Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  Despite what he showed, Foraker was unable to get ahead of the story. Two months later, after Taft won the White House, Foraker was still denying he did anything wrong.15 To the public and to Theodore Roosevelt, being employed by Standard Oil (which Foraker admitted) was the same thing as being bribed by Standard Oil (which he denied).

  ARCHBOLD AND STANDARD OIL were bipartisan dispensers of bounty to public men, and Hearst was an equal-opportunity exploiter of circumstances. The Democrats also nourished their “sinews for war” at the Standard Oil teat, with less sustenance, but they did not go away “empty-handed.”16 In St. Louis, Hearst also targeted Democratic governor Charles Haskell of Oklahoma, the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Theodore Roosevelt was quick to recognize an opportunity to make trouble, and he joined the attack on Haskell and the Democrat nominee William Jennings Bryan. Bryan hit back by demanding Roosevelt prove the charges against Haskell. Roosevelt could not and answered that Bryan's support of Haskell was a “scandal and disgrace.” Haskell called Hearst “a liar” but meanwhile resigned as party treasurer.17 Everyone seemed to be shocked by the allegations and counter-allegations, but to all appearances everyone was having a good old time. Especially publisher Hearst, who was selling a lot more newspapers.

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WAS JUST as quick to go after Senator Foraker as he was Governor Haskell. Three days after Hearst released the letters in St. Louis, Roosevelt wrote his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, “Those revelations about Foraker are very ugly. They of course show, what everyone on the inside knew, that Foraker was not really influenced in the least by any feeling for the Negro, but that he acted as agents for the corporations.”18 To his son-in-law Nick Longworth, Roosevelt suggested Taft “ought to throw Foraker over with a bump.”19 (Nothing in the Lodge and Longworth letters explained how defending the Negro soldiers was in the interest of Standard Oil.) Two days earlier he had wired Taft the same thing. Referring to the meeting of the National League of Republican Clubs meeting at Music Hall he advised, “If I were running for President, I should…decline to appear upon the platform with Foraker, and I would have it understood in detail what is the exact fact, namely, that Mr. Foraker's separation from you and from me has been due not in the least to a difference in opinion on the negro question, which was merely a pretense.”20 Taft got Roosevelt's message and indirectly sent his own to Foraker not to show up at Music Hall. Foraker took the hint and sent a note explaining he was bowing out “because I do not wish to do anything that might injure the cause or embarrass you personally.” Taft gratefully accepted this gesture. Thereafter the Taft campaign cut all ties with Foraker.21 Julia Foraker was particularly hurt by the Music Hall matter. “If the positions of the two men were reversed…I know what would happen. My husband would refuse to believe the charge brought against an intimate old friend…. He would insist that the Senator appear on the platform with him—or he would not appear.”22

  Maybe people saw Foraker's denial of wrongdoing not squaring with politics as it was practiced. In his biography of Boies Penrose, Robert Bowden lists eleven senators in 1906, including Foraker, as “representatives of corporate business.” Their arrival in the Senate “had produced in Washington as commercial an atmosphere in its way as the atmosphere of Wall Street itself.” Walter Davenport in his biography of Penrose reproduces a letter from John D. Archbold to Penrose enclosing the $25,000 that was what Davenport characterized as “Pennsylvania's quota of Mr. Archbold's contribution to the Republican party for favors done and expected.” That letter and his letter to Foraker on January 27, 1902, both use the same shorthand explanation for why the money was sent; it was “in accordance with our understanding.”23

  Roosevelt sought to prove his pure politics by trumpeting that his 1904 campaign returned money from Archbold. In 1912 he denied any knowledge of a 1904 contribution at the time it was made and was able to produce letters to then chairman of the Republican National Committee George B. Cortelyou prohibiting the acceptance of any Standard Oil money and ordering the return of any already paid.24 Of course, it is possible “these letters were written to be filed, but not otherwise respected,” so-called posterity letters.25 During the 1906 campaign, Standard Oil knew it was about to get whacked with an enormous antitrust lawsuit seeking to break the company into bite-sized entities. It remembered what happened to J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities Company (the Supreme Court broke it up) and was spreading its money around in 1904 to buy protection from a similar crusade against it. Its plan failed. On November 15, 1906 (like the order discharging the black soldiers, just after the off-year elections), Roosevelt's Justice Department sued it for conspiring to restrain trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act, and five years later the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court's order of dissolution.

