Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  MINDFUL OF GEORGE MYERS'S hostility when he got the Treasury Department job, Ralph Tyler made a point of staying in touch and ingratiating himself. In August he sent Myers a gift of Prussian coins to add to his collection. There was no discussion of Brownsville or politics, an acknowledgment that the two men saw these things differently. In a postscript Tyler added, “It's HOT here,” a reference no doubt to the weather and not Brownsville. About a week later Tyler wrote he had had a meeting with Secretary Taft regarding a favor Myers was doing for an army-chaplain friend who thought he was entitled to a promotion. Taft wanted to see the man's file, but it was late and the adjutant general who had possession of them had gone home. Tyler, sharp as ever, “thoughtfully brought the copies along you sent me and gave them to him.” Taft said he would recommend a promotion to major. “I was received very cordially and was particularly pleased with my interview and the progress made.”16

  Two weeks later came the more important news. “Friend George: I have assumed additional charge of the N.Y. Age and will write its editorials. Watch them. [T. Thomas] Fortune is out. Has disposed of his interest.” Unsaid in the letter was that the editing position was arranged for him by Booker T. Washington. Under its founder and publisher T. Thomas Fortune, the New York Age became one of the country's leading black newspapers. All the credit went to Fortune, a skilled writer of prose and poetry. The Age was more than a place for news of the black community in New York and elsewhere. It had social news, book reviews, gossip, and other special features. Washington quietly supported the newspaper and maintained his influence over its news articles and editorials, sometimes writing them himself, but always anonymously. Washington had emotional control over the emotionally fragile Fortune and could influence his behavior as well as the newspaper's. But Brownsville so irritated Fortune he no longer would toe the Washington line when it came to his editorials. They became anti-Roosevelt, and Washington knew Fortune had to go. He encouraged Fred Moore, a New York real estate investor, to buy the Age, and after a couple of false starts Fortune agreed to sell. The deal closed in September 1907.17 Washington arranged Moore's financing—just as he had for Fortune—for the paper's operating and other expenses and thereby maintained his influence over the paper. He congratulated Moore and said he had in his hands “the greatest opportunity, in my opinion, that any individual has had in many years to influence and make public sentiment.” Left unsaid was just how public sentiment should be influenced. Instead he cautioned Moore to “be more considerate of your health” and quit smoking.18

  Moore was not the journalist or writer that Fortune was and someone had to be brought in for the editorials. The reliable Ralph Tyler, comfortably employed as an auditor for the navy in Washington thanks to the Wizard and Theodore Roosevelt, could be counted on to follow the party line. Energetic and resourceful as always, he took charge of more than the editorial page of the Age. He had hardly warmed his seat at the editorial desk when he arranged with his fellow Columbus resident Arthur Vorys to set up a Colored Press Bureau in Washington (“at their expense”) to send “a newsy letter,” pro-Taft of course, to black newspapers each week.19

  Washington was solidifying his control over the newspaper and what it said. But not right away. Fortune had pulled the Age away from Roosevelt, and the move back had to be gradual so as not to seem too deliberate. Both Moore and Tyler understood it might take until December and January.20 Nevertheless, for reasons not entirely clear, the timetable was moved up to October 17 when Tyler printed an incendiary editorial, “Brownsville Ghouls.” It said those who supported Foraker and opposed Roosevelt were ghouls for making Brownsville a race issue not to obtain justice for the discharged soldiers but for “thirty pieces of silver coined for Judas.” They were “worthless parasites who represent nothing but selfish avarice” and used the soldiers for their own political ends. The effect was explosive. Fortune was so angry he wrote a letter to the Age, which it refused to print.21 He sent letters to other black newspapers, including Harry Smith's Cleveland Gazette, known to be the leading black newspaper to support Foraker. “Let Roosevelt-Taft ghouls howl. When God gets behind men, as He is behind Roosevelt and Taft he does not rest until he eats them up.”22

  “Brownsville Ghouls,” as Washington wrote to Tyler soon after it was published, “proved a boomerang.” It was printed “too quickly after [Moore's] taking charge of the paper” and changed the Age's “attitude” too suddenly.23 He told Fortune the same thing, but its damage would be to the newspaper, “as a business matter alone.” (He also misled Fortune by saying, “I am absolutely sure that no one connected with this Institution wrote the ‘Brownsville Ghouls’” [author's emphasis].)

  Tyler had gone too far. And so had the Wizard.24

  AT ITS THIRD ANNUAL meeting in Boston the Niagara Movement looked back to its Harper's Ferry meeting a year earlier and found it had been “A year of wrong and discrimination.” W. E. B. Du Bois asked rhetorically, “Has not the man in the White House set [an] example by bowing before the brown and armed dignity of Japan and swaggering roughshod over the helpless black regiment whose bravery made him famous?”25 His comparison between the benevolence Roosevelt displayed to Japanese in America and the hostility he showed to the “helpless black regiment” was telling.

  There were, as already commented on, a series of antagonisms, prejudices, sensitivities, competing interests, and quasi-legitimate concerns boiling together in California and the AmericanWest.

