Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  It seemed to him that Circular number 6 and its predecessors justified the adoption of some “very moderate and common-sense” spelling reforms, which would keep the government in step with “the ablest and most practical educators of our time”—men such as Thomas R. Lounsbury, Professor of English at Yale University. In a letter to the Public Printer of the United States, Roosevelt ordered simplified spelling of some three hundred frequently used words. Such changes, he argued, were “but a very slight extension of the unconscious movement which has made agricultural implement makers and farmers write plow instead of plough … just as all people who speak English now write bat, set, dim, sum, and fish, instead of the Elizabethan batte, sette, dimme, summe, and fysshe.”

  There could be little protest against these examples—certainly not by menu writers in Chinatown, where dim sum was already approved usage. But Roosevelt’s appended list of new spellings caused a sensation in bureaucratic Washington:

  addresst blusht comprize deprest egis fagot gazel kist partizan phenix pur ript snapt thru vext winkt

  Soon, the nation’s newspapers were vying with one another to coin new, sarcastic simplifications, until Harper’s Weekly complained, “THIS IS TU MUTCH.” Members of Congress and the Supreme Court announced their absolute unwillingness to go along. Roosevelt seemed to sense defeat, even as he insisted that he would continue to use the new styles himself. He told the Public Printer that none of his changes should be considered permanent. “If they do not ultimately meet with popular approval they will be dropt, and that is all there is about it.”

  ON 29 SEPTEMBER, President Estrada Palma and his entire Cabinet resigned, leaving Taft with no alternative under the Platt Amendment but to issue a declaration of intervention by the United States. He established himself as the temporary executive of a “Cuban” administration, “conforming as far as may be to the Constitution of Cuba,” and operating under the Cuban flag. Roosevelt had insisted on that last touch. He told Taft that the role of the United States must simply be to ensure that Cuba stayed solvent and stable until she could once again govern herself. To that end, American troops would guard the island’s treasury and maintain order in her towns. A simultaneous agreement with the liberals guaranteed that all insurrectionary activities would cease, pending free and legal elections.

  In his last official act before returning to Washington from Oyster Bay, Roosevelt sent Taft six thousand additional troops. “I congratulate you most heartily upon the admirable way you have handled the whole matter,” he cabled, adding that he had instructed the State Department to continue Cuban foreign relations “as if no change had occurred.” It was crucial that all islanders understood that he had intervened only because the government had collapsed. “I am most anxious that there should be no bloodshed between Americans and Cubans.”

  Back in the White House on 1 October, he chafed at not having Taft at hand to help him decide finally between Moody and Lurton for the Supreme Court. He did not trust his own judgment on matters of Constitutional import, and in this case could hardly ask the Attorney General for an opinion.

  Even more critical was the ugly matter of Brownsville. Ideally, Taft should be in charge of it, as Secretary of War. But until a provisional governor could be installed, somewhere around midmonth, Roosevelt would have to supervise the Army’s ongoing investigation. It was fraught with political risk. Color had become an issue in the congressional campaign, after the recent outbreak, in Atlanta, of some of the worst race violence on record. Twenty black men had been killed and hundreds wounded at the hands of a mob crazed by reports of “an unusual number” of Negro assaults on white women. Roosevelt remained silent on the massacre. He did not even mention race relations in his “platform” address of the season, a somewhat repetitive-sounding denunciation of corporate greed, delivered on 4 October in Harrisburg.

  Only those with ears attuned to the clang of Rooseveltian clichés detected a new overtone of impatience with executive restraints. He paid homage, for the gratification of his audience, to the Pennsylvanian jurist and Founding Father James Wilson (1742–1798), and cited Wilson’s belief that “one uniform and comprehensive system of government and laws” arose in response to frequently conflicting decisions of state and federal judges. That super-jurisdiction was, in effect, the will of “the sovereign people” who, in 1906, were determined “to assert their sovereignty over the great corporations of the day.”