  THE HEARST–STANDARD OIL letters take up, as they do here, an important part of almost any narrative of the Brownsville Incident, despite their glancing connection with the Black Battalion. In his memoirs, Senator Foraker recalled that Champ Clark said Brownsville put him out of “the Presidency” and Senate.26 But, Foraker insists, Clark was wrong about the Senate. His defeat there was because of the Hearst–Standard Oil letters.27 Therein lies the link with Brownsville. Hearst's effort to get attention for himself grievously wounded Foraker's chance for reelection to the Senate. Few believed him when he said he did nothing wrong with Standard Oil, just as few believed the soldiers when they said they were innocent of the shooting. But knowing what Brownsville had cost him and not knowing what greater price might await him just ahead, he continued with his struggle for his soldiers.

  And for reelection to the Senate. Until the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, US senators were elected by state legislatures and not the direct vote of the people. A state legislature voted after it reassembled with its new members from the previous November election, thereby ensuring lame-duck legislatures would not make the decision. Exactly when was up to the states, so long as the decision was in time for senators to take their seats on March 4, the day their terms would begin.28 In Ohio the senatorial choice would be made in early January 1908. Foraker still had time and still might have a chance.

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 13, Foraker invited John Callan O'Laughlin to his home. One of Roosevelt's favorites in the Washington press corps (Roosevelt called him Cal), O'Laughlin had been, courtesy of Roosevelt, serving as secretary to the American Commission to the 1907 Tokyo Exposition intended by Japan to show it was now a world power. Roosevelt had promised to make O'Laughlin the assistant secretary of state after the 1908 elections to replace Robert Bacon, but only as a résumé builder, since the position came “with the distinct understanding” the job would end when Taft took the oath of office in two months.

  At first O'Laughlin thought Foraker wanted an opinion on his latest answer to the Hearst charges. But Foraker wanted to talk about himself, President Roosevelt, and his Brownsville soldiers. In a memorandum, O'Laughlin said Foraker told him it still was possible he would be reelected and was “anxious to ascertain if the President proposed to take a part in [that] campaign…. Then he turned to Brownsville. ‘I do not understand why the President has been so antagonistic to me. For years we were the closest friends, and then my opposition he construed as criticism.’” If O'Laughlin did not grasp that Foraker's grip on reality was loosening from his Alice-in-Wonderland belief that Ohio would send him back to the Senate, his failure to understand Roosevelt's antagonism surely put it in focus. Anyone who knew Theodore Roosevelt knew he did not tolerate criticisms of his programs and ideas. Foraker seems to have misplaced in some forgotten regions of his mind the joint statehood bill for Arizona and New Mexico, the Hepburn Act, the problems in Cuba in 1906, the Senate Brownsville investigation (which, if Foraker had not made the discharges an issue, would not have been approved), the stubborn defense the Ohioan put up for the soldiers in those hearings, the addresses to the Senate over and over again that made Roosevelt look sometimes like a madman, other times like a zealot
, and still others like a fool, and his efforts, for whatever reason, to deny Taft the White House. Foraker's sad monologue went on: he always defended the president; he never said a bad word against him personally.

  “Foraker closed by asking, ‘Do you think there is any way a conference could be arranged with the President when we could talk over the Brownsville matter? I don't want to fight anybody. I am a man of peace. I do not believe the President wants the fight to continue. Could you find out for me if the President would care to see me and talk over the matter, perhaps the whole field?’ I told Senator Foraker I would see what I could do.”29

  In the morning two days later, O'Laughlin met President Roosevelt and in the late afternoon he met again with Foraker to report Roosevelt's reaction. “If the Senator from Ohio wants to see me, I shall be glad to see him as I would a Senator from any other State.” Foraker was crestfallen. “That means only he will see me officially. Now if he had said that he would see Senator Foraker, it would give the personal touch which I consider necessary.” This perceptive observation of what Roosevelt said and what his words really meant suggests Foraker was reasserting a grip on himself. It also showed he understood very well his chances for getting back to the Senate. “It is probable I will not be reelected.” He focused on Brownsville. “I would like to have a settlement of this Brownsville question…acceptable to the President and to me.” It was becoming clear that when he said “to me” he meant not “to me for the benefit of my career” but “to me for my soldiers.” In the context of his admission that he would not be reelected and his realization that Roosevelt had understood and disregarded why he wanted the meeting, there was nothing left for him but his commitment to the Black Battalion.