  Roosevelt knew he first had to show Japan he could resolve the problems before it would allow him the time to do so. His Harvard classmate and friend Japanese Baron Kaneko Kentaro, formerly Japan's minister of justice and a member of the Japanese House of Peers, became a back channel for getting messages to the Japanese government and sending back a reading of how it saw things. Kentaro told Roosevelt the Japanese government appreciated Roosevelt's attitude and sincerity.26 Roosevelt knew he was on the right track.

  San Francisco's exclusion of Japanese children was the flash point, California's discriminatory legislation the kindling, and Americans’ belief Japanese should be kept out of the country entirely the lighter fluid that made the puzzle of how America would deal with a threatening Japan so combustible. They all came together to interfere with how Roosevelt wanted to deal with a foreign power. This made it a matter of foreign policy, a federal concern, and therefore he was entitled deal with it. But the overall problem would not be resolved until the San Francisco schools matter was straightened out.27 He had instructed Metcalf to look at more than San Francisco schools; he was also “to confer with the authorities and the labor union people to point out the grave risk they are forcing the country to incur.”28 The “grave risk” he was worried about was nothing less than war, as he wrote to his son Kermit: “The infernal fools in California, and especially in San Francisco, insult the Japanese recklessly, and in the event of war it will be the nation as a whole which will pay the consequences.”29

  In California, Metcalf's visit was not favorably received at all.30 On his first day there, he met with the San Francisco school board president, who told him the schools were only following California law, and if their exclusion of Japanese students violated any treaty provisions, “that is a matter…for persons other than the members of the School Board to pass upon.”31 A discouraged Metcalf wrote Roosevelt there was no chance the school board would modify or repeal its decision.32 Roosevelt hoped his annual message to Congress, the same message in which he so antagonized Negro Americans with his talk of black crime and conspiracies of silence, would persuade Americans and especially Californians to reassess their opposition to the Japanese.33 His target audience, however, was not just his own countrymen; he wanted to make sure his message got through to the Japanese government, and to this end he showed it to Japan's ambassador to the United States, giving him enough time to send it to Tokyo and measure its response.

  Roosevelt began the Japan part of the message by saying there was “hostility…assumed toward the Ja
panese in this country,” called it “most discreditable to us as a people,” and warned, “it may be fraught with the gravest consequences to the nation.” Using the bully pulpit as a classroom, he undertook to explain something about Japan and its people and why it could be a threat to America. “Her civilization is older than that of the nations of northern Europe.”34 But this civilization possessed the strength of Sparta as well as the humanities of Athens. The Japanese were “great in the arts of war…great in military…. Japanese soldiers and sailors have shown themselves equal in combat to any of whom history makes note. She has produced great generals and mighty admirals; her fighting men, afloat and ashore, show all the heroic courage, the unquestioning, unfaltering loyalty, [and] splendid indifference to hardship and death…and they show also that they possess the highest ideal of patriotism.” Japan, in short, was not a country to pick on. It also was a friend to America. “Thru the Red Cross the Japanese people sent over $100,000 to the sufferers of [the] San Francisco [earthquake and fire], and the gift was accepted with gratitude by our people.” “The Japanese have won in a single generation the right to stand abreast of the foremost and most enlightened peoples of Europe and America.”

  He turned to San Francisco. “To shut [Japanese schoolchildren] out from the public schools is a wicked absurdity. I ask fair treatment for the Japanese as I would ask fair treatment for Germans or Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, or Italians.” To show the Japanese and California he meant business, he recommended Congress enact a law, “specifically providing for the naturalization of Japanese who come here intending to become American citizens.”35 (The dramatic effect of such a proposal is seen in the New York Times headline capturing what its editors thought was the most significant item in the address: “President Demands Citizenship for Japanese.”) Roosevelt also wanted “the criminal and civil statutes of the United States be so amended and added to as to enable the President, acting for the United States Government, which is responsible in our international relations, to enforce the rights of aliens under treaties.” Until then, “everything that is in my power to do will be done, and all of the forces, military and civil, of the United States which I may lawfully employ will be so employed.”36 Before leaving for Panama the previous month, Roosevelt ensured this would be done even in his absence. He gave Secretary of State Elihu Root a letter directing him “to use the armed forces of the United States to protect the Japanese in any portion of this country if they are menaced by mobs or jeopardized in the rights guaranteed them under our solemn treaty obligations.”37 Roosevelt showed his cleverness at laying the groundwork for taking action others might not accept as part of his authority. Enforcing treaties and granting citizenship are federal matters; two more reasons he was entitled to get involved with the Japanese problem.

  The phenomenal success Roosevelt's message enjoyed in Japan can be measured by Baron Kaneko calling this the greatest “utterance by an American President since Washington's Farewell Address,” thereby downgrading a gem such as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.38 San Franciscans were less impressed. Speaking for them and all Californians, Governor George Pardee, in language and tone milder than that heard on the street, said President Roosevelt “was not aware of conditions on this coast, especially in California.”39 When Roosevelt said he would employ “all of the forces, military and civil, of the United States,” San Franciscans heard him say he would seat Japanese children in white schools with guns and bayonets. The schools matter remained at an impasse.

