Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  He saw that his legislative balancing act now was going to be especially delicate through 4 March, when the Fifty-ninth Congress would end. With a much more Democratic Congress due in December, he was going to be losing many old allies (most seriously, Senator Spooner) and gaining, if not enemies, at best an equal number of newcomers more likely to cultivate his heir apparent than himself. Those Republicans re-elected would by the same token not have to worry, anymore, about contradicting an enormously popular President. Even the representatives among them now knew that they would see out his second term.

  To maintain his centricity, therefore, he was going to have to be less confrontational and more accommodating as his power slowly waned. When decisive action was necessary, he could always resort to a privilege he understood better than any President before him: that of the executive order.

  On 14 January, Roosevelt moved to quell a fierce Senate debate over whether he had exceeded his authority in dismissing the Brownsville soldiers. He sent Congress another special message on the subject, much less aggressive than his first. Although he still insisted that he had acted correctly, he allowed for the first time that he was prepared to readmit any dischargee who “shows to my satisfaction that he is clear of guilt, or of shielding the guilty.” This was not of much comfort to those who believed that the burden of proof should lie on the other side, but it persuaded a majority of the Senate that the President had not broken any law.

  Foraker, undeterred, pressed for, and won, a full investigation.

  NEXT, THE PRESIDENT tried to counter “this belief in Wall Street that I am a wild-eyed revolutionist.” He had always jumped at chances to show plutocrats that he had no objection to the formation of trusts of any size, as long as they consented to scrutiny by the Bureau of Corporations.

  Such an opportunity presented itself when George W. Perkins arranged for Judge Elbert H. Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel, and Cyrus H. McCormick, president of International Harvester, to meet discreetly with Roosevelt’s incoming and outgoing Corporations Commissioners, Herbert Knox Smith and James Garfield. The encounter took place in a New York hotel on 18 January. Perkins, who was fluent in both federal and boardroom English, acted as interpreter.

  Judge Gary praised the work of the Bureau of Corporations under Garfield, and said that President Roosevelt’s overall supervision had helped make it a bastion of “private rights.” He added that he hoped the agency would be as willing to cooperate with International Harvester in the future as it had been with his own company in the past.

  This was a discreet allusion to a deal that Gary had concluded with Roosevelt and Garfield more than a year before. Faced with a bureau investigation of U.S. Steel, he had undertaken to open up the giant trust’s books, on condition that only the President could decide whether there was anything there worth prosecuting. The agreement had worked well enough to avoid any antitrust action by the Justice Department.

  Now Congress was calling for a bureau probe into allegations that McCormick’s company was monopolistic. Perkins and Gary asked, as board members, if the President would extend International Harvester the same kind of most-favored-trust status. Garfield was quite sure that Roosevelt would. And so was Roosevelt, when he heard. Gentlemen’s agreements were an accepted part of his code of behavior, as was the discretion they entailed. All Americans needed to know, in this case, was that he knew all about a giant trust that already controlled 85 percent of the national reaper and harvester market.

  IF MEMBERS OF THE Gridiron Club, welcoming Roosevelt to their annual dinner on 26 January, wondered how he could possibly top his previous performances before them, they soon found out. He arrived at the New Willard Hotel looking unusually grim, and the club president, Samuel G. Blythe, saw that entertaining him was not going to be easy.

  When Roosevelt took his seat next to Blythe, he noticed that by chance or, more likely, design, Joseph Foraker had been placed in front of them, at a table perpendicular to the main table. He thus could look forward to several hours of studying the Senator’s haughty profile, while Foraker did not have to look at him.

  Oysters were served, then clear green-turtle soup. Between spoonfuls, the President leafed through a souvenir booklet of caricatures of prominent guests. Each sketch was accompanied by jokey captions. One beneath Foraker’s portrait arrested his attention:

  All coons look alike to me.

  Blythe saw the presidential jaw tighten, and got an impression of slowly rising fury. Roosevelt waited for the planked shad to be served, then leaned over and said, “I would like to speak now, if it can be arranged.”

