POSTMORTEM EXPRESSIONS OF GENTLE admiration and tribute notwithstanding, neither of these eulogists forgave him for discharging the Black Battalion. But as even Du Bois conceded, Roosevelt did think he was right. Was he justified in thinking this?
Roosevelt believed that he had an intuitive sense of what was the right thing to do and that he was entitled, as commander in chief, to make his decision regarding Brownsville based on it. Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian David Fromkin suggests, “Intimations of these moral issues—of the showdown between good and evil, and of the showdown struggle for survival in a lawless society” may have been deeply etched into him by his ranching days in Dakota.39 His view of what was the morally right thing to do in Brownsville took in more than the soldiers. Convinced in his own mind they were guilty, he analyzed the problem considering the greater good, the nation's need for a disciplined army, and the soldiers’ duty to turn in the guilty parties. Roosevelt and Taft biographer Henry Pringle identified this Rooseveltian capacity for taking the macro view as far back as when he was in the New York State Assembly. He used the young Roosevelt's “indignation” over cigars manufactured amid filth and disease in New York tenements to explain that his morality “did not spring from concern over the predicament of the workers; he looked at the problem in terms of public health.”40 While this global thinking may have led him to the right decision with cigars in New York City, it may have led him to the wrong one with soldiers in Brownsville.
We know he was persuaded by the letters from Mayor Combe's citizens in Brownsville that the soldiers had shot up the town and there was a real possibility they might do it again. With this, his initial inclination to let the army figure out what happened went out the window. He bought into the guilty-soldiers theory and then had to hold on to it. And do something about it. To do nothing about something never described Theodore Roosevelt, and in Brownsville he may have pulled the trigger too fast. “He was the most impulsive human being I ever knew,” recalled Isaac L. Hunt, a member of the New York State Assembly when the neophyte Roosevelt was elected to it.41 Former secretary of the navy John D. Long, who worked with him fifteen or so years later, also said his Brownsville action was “an honest, if a hasty impulse.”42 The more mature Roosevelt had not outgrown this habit, and Howard University professor Kelly Miller, a Roosevelt contemporary, wrote, “He reaches conclusions and settles issues with a swiftness and self-satisfying certainty that startle the more cautious statesmen who rely upon the slower processes of reason and deliberation. He has diagnosed the case, prescribed the remedy, and cured, or killed, the patient before the ordinary physician has finished feeling the pulse.”43 Henry Adams, another Roosevelt contemporary, but also his friend who had a closer look at him, put it more simply. “He was pure act.”44 And once he decided on a course of action, he was unable to change his mind.45
Roosevelt also may have been motivated by his uncontrolled anger at Foraker, which in full fury blinded him to the soldiers and focused him only on the man defending them. Roosevelt could be that way. “No man in American public life has ever been able to find for his personal animosities the sanctions from on high which strengthens Mr. Roosevelt's hatreds with a sort of inspired and holy zeal…. He sees in those who differ from him not merely mistaken persons, but moral offenders. To disagree with the President is not a sign of folly; it is an evidence of wickedness. To oppose him is to sin against God. Against the sinner, therefore, the hand of punishment must be stretched out, and stretched out, not to correct, but to slay. The eagerness with which the President pursues his enemies would, in any one of less moral earnestness, appear as intolerable vindictiveness.”46
The simplest explanation for an action is usually the closest to the truth. Speaking only generally and not of Brownsville, toward the end of his life Roosevelt wrote to poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, “There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us.”47
ON JANUARY 31, 1919, less than a month after Theodore Roosevelt died, Mallie Robinson of Cairo, Georgia, gave birth to a son. She and her husband Jerry were, as were all other black sharecroppers in the South, struggling to get by in what Du Bois described as “[Booker T.] Washington's impoverished, agrarian South, with its monocrop economy and biracial demographics.”48 They wanted to give their new son something more than poverty and hopelessness. They wanted to give him an example of diligence, hard work, and decency to guide him as he grew to adulthood and made his own way in the world. They wanted his name to inspire him. They gave him the middle name of Roosevelt, for the man who died just before their son was born. Their son became the man they wanted him to be, and he changed America. His impact on us can be measured by the respect America pays to him. Once every year he is remembered and honored by every major league baseball player wearing his number on his jersey. That is the only time the number can be worn by a ballplayer, because in 1997 Major League Baseball retired it for every major league team. No player will wear it again because no player can ever do what Jerry and Mallie Robinson's son did for baseball and for America. The number 42 worn by Jackie Roosevelt Robinson honors him as his middle name honors Theodore Roosevelt. For them the Brownsville Incident, something they lived through, could not tarnish what they knew Theodore Roosevelt to be.