  WHEN SAYING HE WOULD not hesitate to use the army in San Francisco, Roosevelt was showing he carried a big stick. He would display it again. On January 5, 1907, he met at the White House with Senator George C. Perkins of California and US District Attorney Robert Devlin, whom he summoned from San Francisco.40 That same day it was reported Attorney General Charles Bonaparte was preparing the papers to go to court on behalf of the Japanese schoolchildren.41 Two days after that, Roosevelt pressured Congressman Everis Hayes from California, who had introduced a Japanese exclusion bill in the House.42 At the end of the month Roosevelt had the entire California congressional delegation come to the White House, and when they left it seemed a breakthrough had been made. The delegation issued a statement suggesting a solution was possible. It sent a telegram to the San Francisco school superintendent and president of the school board asking that they come to Washington to meet with Roosevelt and Secretary of State Root. A second wire was sent to Governor James Gillett, who had been newly inaugurated, requesting that he ask the California legislature to defer consideration of all Japanese matters before it. The invitation to the school officials was soon expanded to the entire school board, and with some further prodding by the members of Congress, they agreed to come. So did San Francisco's mayor. On February 3, only four days after receiving the first telegram from the congressional delegation, the Californians left on the long, cross-continent train trip to meet with President Roosevelt. It was time for him to speak softly.43 By the middle of February, the mayor and school board gave in. Roosevelt had won.44

  Roosevelt had protected the rights of Japanese children, most of whom were not American citizens. He saw to it they would attend schools with white children in California, something black schoolchildren in the South would be denied by law until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional almost half a century later.45 Along the way he gave the Japanese ambassador approval rights to what he would say in his 1906 annual message, whereas Booker T. Washington had a right only to look at it and not, as T. Thomas Fortune put it, “blue pencil” Roosevelt's offensive and hurtful comments about blacks who were American citizens all.46 Roosevelt muscled the San Francisco school board, its mayor, California's governor, and its legislature in a way thoroughly at odds with the American federalism he said tied his hands during the Atlanta riots.

  Roosevelt went to these lengths to protect the country from war with Japan.47 It was the foreign-policy element that made the difference to Roosevelt. It required he get involved to ensure “fair treatment” for schoolchildren and laborers. Unlike the Japanese schoolchildren, black Americans, their schoolchildren, and the soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry had no powerful foreign or domestic protector to ensure their fair treatment.

  “Theodore Roosevelt was not lucky for Foraker; he was a disaster.”

  Julia Foraker, I Would Live It Again

  THE AUTUMN OF 1907 was an Indian summer of unexpected good news for Joseph Foraker and his fight to keep his Senate seat. The man yearning to seize it from him, Theodore Burton, had reluctantly accepted President Roosevelt's “suggestion” in the spring that he run for mayor of Cleveland, but, in what was seen as a direct blow to Roosevelt and Taft, a substantial majority of its voters elected the Democrat Tom Johnson.1 More encouraging was the chatter that Foraker might control the Ohio delegation at the Republican nominating convention in June 1908. Taft's nomination effort would be crippled if his home state failed to support him, and he might have to endorse Foraker for the Senate just to keep him out of the presidential race.2

  On November 20 Foraker extended his streak with the endorsement of the Ohio State League of Republican Clubs. In a slap at President Roosevelt the League declared it had no sympathy for the proposition Foraker should be eliminated from public life and supported him for president.3 Foraker knew that he controlled the League, and this was no real achievement. But this public rejection might be another reason for Taft to relent. To further pressure Taft, Foraker made his virtual candidacy for the White House the real thing. Interior Secretary (and fellow Ohioan) James Garfield saw this for what it was, “This is to my mind simply a desperate effort to compel an agreement by the Taft men not to oppose Foraker for the Senatorship.”4

  By the new year the glow was dimming. On January 2, 1908, the Republican State Central Committee voted to choose delegates to the nominating convention by primary elections, taking the decision out of the hands of county conventions Foraker was more likely to dominate. At the end of the month, Warren H
arding, who had introduced the resolution supporting Foraker at the Ohio State League of Republican Clubs meeting in November, went over to Taft. He now saw Foraker's cause as lost.5

  AFTER MEETING WITH FRANCIS Woodbridge, Foraker agreed to coordinate efforts with George Michaelis and his lawyers; Foraker would work in the Senate and with the lawyers in federal court. Michaelis became something of a gadfly, presuming he now was entitled to Foraker's ear whenever he had a thought or two to pass on. What was to have been a “second front” that would relieve some of Foraker's pressures was becoming a nuisance and sapping his energy. On June 18, 1907, Michaelis told Foraker who he thought shot up the town. Ignoring that policeman Joe Dominguez lost an arm and bartender Frank Natus lost his life, Michaelis smugly observed, “Veteran soldiers used to handling firearms would not have been such poor marksmen.” Foraker thanked him for the “interesting and important information.”6 In August he wrote Foraker with his views on free trade (“Personally, I am a Republican free trader”) and his opinion “from the alienist's point of view” that Roosevelt would be the candidate in 1908.7 Foraker's secretary politely answered that he was “under general instructions to acknowledge receipt of your letter.”8