  Service was halted, and Blythe rose to announce the President of the United States. Diners laid down their forks in surprise.

  Roosevelt began cordially enough, with compliments to his hosts, then swung on a “Millionaire’s Row” of financiers and lectured them on corporate control. His manner became peremptory. Men of wealth, he said, were going to have to learn to live with the reforms undertaken by his Administration. (J. Pierpont Morgan listened glowering, three places to his left.) The only alternative was a takeover of Wall Street by “the mob, the mob, the mob.”

  Then, picking up his souvenir program, Roosevelt read aloud, “J. B. Foraker sez, sez he, ‘All coons look alike to me.’” He threw the booklet down in disgust. “Well, all coons do not look alike to me.”

  These words were delivered in a near shout. Roosevelt stared straight into Foraker’s eyes and launched into a passionate rationale for his Brownsville action. The shad grew cold as he attacked Foraker for questioning an executive decision by the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army. Senate debate on the subject was “academic,” because he had “all power” vested in himself in such matters. And “all” meant what it said. Nobody else had any power of review of the discharges.

  Diners from the back of the room stood up and crowded the aisles. Foraker sat fidgeting. After half an hour, Roosevelt ended with a few conciliatory words, and sat down amid cheers.

  Blythe was faced with the choice of proceeding with the evening’s set program, already in disarray, or honoring the American rule that nobody ever speaks after the President. He elected to abandon form altogether. Once, as a boy, he had driven twenty-nine miles in a springless wagon to hear “Fire Alarm Joe” orate. He had an idea that Foraker might respond if asked to do so with the right combination of wit and suddenness.

  “The hour for bloody sarcasm having arrived,” Blythe announced, “I take the liberty of calling upon Senator Foraker for some remarks.”

  Foraker stood up, stark white in the face. He said that he was “embarrassed” at having to follow the President. But, Roosevelt having so clearly singled him out by word and gesture, he would respond.

  The sarcasm most people were waiting for did not materialize at once. (Neither did the next course.) Foraker spoke at length in defense of his own hands-off attitude to corporate control, earning napkin waves of approval from Millionaires’ Row. Then at last he mentioned the word Brownsville, and proceeded to justify his nickname.

  Never before, at the Gridiron or anywhere else, had a President been challenged before an audience. Foraker was an unusually handsome man, more than six feet tall, and his unsmiling demeanor and effortless command of language made everything he said sound oracular. Napkins fluttered elsewhere in the room as he observed, in the words of the Fourteenth Amendment, that “all persons” looked alike to him, black or white, male or female, old or young.

  He noted that the President had said earlier, in reference to big businessmen, that “no man was either so high or so low that he would not give him the equal protection of the law if innocent of offense against the law.” If so, where was equal protection for the innocents of Brownsville? Roosevelt had himself admitted that many “absolutely innocent” soldiers had been branded as criminals in his discharge order. First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, with twenty-six years of service and a record of bravery in battle, was left dependent and disgraced “when he was nearing the
time when he would have a right to retire on pay, without honor”—even though Foraker knew, and had reason to believe Roosevelt knew, “that he was as innocent of any offense against the law of any kind whatever as the President himself.”

  Roosevelt half rose from his seat. Blythe had to restrain him, saying that he would have “a chance for rebuttal” after the Senator finished. Foraker proceeded to squander his great moment, going on so long that Roosevelt again tried to interrupt, and was again held back.

  Foraker grew maudlin. There had been a time, as the President well knew, “when I loved him as though one of my own family.” He still had “an affectionate regard for him,” and had for the most part “cordially supported all the measures of his Administration.” At last he sat down. Such a hubbub ensued, with members crowding to congratulate him, that Blythe’s gavel was unable to restore calm. Then Foraker heard a familiar high-pitched voice, and saw the President standing, appealing to be heard.