  To Henry Cabot Lodge, knowing Roosevelt’s tendency to use the word sovereign as if it were a personal pronoun, such statements sounded more like Nietzsche than Wilson. But the Senator worried only that his old friend was bearing down too hard on businessmen as opposed to radical agitators. Had Lodge a deeper knowledge of Wilson’s philosophy, he might have come across a ruminative passage that was practically pure Theodore: “If I am asked … how do you know that you ought to do that, of which your conscience enjoins the performance? I can only say, I feel that such is my duty. Here investigation must stop; reasoning can go no farther.”

  Propelled by just such a sense of moral certainty, hearing answers rather than questions and inviting no argument, Roosevelt decided it was time to bring the Brownsville affair to a conclusion. He ordered his new Inspector General, Ernest A. Garlington, to proceed to Oklahoma and Texas and interview the quarantined members of the Twenty-fifth Infantry personally. “If the guilty parties cannot be discovered, the President approves the recommendation [by Major Blocksom] that the whole three companies implicated in this atrocious outrage should be dismissed and the men forever debarred from reenlisting in the Army or Navy of the United States.”

  WHILE AWAITING GENERAL Garlington’s report, the President played host to Arthur Lee. His old friend arrived from England on 12 October, rather mystified at having been summoned across the Atlantic without explanation.

  Roosevelt, who made no small talk, immediately broached the subject. “I have had to finally abandon any attempts to do confidential business through the present British Ambassador, and must do it through someone else.”

  As a member of the government Sir Mortimer Durand represented, Lee was at once put into a delicate diplomatic position. Roosevelt made him understand that something more important than protocol was at stake. The United States and Great Britain “ought to be in specially intimate relations,” but had reached a virtual standstill because of Durand’s imprisonment in his own culture. “He doesn’t begin to understand us.”

  At present, fortunately, the international situation was quiet, and no difficult negotiations loomed between Washington and London. “I say this, however,” Roosevelt went on, “and cannot say it too emphatically, that if any difficult question does arise, your government will have to send over, specially, someone with whom we can work, to deal with it. This is not merely my view, but that of Root, and also of Taft—who will probably be the next President.”

  Lee stayed at the White House for several days, during which time he was permitted to read the private correspondence Roosevelt had had with other ambassadors during the Portsmouth and Algeciras conferences. “I cannot help but deplore the gradual waning of British prestige and popularity over here, during the last three years,” the President said, knowing that his words would be repeated throughout Whitehall, “and the eclipse of the British Embassy by the French and German missions—both of which are exceptionally well filled.”

  Edith Roosevelt contributed her own quiet propaganda over dinner. “You remember, of course, that in your time here, and until Sir Michael Herbert died, it was never spoken of in Washington except as ‘the Embassy.’ ” Lee remembered well, and with nostalgia. In 1899, he had been military attaché to Sir Julian Pauncefote, and engaged to marry an American heiress. It was largely to Ruth Lee’s fortune that he owed his current comfortable place in British society. Now Mrs. Roosevelt seemed to be suggesting that the pair of them could restore 1300 Connecticut Avenue to the center of Washington’s haut monde. “Hardly any of the right kind of people go there,” Edith
pursued. “The Durands do practically nothing in the way of entertaining—and that little so poorly that people do not care to go.”

  Lee left the White House with an official note from Roosevelt, practically appointing him to the British foreign service. He did not know that a letter recalling Sir Mortimer was already on its way. Sir Edward Grey had heard so many presidential complaints about Durand from Henry White that a more cerebral Ambassador was being looked for. This did not augur well for Lee—who in any case sat on the wrong side of the House of Commons.

  Sir Mortimer was thunderstruck when Grey’s letter arrived on 21 October. Twice that night he came down to reopen his dispatch box “to assure myself that I had not dreamt the whole thing.” He had not. His diplomatic career was over.

  Edith Roosevelt had chosen the right qualifier to describe the way the Durands entertained. Sir Mortimer was not a wealthy man, and for two years had spent dollars as if they were shillings, just to fulfill his mission. He had given up polo, books, hunting, and traded in his life-insurance policy. Even so, he was penniless.

  “I must try to take it like a gentleman,” he wrote in his diary.