  But Foraker thought there was still a chance. He repeated to O'Laughlin what he said two days ago, that “he was anxious…to effect a settlement [and] asked me to see the President that night,…that he was not wedded to the language of his bill…he was prepared to make numerous concessions.”30

  O'Laughlin ended his memorandum without any reference to a second meeting with Roosevelt, only, “I told Senator Foraker I would see what I could do.” It is not likely he did anything. His meeting with Roosevelt that morning had been disappointing. Roosevelt would not ask Taft to keep O'Laughlin in the State Department. O'Laughlin had his own job now to worry about after Roosevelt left the White House. And he knew very well Roosevelt's reaction to a second Brownsville plea after the first was so coldly dismissed would not be pretty. What was Foraker's last attempt to find an accommodation with Roosevelt, more for his soldiers than for himself, had failed. And his hope for the Senate would soon be gone.

  AT THE LAST MINUTE Charles Taft, President-elect Taft's brother, got into the Ohio Senate race, egged on by his wife, who wanted to move to Washington. According to a letter from Roosevelt to Taft on January 1, 1909, on December 17 Charley met with President Roosevelt to test his allegiance to Burton by telling him Burton might lose. Roosevelt's blood chilled at the thought Foraker would be returned and told Charley nothing was more important than defeating him. “Compared to the importance of [that] it was of no particular consequence at all what particular man was chosen to succeed him.”31 This was not what Charley wanted to hear. On December 28 he sent the Washington correspondent for his newspaper the Cincinnati Times-Star to the White House with a stronger hint. Burton had weakened and Foraker would win. Roosevelt knew where Charley Taft was going with this and had a message for him. He “thought Charley had grown weaker and Burton stronger.”32 Roosevelt added, “I thought it was outrageous from [President-elect Taft's] point of view…to consider any personal question whatever.” The “one vital question” was getting rid of Foraker. But he would not tell him what to do.

  For anyone without access to news of the outside world for the previous almost three years, Roosevelt made a statement to Gus Karger of the Times-Star to print the next day, and which was reprinted in Foraker's memoirs. “The one great issue involved in the Ohio Senatorial contest is now waged for the defeat of Foraker…. To support Foraker in this fight is to commit an ACT OF TREASON against the Republican Party.”33

  Foraker's end came two days later, on December 31, when Charley Taft withdrew from the race after getting the word from his brother to step aside. Only Burton was left standing. A few hours after his announcement, Foraker issued a statement of his own. “I would have been glad to be reelected…[but] there is a great compensation…in the result that has been reached. [Burton] is well-qualified by experience, ability and character.”34 The Republican caucus in the Ohio Senate confirmed the reality on January 2, and ten days later the Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly elected him the state's next United States senator.35 When Foraker stood that day to make his final address to the Senate for his Brownsville soldiers, he was Ohio's senior senator. By the time he sat down, he was a lame duck.

  DURING THE DECEMBER IN which Foraker's fate would be determined and the hopes of black Americans forsaken, thousands of miles away in Sydney, Australia, the promise of one black American was redeemed. On the day after Christmas, when President Roosevelt sent Kaiser Wilhelm II holiday greetings and said he hoped to visit German East Africa on his hunting trip to the Dark Continent in the coming year, a descendant of Africa was preparing to fight for boxing's heavyweight championship. Jack Johnson, a black American from Galveston, Texas, entered the ring to face Tommy Burns, a white Canadian. The odds were 5–4 that Burns, a little-regarded boxer, would win against the better boxer, and it may have been simply because Burns was white and Johnson was black. Whichever man won would capture the $35,000 purse.36

  Johnson took command of the fight the moment he entered the ring. “Capable and confident, Johnson grinned, bantered and taunted Burns from the start of the fight to the finish.” The writer Jack London, reporting on the fight for the New York Herald, wrote back to his newspaper, “Burns was a toy in his hands.”37

  There was never a doubt who the winner would be. Jack Johnson was declared the heavyweight champion. He had beaten a white man. Decisively. A black man was champion of the world.38

  “It was because the Ninth Cavalry was my home, my real freedom, and my self-respect.”