  The noise subsided to a buzz that continued throughout Roosevelt’s rebuttal. It muted what was, to attentive listeners, an exquisitely lethal moment, when he suggested that Foraker’s defense of the Brownsville rioters was consistent with the Senator’s enthusiastic backing, some years before, of a convicted double murderer for United States Marshal.

  It was now nearly midnight, and 266 uneaten dinners had coagulated in the Willard kitchen. The buzz of conversation continued, but an air of unresolved disharmony hung over the tables. Uncle Joe Cannon got up in an attempt to clear it. “If the floor of this great hall should suddenly cave in, and all the people here be precipitated to the cellar … it would not deter the progress of the United States.”

  There was little applause. Roosevelt sat fiddling with a fork until Blythe called for a concluding song, then declared the Twenty-second Annual Dinner of the Gridiron adjourned.

  WHATEVER SHAKY REPUTATION for confidentiality the club had managed to preserve after Roosevelt’s “Man with the Muckrake” speech was demolished by the Roosevelt-Foraker clash. A detailed account, with “exit interviews,” was published in The Washington Post. The scandal was immense, the political consequences immediate.

  “IF THE FLOOR OF THIS GREAT HALL SHOULD SUDDENLY CAVE IN …”

  Speaker Joseph Cannon, ca. 1907 (photo credit 28.1)

  Roosevelt jeered at Winthrop Murray Crane’s concern that the alienated Foraker would cause “a split” in the Republican Party, big enough to elect a Democrat in 1908.

  “I call that a splinter,” he said.

  Far from aggravating the party’s inner tensions, he felt that he had moved at just the right time to prevent a split. Fate had conspired to put in his way a provocative cartoon caption, a row of financiers, and Foraker himself—the man most likely to get Wall Street’s vote in 1908, if something lethal was not done to him soon—in front of the most power-packed audience Washington could muster. It had been a rhetorical opportunity irresistible even to a President who loved to eat. His lecture to the plutocrats and segue to an attack on Foraker had branded the Senator as an apologist for wealth, if only by association. Conversely, by his reiteration of the War Department’s case against the Twenty-fifth Infantry, he had shown himself to be someone who stuck to moral principles. Distasteful though the spectacle of a President and Senator squabbling had been to some guests, Roosevelt’s “favorite audience”—a mythical grizzled farmer reading a newspaper at fireside—would probably see a confrontation of Right v. Wrong, or Executive v. Legislative, or Authority v. Anarchy, or whatever other antitheses suggested themselves.

  Closer to home, political professionals saw an effective blow in favor of Taft against Foraker for the nomination in 1908. The Secretary (who had accompanied Roosevelt to the Gridiron dinner) was actually a reluctant party to the Brownsville discharges. He had been on vacation at the time of the incident, and the first prosecutorial steps had been taken in Oyster Bay. Taft’s subsequent attempt to suspend the discharges and get a “rehearing” of the evidence against the soldiers had been prompted by an emotional appeal on their behalf from the president of the National Association of Colored Women. Most recently, he had annoyingly drawn Roosevelt’s attention to a conflict in the testimony of the eyewitness who “saw” black soldiers kill Frank Natus, and suggested that the Senate be informed.

  These scruples were, however, kept confidential, so Taft had come away from the New Willard looking more than ever a loyal Cabinet officer unbeholden to Wall Street, who just happened to hail from the same state as Senator Foraker.

  By the time the Senate Committee on Military Affairs began its investigation of Brownsville on 4 February, Foraker was about as welcome at the White House as Benjamin Tillman had been in 1902. He and his wife began to notice signs of social pariahdom. Friends stopped visiting their house by daylight. James Garfield, a regular dinner giver, sent no invitations, complaining that Foraker was “trouble.” A “journalist” of strange ubiquity was seen making notes whenever the Forakers went out. Most ominously, Foraker discovered—in an experience, again, not new to Tillman—that his mail was being opened and read.