  BY NOW, TAFT was back in Washington, having installed Charles E. Magoon as Provisional Governor of Cuba. The crisis that had so upset Roosevelt seemed to have been resolved without force, and with the happy acquiescence of most islanders. No date was yet set for Cuba libre segundo, but Taft and Magoon both understood that it had to occur before the President left office.

  Senator Foraker was forced to acknowledge that the Administration had behaved honorably toward a sister republic. Perhaps now, he suggested in a campaign speech, the Administration would find the time to address some problems closer to home, such as that of race relations. “It is important to protect Cubans in Cuba, but it is even more important to protect Americans in America.”

  Ignoring him, Roosevelt commandeered Taft and Root for five days of tense consultations about the Supreme Court matter. Three sitting Justices and four Senators helped him decide that William H. Moody would be his third appointee to the Bench. The official announcement was delayed, for propriety, until after the elections, but Moody’s name was leaked on 24 October, to the great satisfaction of voters from Massachusetts.

  General Garlington’s Brownsville report reached the War Department around the same time. It was remarkable for a lack of evidence so total as to inculpate him for word-spinning. He stated that during exhaustive interviews with the main suspects in San Antonio, he had encountered nothing but “a wooden, stolid look” as each soldier, in turn, “positively denied any knowledge” of the affair. This, to an investigating officer brought up in Greenville, South Carolina, could mean only the opposite. He had called them all back in groups and made sure they understood the President’s ultimatum: if no man confessed or informed, all would be adjudged guilty. They remained silent.

  Garlington had then proceeded to Fort Reno and interviewed the troops held in quarantine. Again, he was frustrated by the conspiratorial caginess he took to be typical of black men: “The secretive nature of the race, where crimes to members of their color are charged, is well known.” He concluded “that the firing into the houses of the citizens of Brownsville … was done by enlisted men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry,” and recommended that every man in the battalion be held responsible for the crimes of the few. As the President had stipulated, they should be dishonorably discharged.

  On 30 October, Roosevelt summoned Booker T. Washington to the White House, in a clear indication that he was worried about how Negro voters might react. Election Day was just one week away, and the political situation nationwide was volatile. The Democratic Party had recovered from its debacle under Alton B. Parker two years before, and—as Senator Foraker gloomily observed—stood to gain from progressive/conservative infighting among Republicans. Race and labor were key issues, with the Industrial Workers of the World fanning radical discontent among Western miners, and Southern whites wildly agitated by the Atlanta riots. (In Tennessee, rumors circulated of “Negro companies drilling by night.”) William Randolph Hearst was showing alarming strength as the Democratic nominee for Governor of New York, against Roosevelt’s personal candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, a coldly brilliant Republican lawyer.

  Washington listened with misgivings as the President told him that he was about to dismiss 167 Negro soldiers, without honor and without trial. He had just been in Atlanta, and sensed that Roosevelt was making a terrible mistake. American blacks would have trouble understanding why “our friend” (as Washington always called him) should rush to judgment at such a time, without giving a single man of the Twenty-fifth Infantry a chance to testify in court. Even more distressing was the likelihood that redneck racists everywhere would applaud Roosevelt’s willingness to act on what passed for evidence in lynch country: unsubstantiated charges of rape, instant identifications of black men last seen in darkness, the “wooden, stolid look” of Negro terror, and a few dozen shell casings ejected from clean rifles.

  WASHINGTON’S DISTRESS GREW after leaving the Executive Office. On 3 November, he wrote begging Roosevelt not to do anything precipitous about Brownsville until they could meet again. “There is some information which I must put before you before you take final action.” But his letter arrived at the wrong psychological moment. Roosevelt’s blood was up, after two days of hunting wild turkey at Pine Knot. It was Election Eve, and he was about to leave for New York, where Elihu Root (speaking on White House authority) had just come within one syllable of saying that the President held William Randolph Hearst responsible for the death of William McKinley.

