Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  While waiting for Roosevelt's answer, Foraker considered his next move. Every Republican on the Military Affairs Committee had said some sort of redress for the innocent soldiers was needed, and even Roosevelt made minimally encouraging concessions to this in his special message. The Senate was eager to be done with Brownsville, and President Roosevelt was aware that at noon on March 4, Inauguration Day for Taft, he would lose all control over it. But he was not likely to sign any bill that permitted any soldier back in the army who to his mind was not absolutely free of the least hint of guilt. Foraker knew the time had come to abandon soldiers who were doomed, as in triage on a battlefield, to save those with a chance. Roosevelt would not come to an accommodation with him but might with the Senate. He would deal with Roosevelt through the Senate as “the Senator from Ohio,” the term Roosevelt used in his answer to O'Laughlin, which Foraker took to mean without the empathy he hoped for.

  ON JANUARY 12, 1909, Joseph Foraker rose before a Senate floor crowded with senators and with spectators jammed into gallery seats.11 No one wanted to miss what was thought to be Foraker's last appearance on behalf of his Brownsville soldiers and possibly his last address to the Senate. Ostensibly speaking in support of his reenlistment bill, he quickly angled back to the Browne-Baldwin report. With his O'Laughlin hopes dashed, there was no reason to hold back, and he tore into Roosevelt and the investigation. He accused the detectives of using tactics just short of a rubber hose. Their evidence was “wholly false in every essential particular, being nothing more than malicious fabrications of the most villainous character.”12 He reminded senators that repeatedly since August 1906 Roosevelt had said with bombastic certainty the evidence overwhelmingly and conclusively showed the soldiers were guilty. Yet every time, he required more proof of what he said was already proved. Before the Senate in his special message on December 19, 1906, President Roosevelt had said it again with greater emphasis. But afterward Assistant Attorney General Milton D. Purdy and Major Augustus Blocksom had to go to Texas to investigate. In March 1908 a majority on the Senate Military Affairs Committee determined soldiers did it, and President Roosevelt said this confirmed their guilt. Within the month, though, he authorized Secretary Taft to hire private investigators to investigate one more time, and he kept this hidden and paid for with contingent funds only he controlled. And with not one soldier admitting guilt, still Roosevelt claimed he was right.

  Time now was on Foraker's side. Roosevelt had only fifty-one days left in the White House; his ability to use the authority and respect of his office to persuade people was waning. The Senate was tired of Brownsville and tired of Roosevelt. Though not prepared to deny Roosevelt his discharges, senators were sure that for at least some soldiers an injustice had been committed and must be corrected. The president's blindness to the Browne-Baldwin investigation's shadiness and shabbiness was the best reason yet to give the soldiers a fair hearing and a real chance to get back in the army. Foraker would show little regard for the man who had treated him so cruelly. He had lost his cause in the Military Affairs Committee and his seat in the Senate. He had been humiliated and disgraced. What was left was his obligation to his soldiers. There would be no restraint in his speech today.

  This speech put Brownsville back on the front pages. The New York Times called Foraker's speech his “swan song…a vigorous, vitriolic valedictory.”13 Senators turned from distractions on their desks and in the chamber to give him strictest heed. People in the galleries (including an unusual number of blacks) were too absorbed even to applaud. Spectators and listeners must have held their breath as the energized Senator Foraker accused President Roosevelt of behaving illegally; he cited an 1893 law expressly forbidding employment of private detectives by the government.14 And why was such a thing even needed? Why the “determined effort…to again bolster the case [already] characterized as ‘conclusive’ and overwhelming”?15 It was “monstrous,” “revolting,” “shocking to every sense of fairness, injustice, and every common decency.”16 “The President's methods cannot be fittingly characterized without the use of language which, if employed, might appear to be disrespectful to the Chief Executive. He has become utterly oblivious to all the restraints of law, decency, and propriety in his mad pursuit of these helpless victims of his ill-considered action.”17 The New York Times softened these indictments by calling them “flings of biting sarcasm.”18 But newspapers across the country had similar headlines: “President ‘Oblivious to All Law and Decency.’”19

  Foraker denied Conyers or any other soldier had confessed to any part in the shooting or cover-up and invited senators to look through letters from them bundled on his desk. He even had an affidavit from the white sheriff in Monroe, Georgia, who was present when Browne tried to get Conyers to confess, saying Conyers had made no confession and Browne's story was false. “I desire,” swore Sheriff E. C. Arnold, “to state further that the report of Mr. Herbert J. Browne…in so far as the same relates to these conversations with Boyd Conyers, is not true. To the contrary, and I say it under my solemn oath, it is the most absolute false, the most willful misrepresentation of the truth, and the most shameful perversion of what really did take place between them that I have ever seen over the signature of any person” (emphasis in Foraker memoirs).20 “Yet,” Foraker editorialized, “a President of the United States…is continuing the employment of [this] man…. If I speak plainly…it is because we have reached the point where only plain talk would seem to properly meet the requirements of the case.”21

  But the matter before the Senate that day was his bill to get as many soldiers of the Black Battalion as possible back into the army. He might pummel Roosevelt with the Browne-Baldwin report, he might use it to purge himself of the frustration and bitterness built up over the almost two years since he took on what had become for him a crusade for justice, but he still had to convince the Senate to establish a tribunal to consider the reenlistments and to wall it off from Roosevelt's influence by naming its members in the legislation and not by presidential appointment.22 He asked for a vote on his bill. The Senate postponed it. He sat down in his chair, depleted and disgusted.