ROOSEVELT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY CONTAINS NO mention of the Brownsville Incident. The inference often made is that he realized he was wrong and wanted to hide his mistake.49 But W. E. B. Du Bois shoveled dirt on Brownsville too and left it out of his autobiography.
The Brownsville Incident is an unhappy story primarily about a battalion of black soldiers, a senator from Ohio, and a president. All were hurt—badly hurt—by it. So was our country. The happier story is what happened to the country in the years since. Not right away perhaps, but over time, painfully, often accompanied by further tragedy and heartache, change came. To paraphrase Judy Crichton in America 1900: The Turning Point, the American ideal and promise surely were not realized in the Brownsville Incident, but they remained alive until they could be, and they remain alive today.
“History can never be truthfully presented if the presentation is purely emotional. It can never be truthfully or usefully presented unless profound research, painful, laborious, painstaking has preceded the presentation. No amount of self-communion and of pondering on the soul of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary imagery, can take the place of cool, serious, widely extended study. The vision of the great historian…must be sane, clear and based on full knowledge of the facts and of their interrelations. Otherwise we get merely a splendid bit of serious romance writing.”
Theodore Roosevelt, “History as Literature,”
the annual address of the president of the
American Historical Association,
delivered at Boston, December 27, 1912,
The American Historical Association Review 18, no. 3
(April 1913)
A BIZARRE BROWNSVILLE CONFESSION, believable because of its source, was never heard by the Senate committee or anyone else since it was not disclosed for twenty years, and then it was ignored. It comes by way of two men rarely mentioned in any Theodore Roosevelt narrative.
JAMES AMOS'S FATHER WAS a black policeman in Washington, DC, with a beat in Rock Creek Park, where President Roosevelt enjoyed riding his horse. Roosevelt would occasionally stop to chat with the senior Mr. Amos, who felt at ease enough with Roosevelt to ask one day if there might be an opening for his son at the White House. Roosevelt told him to send the boy to see the steward.1 The younger Mr. Amos, then in his twenties, was given charge of handling the exuberant Roosevelt children and did the job so well that eventually Roosevelt asked him to be his own valet. He would be with Roosevelt day and night, traveling with him, even carrying Roosevelt's daily pin-money allowance from Mrs. Roosevelt.
In his memoirs of his service to Roosevelt, Amos wrote of what he called the Brownsville Shooting Affair. He recalled “big Republican leaders”
warning Roosevelt he was making a mistake, but Roosevelt told them “he knew he was right.”2 According to Amos, one Republican leader in particular, Senator Joseph Foraker, made Roosevelt “very angry.”3 Because Roosevelt allowed Amos to enter the room when he was “discussing the most important matters with public men,” he happened to be in the “President's Library” when “Senator Foraker was in a high temper and he spoke his mind very freely and in angry words to the President.”4
According to Amos, Roosevelt had good reason to know he was right. His access to discussions between Roosevelt and others permitted him to be present when, “through an army officer—I think it was Lieutenant Fortescue, a relative—the President got some of the accused troopers to call at the White House. They tried to hold out at first but under Mr. Roosevelt's questioning they broke down and admitted the guilt of their companies [author's emphasis]. The President never used this confession to justify the discharges he ordered. The soldiers had not made it willingly, but only under the influence of his dominating personality, and while it completely satisfied his mind he never felt at liberty to use it, though he might have hushed up the whole controversy by doing so.”5
THE LIEUTENANT FORTESCUE TO whom Amos referred was Granville Roland Fortescue, and he was indeed a Roosevelt relative as Amos said, though no one seemed to know just how. As a young adult, stories about his bad-boy escapades made news, and he was described as Roosevelt's relative, sometimes his distant relative, occasionally his nephew, even as related through Mrs. Roosevelt. He was in fact Roosevelt's first cousin, who grew up in New York close to where Roosevelt lived as a boy. Because of their eighteen-year age difference they were not close in those days, but they were good friends when Roosevelt was in the White House.
