession “The Great Recession.”)

  On January 4, 1906, the financier Jacob Schiff had addressed the New York Chamber of Commerce and “assailed in unequivocal language” how the US government handled the nation's money. Describing cash as “the nation's circulating medium,” Schiff told his audience it has an “insufficient elasticity.” Unless something was done soon, “a panic…with which the three which have preceded it would only be child's play” was inevitable. He called upon President Roosevelt to “put part of the energy which he has so admirably put into the attempt to regulate railroad rates into an attempt to cure this condition.”7 Possibly because finances puzzled him so much he was forced to rely on Mrs. Roosevelt to dole out his pocket money and entrust it with his valet for safekeeping, Roosevelt disregarded Schiff's warning.8 His ignorance of finances on the macro and micro levels persuaded him that “rich men” and their manipulations caused the sort of panic Schiff spoke about.9 Roosevelt himself would bare his teeth to men like this at the 1907 Gridiron Club dinner and later that year on August 27 in a speech in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he called them “malefactors of great wealth.”10

  It turned out both Roosevelt and Schiff were right. Either because banks trying to discredit trust companies that were threatening their business targeted the Knickerbocker Trust Company and so weakened it by silent runs that it failed; or because of continuing economic fallout from the San Francisco earthquake weakened Knickerbocker causing it to fail; or because President Roosevelt's speech in Provincetown caused distress throughout the financial industry and caused Knickerbocker and other banks and trust companies to fail; or because Knickerbocker was over its head with loans either to unscrupulous characters trying to corner the copper market or not-so-unscrupulous people simply trying to acquire control of copper mining companies—for whatever reason or reasons, the Knickerbocker Trust Company started to fail, leading to what is remembered as the Panic of 1907.11 Long lines of panicked depositors formed outside banks to withdraw their deposits before their bank went bust. Wall Street needed the one man who could figure out a plan to save the situation and had the respect to influence others to agree to it. It was not President Roosevelt, who was hunting in Louisiana and taking his time returning to Washington. It was the financier J. P. Morgan, also out of town at a church conference in Richmond. On October 19, before the conference had ended, he rushed back to New York. In his mansion on Fifth Avenue and a private dining room at Sherry's Restaurant, he brought together financiers and bank presidents and decided which banks and brokerage companies could not be saved and would be allowed to fail and which could be rescued. For these he secured pledges of funding and then allowed his plan to unfold.12 By the time Roosevelt returned to Washington, Treasury Secretary George B. Cortelyou was in New York, in effect relocating the Treasury Department there to serve J. P. Morgan. On October 25, Roosevelt, responding to “much clamor for me to say something,” sent Cortelyou a letter that expressed “calm confidence.” He gave Cortelyou extraordinary authority to publish the letter, to not publish it, or to modify and then publish it. “I must trust to your judgment…. You can judge better than any of us here.”13 That same day he sent a second letter to Cortelyou to congratulate him “for the admirable way in which you have handled the present crisis. I congratulate also those conservative and substantial businessmen who in
this crisis have acted with such wisdom and public spirit…. they did invaluable service in checking the panic” (author's emphasis). Roosevelt's meekness in stepping aside to allow these “conservative and substantial businessmen” to rescue the country's economy when he could not and in thanking them for it contrasts with what he said to some of these same men, including J. P. Morgan, to their faces the previous January at the Gridiron Club dinner. No such consideration would he give to Senator Joseph Foraker, his other target that night.

  Nor did Roosevelt acknowledge Jacob Schiff had been right in predicting the panic and identifying its causes. (The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 48 percent of its value from January 1906, when Schiff made the speech, to November 1907, when the Panic ended.14) Morgan had to find the money to save things because, as Schiff pointed out, the federal government's monetary policy did not have the flexibility to expand the money supply by putting more than a pittance in the banks to cover the deposits. It had to depend on Morgan, John D. Rockefeller (who put in $10 million), and other malefactors of great wealth. Toward the end of November, Morgan came to Washington to talk to Cortelyou and “pay my respects to the President. Of course, we talked about the financial situation, but I cannot go into details.”15 Less than two weeks later, Secretary Cortelyou did when he announced, using the very words Jacob Schiff used the previous January, the nation's monetary system was imperfectly organized and required a “greater elasticity.”