  “HE WOULD HAVE LOST HIS SEAT, AND VERY LIKELY HIS WIFE.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, ca. 1906 (photo credit 27.2)

  Root’s statement had pulverized the Democratic campaign, not to mention Hearst’s chances of running for President in 1908. Roosevelt could not wait to get to a voting booth to add to the rout. He had no interest in belaboring Brownsville any further. “You can not have any information to give me privately to which I could pay heed, my dear Mr. Washington,” he wrote, “because the information on which I act came out of the investigation itself.”

  With that, he left for Oyster Bay by overnight train. His discharge order, dated 5 November 1906, was not released for another thirty-six hours, until after Republicans had gone to the polls to elect Hughes Governor of New York, and re-elect Congressman Nicholas Longworth in Cincinnati. Had just half of Nick’s three-thousand-odd black constituents voted against him, he would have lost his seat, and possibly his wife.

  Across the nation, Roosevelt’s popularity helped contain the Democratic surge. The GOP lost twenty-eight seats in the House, but retained its working majority, and gained four seats in the Senate. It won Massachusetts and Ohio, and Roosevelt was pleased to see Frank R. Gooding, Idaho’s antiradical Governor, re-elected in a rebuff to the Western Federation of Miners. Representative James Wadsworth was punished for opposing last spring’s Meat Bill, and sent back to the farm to inspect his own beeves at leisure. Sales of The Jungle notwithstanding, socialist candidates suffered everywhere.

  “Well, we have certainly smitten Ammon hip and thigh,” Roosevelt wrote to Alice.

  Meanwhile, blacks fresh from the polls pondered his Special Order number 266, as transmitted by the War Department:

  By direction of the President, the following-named enlisted men [in] Companies B, C, and D, Twenty-fifth Infantry, certain members of which organizations participated in the riotous disturbance which occurred in Brownsville, Tex., on the night of August 13, 1906, will be discharged without honor from the Army by their respective commanding officers and forever debarred from reenlisting in the Army or Navy of the United States, as well as from employment in any civil capacity under the Government.

  There followed 167 names, including that of First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, who had fought in Cuba in ’98, and remembered dividing rations of hardtack and bacon with Colonel Roosevelt after the Battle of
Las Guasimas; Corporals Solomon P. O’Neil, Temple Thornton, and Winter Washington; Cooks Leroy Horn and Solomon Johnson; Musicians Joseph Jones, Henry Odom, and Hoytt Robinson; and Privates Battier Bailey, Carolina De Saussure, Ernest English, Thomas Jefferson, Willie Lemons, Joseph Shanks, John Slow, Zacharia Sparks, William Van Hook, and Dorsie Willis.

  BOOKER T. WASHINGTON was not surprised by the swiftness and unanimity of black reaction. For the last five years, he sadly noted, Theodore Roosevelt had been the idol of America’s ten million Negroes. Now, within days—“I might almost say hours”—the President had become a pariah.

  Telegrams of protest began to flow into the White House, not all from blacks. Roosevelt replied to one with an arrogance of tone and language that increasingly reflected his attitude to criticism: “The order in question will in no way be rescinded or modified. The action was precisely such as I would have taken had the soldiers guilty of the misconduct been white men.… I can only say that I feel the most profound indifference to any possible attack which can be made on me in this matter.”

  On 16 November, the first dishonorable-discharge papers were served on men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry. Roosevelt’s name was mentioned at a black convention that day, and was received in complete silence. But by then the President was in Panama, in the depths of the Culebra Cut, watching the dirt fly.

  HE HAD SEEN CULEBRA looming over the Louisiana’s white bow before he saw anything else of the Isthmus. Too low to be a cordillera, too high for any rock-splitters in the world—save those of the United States—it was already carved half open. Imaginations less vivid than his would have no difficulty picturing the day, perhaps no more than six or seven years off, when the continental spine would be snapped, and North and South America, paradoxically, brought closer together by a mutual highway of water. A new age of wealth and Pacific connections was coming to all those invisible Latin republics lying off to his left, while el Coloseo del Norte would be able to speed battleships as big as this one, and bigger and bigger, through her own secure conduit!