  THE MOOD OF THE Senate was reflected when it passed a resolution calling for an itemized accounting of the money spent from the so-called Emergency Fund as far back as 1898 under President McKinley.23 The late McKinley was not its target. Roosevelt was. Two and a half years after the Brownsville shooting raid, almost a year after the Senate decided soldiers from the Black Battalion were the shooters, and less than a month after Roosevelt foisted on it a corrupt investigation with a scandalously unproven conclusion, the Senate was about to pay him back.24 But this did little for the Black Battalion.

  Roosevelt agreed to make a “full report.” But the term full report had an elasticity to it, and there may have been more to this fund than Roosevelt wanted the Senate or the public to know. He wrote President-elect Taft that Taft “need not be under the least anxiety. I will see that the matter is put in such shape that no possible difficulty arises from the disclosure of matters which ought to be kept confidential” (author's emphasis). And just in case things should slip out nonetheless, he added language that would allow him to sidestep this commitment to Taft: “I knew in a general way of all that you did” (author's emphasis).25

  TO SHOW HOW TOUGH he was, the day after the Senate voted for the accounting, the overweight, woefully out-of-shape, and blind in one eye Roosevelt left the White House at 3:40 a.m. for a round-trip ride of about one hundred miles on horseback to Warrenton, Virginia. He had ordered flabby army officers to condition themselves physically, and he was going to show them a thing or two. The last thirty miles were ridden through a blizzard that left him “covered with mud and ice from the brim of his Rough Rider hat to the tips of his riding boots.” Leaping from his “steaming mount,” he shook off the ice before entering the White House and declared to gathered reporters, “It was bully.”26

  IN FORAKER'S PAPERS IN Cincinnati is a letter from A. C. Stine, a whi
te man from Monroe, Georgia. “We all know ‘Buddie’ [Boyd Conyers's nickname] here, and I do not believe there is a respectable white man here who believes for a moment that he” made that confession. Of Sheriff Arnold, who defended Conyers, Stine wrote, he belongs “to that class of the southern white people who do not make social equals of the negro, but who are willing and desire to see him treated right and fair at all times.” Of Foraker he wrote, “I can say that you are doing simple justice.”27

  HANGING OVER THE SENATE and the Black Battalion were Roosevelt's and Foraker's differing bills to deal with reenlisting the innocent soldiers. As far as the Senate was concerned, the Brownsville Incident would be over once this matter was dealt with. Both Roosevelt and Foraker heard the clock ticking toward the end of their terms in office. One man who would still be there was Senator Nelson Aldrich, the Senate Republican leader. It was he who would have to protect President Taft and shepherd his legislation through, and he did not want Brownsville, which had tied the Senate in knots for more than two years, snarling things up. Unconsciously validating Foraker's thinking that it would have to be the Senate as a body to coax President Roosevelt into cooperation and accommodation, Aldrich was determined to close the matter and was the perfect man to do it. His intelligence, discretion, and charm could persuade and give cover to those eager to move away from Roosevelt on Brownsville. He had a reputation for thinking clearly and acting fairly. And because he was charming and reasonable, with none of the zealousness that characterized Foraker in Roosevelt's eyes, he would not elevate Roosevelt's blood pressure by walking into his office.28

  He worked from Foraker's bill to make it more acceptable to all. It called for an authority called a Court of Inquiry with one year to do its work. The Court of Inquiry could only determine those “qualified for reenlistment,” not reenlist any of them. Roosevelt especially liked that “the language is permissive and not mandatory and [the Court of Inquiry] is to be allowed to make eligible, and nothing more than eligible.”29 He also probably liked the fact that even though, as Senator Shelby Collum would later write, “it became perfectly clear to almost everyone in Congress that he was wrong,” nothing the Court of Inquiry might do would embarrass him.30 President Roosevelt was eager to get this compromise enacted, and to save time he encouraged Aldrich to show his letter of approval to Senators Warren and Warner, even to Foraker and the Democrats.

  Foraker's memoirs make no reference to Aldrich or his compromise. They note only, “I succeeded in getting a vote on my bill, in an amended form” on February 23 with fifty-six Republicans for it and twenty-six Democrats against.31 All the Republicans, in no small way moved by Foraker's eloquent presentations and perhaps angry at themselves for not doing it sooner, finally did a right thing, if not the right thing. The split in their party from Brownsville was mending. Not one Democrat showed such contrition. Every Democrat, more concerned with maintaining the support of what was then called “the Solid South,” voted against the Black Battalion. Even Foraker's sometime-ally “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman. “As I did not want innocent men to be kicked out of the army, I do not want any guilty men back into the army.”32 It's just as possible he voted against the compromise because President Roosevelt was for it.