  Roosevelt showed no outward concern about the committee hearings, which promised to last, on and off, for at least a year. He had the assurance of Foraker’s colleagues that, whatever new evidence might come to light, he was entitled, as Commander-in-Chief, to uphold his own discharges.

  A VISITOR TO THE White House on 13 February found the President discussing race relations of a far more complex sort with Root and Taft. For the last four months, “Yellow Peril” agitation had been violently resurgent in California, precipitated by the San Francisco Board of Education’s decision to segregate Japanese schoolchildren. The order made no distinction between the children of long-term, Americanized Japanese residents and those of immigrant laborers fresh off the boat—currently disembarking, or swimming ashore, at the rate of one thousand per month. Any child with sloe eyes on the West Coast would now learn what it was like to be a black child in Alabama.

  Roosevelt sat on the front edge of his chair, talking vehemently, as usual, while Taft lounged, twiddling his thumbs. Root stretched out his legs and gazed, for perhaps the thousandth time in his life, at Theodore over steepled forefingers. The visitor, State Senator Everett Colby of New Jersey, was struck by the quizzical expression on each Secretary’s face. Roosevelt was giving his views on immigration, and veering, in a way Root knew only too well, toward a monologue on the “splendid qualities” of Nipponese culture and customs.

  Since the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan had been justifiably proud of its accession to first-power status. Any declaration of prejudice by a Pacific Rim nation (which was how California was viewed through Eastern eyes) was an insult too painful to be borne. In the words of William Sturgis Bigelow, one of the President’s principal advisers on Far Eastern affairs, “They don’t care—broadly speaking—what is done to them as long as it does not seem to be done to them as Japanese.”

  Roosevelt had tried, and failed, to make the Golden State observe the Golden Rule. Some of the most passionate language in his last Message to Congress had been devoted to a plea for respect for Japan as “one of the greatest of civilized nations.” He noted that San Franciscans had been happy to accept one hundred thousand dollars in earthquake-emergency aid from the Japanese in 1906, before shutting their relatives out of the city school system and abusing them in other ways, simply “because of their efficiency as workers.” This last remark had hit home with local labor unions, who were the real agitators in San Francisco, desperate to repatriate every “coolie” in the city. When Roosevelt followed up with a request for a new immigration act, “specifically providing for the naturalization of Japanese who come here intending to become American citizens,” the San Francisco Chronicle had called him unpatriotic, and the Californian congressional delegation began to act like ambassadors from a besieged country.

  Senator Tillman, meanwhile, was seized by an apocalyptic vision of the Administration integrating “Mongolian” schoolch
ildren with white ones in the West, then doing the same with black schoolchildren in the South. He shouted himself so hoarse on the subject of race that London’s St. James Gazette seriously questioned his sanity.

  Roosevelt decided on a moderation of his attitude, not just to soothe redneck neuroses, but because of the much more dangerous mood of the Japanese government. Tokyo’s response to the San Francisco segregation order had been a formal complaint against the “stigma and odium” it entailed. Such language was not to be ignored, coming from a war-hardy Pacific nation at a time when the United States battle fleet was entirely concentrated in the Atlantic. And Culebra was not yet cut.

  The result was a gathering war scare in Washington, stirred up by the anti-Japanese rhetoric of Senator George C. Perkins of California. Roosevelt the balancer sought to steady both sides by attaching to a pending immigration bill an amendment that would significantly reduce the number of Japanese arriving in America from Hawaii. Its language, authored by Root, gave him power to deny entry by “any aliens” to both the United States and her insular possessions. The last phrase was vital, because Hawaii had become a cornucopia of coolie labor. Yesterday’s pineapple pickers were today’s almond hullers and tomorrow’s stokers for the Northern Pacific Railroad.

  “Why should I have to pay a fireman six dollars a day for work that a Chinaman would do for fifty cents?” James J. Hill asked Finley Peter Dunne, over lunch at Au Savarin in New York. “Let down the bars!”