Fortescue's mother was Minnie O'Toole Fortescue. His father was Robert Roosevelt, Theodore's Uncle Rob, the family Democrat, who, with his wife and family, lived in a mirror-image townhouse next door to the one Theodore grew up in.
But the family next door was not the family Uncle Rob had with Minnie O'Toole Fortescue. She was his longtime mistress, with whom he had a second family, and Granville Roland Fortescue, known as “Roly,” was one of their five children. There never was a Mr. Fortescue. Uncle Rob made him up to give Minnie cover for her (and his own) children. Like an espionage agent fleshing out a counterfeit identity by salting his life with enough detail to make it plausible, he decided that she needed a husband, so he made one up for her—a lawyer named Robert F. Fortescue.6 A lawyer needs an office, so Uncle Rob showed one for “Mr. Fortescue” at 65 Wall Street in the New York City directory. Mr. and Mrs. Fortescue and their children (Uncle Rob's children) lived for a while at 3004 West Thirty-Fourth Street, then they moved to 214 East Thirty-Third Street. Not a word of this was true.7 And Granville Roland Fortescue may have had a grandly British name, but there was not a lick of the Brit in him. His mother, Minnie O'Toole, immigrated from Ireland, and his father, Robert Roosevelt, was of Dutch descent.
When Uncle Rob's wife died, he never did the right thing by Minnie; that is, he didn't marry her. But he adopted their children, and Roly, already Theodore's cousin by birth, became his adopted cousin as well.
WHEN ROLY WAS TWENTY-THREE he followed his cousin Theodore and joined the Rough Riders. Roosevelt mentioned Roly in his Cuban memoirs and acknowledged Roly's courage when he refused to leave the line after being wounded. But he said nothing about the family connection. After Cuba, Fortescue joined the regular army, was commissioned a lieutenant in the Twenty-Sixth Volunteer Infantry, and fought with it in the Philippines.8 But he was not a particularly good officer and had trouble persuading superiors that he was entitled to promotion.9 Nor was he a particularly good man or good friend to his fellow officers. In 1904, he was named as co-respondent in a divorce by one of his fellow officers, Captain Elmore Taggart. There was nasty publicity about that.10 He constantly lost his temper and got into fights, and there was unfortunate publicity about those too. These are the stories that made their way into the newspapers and identified him as President Roosevelt's relative.11
Theodore Roosevelt was indifferent to all this. They stayed close, and he kept an eye on Roly's career.12 More than once this was what saved Roly from army discipline. When he was not promoted, Roosevelt took a personal interest and demanded to know why. In 1904 he plucked Fortescue out of the battle-ready army (and the military and personal discipline it demanded) and made him his military aide. In the White House he was Roosevelt's sidekick, boxing partner, dressed-up dandy at state dinners and other official White House functions, and go-to man for those jobs requiring absolute loyalty and a closed mouth. In 1905 Roosevelt sent him to the Russo-Japanese War as America's military observer. For this type of work, Roosevelt trusted him, and it was during this time he mentioned Fortescue by name—but not a word about their being family—often in his letters to his family.13
By 1906 the army wanted to be rid of Lieutenant Fortescue, but discharging an officer the commander in chief had an interest in required a light touch. When news came that Fortescue had resigned from the army, the published reports attributed it to the Taggart divorce and his history of troublemaking. But some saw the hand of President Roosevelt gently pushing him out.14 As a civilian, Fortescue and President Roosevelt had a cordial relationship and stayed in touch mostly by letters (with the greeting in Fortescue's letters, “My Dear Colonel” and not “Dear Mr. President,” which even Roosevelt's son-in-law Nicholas Longworth felt obligated to use). Occasionally Fortescue dropped in to the White House. He was there on January 30, 1907, for example, right around the time of the Gridiron banquet.15
IS THERE ANYTHING TO Amos's recollection about the unidentified soldiers’ confessions? There is no record of either Roosevelt or Fortescue ever mentioning them. On its face the story seems incredible; soldiers mysteriously separated from their comrades and secretly taken to the White House, where they apparently were not seen coming or going, grilled so effectively by President Roosevelt they broke from an otherwise-unshakeable conspiracy of silence and confessed their guilt in—in what exactly? The shooting or the cover-up? Amos did not say precisely. What may be least believable is that Roosevelt kept it a secret, even if he did it to protect the confessing soldiers from the retribution of the men they peached on, and would not tell even Senator Foraker to persuade him to call off the dogs. It really makes little sense.