  First Sergeant Braxton Rutledge,

  Ninth United States Cavalry (Colored),

  as played by Woody Strode in Sergeant Rutledge

  THE PREVIOUS MAY, THE US District Court, noting that the guilt or innocence of Private Oscar W. Reid or any of the soldiers was “beyond this judicial investigation,” decided the enlistment contract was “terminable at will, if terminated [by the] President of the United States, as Commander in Chief.”1 Writing John Milholland, Foraker said, “This I hope is the last piece of bad luck we are to have. I hope the attorneys will take the case to the Supreme Court.” They did, and the Court handed down its decision only twenty-one days after he appeared for his oral argument (considering the intervening Christmas/New Year holidays, perhaps no more than one working week). An opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. turned Reid down. Federal courts could not hear Reid's claim because President Roosevelt was protected by the concept of sovereign immunity. That doctrine, absorbed by American jurisprudence from the English common law, and often characterized in both countries as “the king can do no wrong,” protects the US government from claims such as Reid's.2 Roosevelt had appointed Holmes to the court in 1902 after an intensive examination of his judicial rulings and questioning him on how he thought about the law. Roosevelt wanted a man who would vote what Roosevelt considered the correct way. Holmes surprised him and dissented against the government in the Northern Securities antitrust case in 1904. Roosevelt was irritated and, as Holmes later remarked, “It broke up our incipient friendship.”3 But because the government had won the case anyway, he more or less shrugged it off.

  Before the decision, Sturgis Bigelow (the man who in 1907 wondered what happened at the Gridiron dinner) sent Henry Cabot Lodge a newspaper clipping about the Korean emperor abolishing that c
ountry's supreme court. Lodge forwarded it Roosevelt, who sent it to Holmes with a note, “The merit of the suggestion is obvious.” Holmes sent it back with the answer, “I shall have to remind [Cabot and Bigelow] that if I catch them [before him in court] I will lay them by the heels if they do not keep civil tongues in their heads. The King [Holmes meant Roosevelt], of course, can do no wrong.” Later Holmes and his brethren applied that notion against Reid.

  WHILE WAITING FOR THE Supreme Court decision, Foraker still had the Browne-Baldwin investigation to deal with. It had been made public by Roosevelt in his December 14, 1908, special message to the Senate.4 Because of his own correspondence over the summer with Boyd Conyers, Foraker was prepared to answer Roosevelt in the time the Senate reserved for his reenlistment bill.5 How the investigation was conducted was, he argued, so disturbing it showed why the soldiers deserved a proper tribunal, and that was what his reenlistment bill would give them. He described the investigation from the point of view of the soldier it targeted, Boyd Conyers, and the deceitful way Browne and his associates distorted the truth made it seem Conyers had confessed his guilt, when in reality he denied any involvement. “I am just as innocent of taking any part in that trouble that night as God is on high.”6

  Foraker had to bite his tongue that day because the day before he had asked John Callan O'Laughlin to speak with Roosevelt on his behalf, and O'Laughlin had not yet reported back to him. But he did well enough for the Boston Herald to speak for much of the country and many in the Senate the next day when it titled an editorial “A Discredited Case.”7

  THE NEXT MORNING, FORAKER received a letter from Maurice Low, the correspondent for the London Morning Post. Low had been in Washington longer than Foraker and knew most of what went on there, possibly too much for some people. Theodore Roosevelt could not stand him. He called Low “an English Jew, an underhanded fellow who has been blackballed in the Metropolitan Club here, who dislikes America generally and hates me in particular, who knows nothing whatever, and would misrepresent anything he did know, a liar of bad character, utterly untrustworthy, untruthful little slander monger, and circumcised skunk.”8 Foraker and Low had grown close after Low's young son died and Foraker took a moment from Brownsville and the election to send his condolences. Low now questioned whether the War Department had a “secret service fund” for hush-hush matters, and, if not, where did it get the money for the Browne-Baldwin investigation? “Might not the public interests be served by a resolution of enquiry eliciting this information?”9 For years Foraker the lawyer had used “fishing expeditions” to discover weaknesses in the other side's case in lawsuits. You never knew what sort of catch you might reel in. He took to Low's suggestion as a hungry fish took to a wriggling worm on a hook and introduced in the Senate a resolution asking for the details of the Browne-Baldwin employment, the names of anyone else so employed, instructions given to them, what had been paid and to whom, by what authority, and where the money came from. As a sign that Roosevelt, with only a few months left in the White House, no longer intimidated senators, the resolution easily passed a day later.10