  Four days later it was approved in the House. The pattern in the Senate repeated itself: Republicans voted for it, and Democrats, including John Nance Garner, Brownsville's congressman, were overwhelmingly against it. One Southern Democrat, however, Richard Hobson of Alabama, saw the shame of what was done to the Black Battalion. He voted to help the soldiers even though he unapologetically recognized that “the white man is supreme in this country. [Yet] that makes it only more sacred that he should give absolute justice to the black man who is in our midst…. We are standing here on the field of eternal justice, where all men are the same. It is justice that links man to the Divine. Whether the heavens fall or the earth melts away, while we live let us be just. (Loud applause.)”33

  ON MARCH 2, 1909, with only one full day left in his term, President Roosevelt signed the bill creating the Court of Inquiry. For the Senate, this closed the Brownsville Incident. For Foraker, it remained an open wound never to heal. For the soldiers of the Black Battalion, there would be another investigation in the Court of Inquiry, where they wanted Captain Samuel Lyon, commanding officer of Company D, to represent them, but the army would not permit it. They then asked retired Brigadier General Aaron S. Daggett, their commanding officer at El Caney in Cuba. He accepted on the understanding he had complete sympathy for any soldier not involved in the Brownsville Incident, but none for those, if any, who were. They, he said, should be hanged. Napoleon B. Marshall, the black lawyer who had worked with Foraker in the Military Affairs Committee, would work now with Daggett. Marshall asked Foraker to join them but the exhausted Foraker backed off.34

  IN THE LATE SPRING the Court of Inquiry began its work with a review of all the testimony and evidence from the earlier investigations (overwhelmingly critical of the soldiers), and then a visit to Brownsville to see for itself where it all happened and to talk to the townspeople (hearing only their side). By the time it got to new testimony and evidence back in Washington, its attitude was soured. This order of doing things helped crush any chance the soldiers had. Recycled soldier testimony and evidence was a trove to pick through for inconsistencies. Their memories had become hesitant. There were too many discrepancies and too many unanswered questions.35 What should work in favor of a defendant in a court of law worked against the soldiers in the Court of Inquiry, where guilt was presumed. What Foraker had long feared had come to pass: the soldiers had to prove their innocence. General Daggett wrote Foraker that he and the soldiers faced a stacked deck.36

  Within its one-year mandate, the Court of Inquiry issued its conclusions. It had considered the applications of eighty-two former soldiers (just shy of one-half of the 167 discharged), waded through a river of testimony from before it was created, and excavated a tributary of its own. Its report would take twelve volumes; its hearings alone would sprawl over 1,635 pages. It agreed with all the previous investigations, from the Citizens’ Committee in Brownsville the day after the shooting to the Browne-Baldwin report completed just before the Court of Inquiry was created: unanimously its members said unidentified soldiers of the Black Battalion had shot up Brownsville, and other soldiers had protected them.

  It decreed fourteen soldiers were eligible for reenlistment.37 Excluded was every man above the rank of corporal, which meant every sergeant, including First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, a special target of Theodore Roosevelt.38 How the fourteen were selected is not known. The Court of Inquiry gave the names but no reasons. Private Clifford Adair, the Company C private whose pen was confiscated as he crossed back into Brownsville from Matamoros, was one of the lucky few. The others, except for one, all seem to have been asleep when the shooting began, but so were most of the soldiers not on duty at midnight. The exception was Private John Smith who was “in confinement,” an ironclad alibi.39 Five of the names were from Company C, the company generally thought to have done the shooting because of the harassment experienced by its soldiers. Six were with Company D, least likely to have been involved because its barracks were the farthest from where the shooting came from, and four were from Company B. Of these fourteen, eleven, including Adair, were readmitted to the army.40 One hundred fifty-three soldiers never were.

  ON WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT'S Inauguration Day, Joseph Foraker, now a former senator, was packing for home in Cincinnati. His only engagement left was the loving cup reception at the Metropolitan AME Church, a short three blocks or so from his and Julia's “big yellow house.”

  “Prove to the world and to Mr. Foraker that we as a race are not a set of ingrates and that we are determined to support the men who dare contend for the full and fair enforcement of the Constitution.”

  Rev. J. Milton Waldron, treasurer of the

  Niagara Movement, in an attachment to a letter from

  Waldron to W. E. B. Du
Bois, February 11, 1908

  ACCORDING TO THE WASHINGTON Herald, when people spotted Senator Joseph Foraker arriving at the Metropolitan AME Church for the presentation of the loving cup, “wild, mad cheers broke out, and the edifice fairly shook with the stamping of feet and the clapping of hands.”1 Three thousand people passed up the normal relaxation and pleasures of a Saturday evening and trudged through a cold, early-March rain to see him, honor him, and show him by their presence the gratitude they had for him. After the loving cup was presented, Armond Scott, its presenter, stepped back and, by a gesture toward the front of the podium, invited Foraker to come forward.