But it's possible.
Maybe Roosevelt never mentioned it to anyone because he told the confessing soldiers he wouldn't, and that would be a “gentleman's word” Roosevelt would feel most honor-bound to keep. Maybe he did tell one man, Foraker, and maybe that's why Foraker was so angry that night Amos caught him “in a high temper.” There is no reason to question anything about Amos except possibly his memory, and there is really no reason to mistrust that. He does get some of the facts wrong in his Brownsville story, but they are small potatoes, the kinds of things easily confused after a few years; they are nothing as significant as this. Fortescue, on the other hand, was entirely unsavory, coarse, and thoroughly untrustworthy. Still, this would be the kind of “off-the-books” job he would do for Roosevelt. As a former army officer he would be able to handle soldiers and transport them to Washington and back. He had the time to help Roosevelt because during the Brownsville Incident he was at loose ends and, with little to do, available for an escapade such as this. Unreliability may have been his leitmotif in life, but Theodore Roosevelt, his cousin, mentor, and protector, could expect him to do what he was told and keep his mouth closed afterward. And to keep him away from the subpoena power of the Senate, Roosevelt could arrange for him to leave the country and go to Cuba with a commission in the Cuban Rural Guard and train police there.16
The ethically impaired Fortescue is an easily impeachable source. But he did not tell the story of the confession. That was James Amos. He would have seen Fortescue often in the White House when he was a military aide and known who he was. Amos had access to Roosevelt unlike many others, was so u
biquitous he became like the wallpaper. It's easy to imagine Roosevelt not noticing him entering the room at the wrong time. After his White House years he became a detective with the William Burns Detective Agency in New York and developed investigative skills (and may, as the son of a policeman, have already had a few), including assessing the reliability of what he heard and saw. His loyalty to President Roosevelt is unquestioned, but is it likely he created a story false from beginning to end for him? Or, as a black man, he lied in order to implicate other black men? What is possible is that twenty years later he was confused about the officer who showed up (“I think it was Lieutenant Fortescue”). It might have been Major Augustus Blocksom, the Brownsville investigator who met with Roosevelt in the White House on December 9, 1906, in the middle of the Senate debate to investigate the incident, just when Roosevelt might want to question some of the soldiers themselves.17 But does this call into question the rest of what Amos said?
Subsequent examinations of the Brownsville Incident, other than Edward Wagenknecht's, make no reference to any of this. It is not surprising historians would not have consulted Amos or his book. He was not a historian, not a Roosevelt adviser, not a member of his inner circle. He was merely his valet, he is not widely known, and his memoirs are not widely read. And he may be wrong, not intentionally, but still wrong.
On the other hand, President Roosevelt's cousin and his valet may have helped him crack the Brownsville mystery.
I begin by expressing my gratitude and thanks to the archivists and librarians who guided me through their collections. From tips about a folder, box of letters, newspaper clipping or keepsake that might prove worthwhile to helping me thread the microfilm through the microfilm reader (no two readers work the same way, and most do not work at all), their assistance was invaluable. One in particular stands out. It has been said that no narrative on Theodore Roosevelt could have been written over the past thirty or more years without Wallace Dailey, former curator and fierce protector of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University, and I believe it. Future Roosevelt scholars may never know how immeasurably more difficult their tasks will be because he now enjoys the retirement he so deserves.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 44
