TWO DAYS AFTER THE ELECTION, the president and first lady embarked on a long-anticipated trip to Panama. “I’m going down to see how the ditch is getting along,” Roosevelt shouted from the deck of the yacht set to carry him from the nation’s capital down the Rappahannock River to the sea, where he would board the warship Louisiana. The “ditch,” one reporter explained, referred to the massive artificial lake under construction on the Isthmus of Panama that promised to rival “the pyramids . . . the Colossus of Rhodes [or] the hanging gardens of Babylon.” Roosevelt began the six-day sail in “particularly good spirits,” delighted to be taking an unprecedented step in the history of the presidency—leaving the country to visit a foreign land. Indeed, when his trip was first announced, “a large portion of the public gasped,” anxious that “such a jaunt would be contrary to law.” The public was assured, however, that “modern inventions” would enable the president to keep abreast of the nation’s business “no matter where he may be.”
Roosevelt’s three-day visit to Panama was packed with “a little of everything.” Wishing to judge the progress of the construction firsthand, the president climbed atop a steam shovel and barraged the operator with dozens of questions about his work. He traveled by train to several excavation sites, observed drilling machines at work, and watched as dynamite charges were detonated. He met with laborers, toured their sleeping quarters and bathrooms, and listened to their complaints. He even dropped by the workers’ mess rooms, insisting that he sample the food they were served. Overall, the New York Tribune reported, the president came away “well pleased with what he saw,” and the men were well pleased to see him.
Although the Tafts had been invited to join the president and Edith on the Panama trip, Taft had already arranged to follow his western political tour with a weeklong inspection of half a dozen Army bases in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Illinois, Kansas, and Texas. At each base, he was received with elaborate ceremony. “Not in the history of the post at Fort Sill has there been accorded to an officer of the war department a larger reception,” one reporter remarked. At Fort Leavenworth, “several thousand school children waved flags; whistles were blown, church bells rung and hundreds of cannon crackers were fired.” After a final stop at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Taft settled down for the long train ride home. “One trouble about travel,” he wrote Nellie, “is that with nothing particular to do on the cars, meals assume an undue importance.” And, indeed, Taft’s extensive travels had prompted him to add 15 more pounds to his girth.
WHEN TAFT ARRIVED AT HIS War Department office shortly after his return, he found himself thrust in the midst of a firestorm. During his lengthy absence from Washington, the president had made a unilateral decision on a matter he would normally have discussed with his secretary of war. Roosevelt had issued a sweeping presidential order discharging without honor an entire battalion of black soldiers for an incident three months earlier in Brownsville, Texas.
Racial tensions in the small southern city had been building since late July 1906, when the battalion first arrived at Fort Brown from Nebraska. Local papers had denounced the government’s decision to transfer the troops to a region where privileges granted in the North “would certainly be denied them.” A series of minor confrontations had taken place: black soldiers were forced off the sidewalk, hit with revolver butts, and denied access to public bars. Rumors of a black soldier assaulting a white woman in her home circulated. Then, just past midnight on August 14, a group of soldiers had allegedly entered town and fired into buildings, killing a saloonkeeper and so grievously injuring the chief of police that his arm was later amputated. Eyewitnesses produced contradictory accounts: some claimed that the townspeople had fired first; others pointed to “colored soldiers in khaki and blue shirts” as the aggressors. No one could identify any of the individual soldiers, all of whom had returned to their barracks immediately after the shootings.
With Taft en route to Cuba when the first official account reached Washington, Roosevelt took charge, ordering the inspector general of the Army to investigate the incident. Six days later, Major Augustus Blocksom wired an initial report. Even while acknowledging that racial prejudice had motivated townspeople to heap abuse upon the enlisted men, he nevertheless discounted the report that the citizens had fired first, blaming an unidentified group of about “nine to fifteen” soldiers for initiating the raid. Interviews with battalion members had failed to disclose the identities of those involved. Blocksom therefore recommended that if the soldiers continued to obstruct the investigation by refusing to cooperate, they should be collectively “discharged from the service.” Because the townspeople of Brownsville remained “in a state of great nervous tension,” with civilians patrolling the streets with guns “openly at night,” he suggested the battalion be temporarily transferred to Fort Reno, Oklahoma. “It is very doubtful,” the Brownsville Herald observed, “whether our people would ever tolerate the presence of negro soldiers here again.”
Roosevelt accepted Blocksom’s recommendation to remove the troops, ordering the inspector general, Ernest A. Garlington, to Fort Reno to conduct further interviews with the enlisted men. When Garlington arrived on October 18, he called the troops into formation on the Parade Grounds and read them an ultimatum from the president: If they continued to conceal the names of those involved in the raid, they would be discharged en masse. When not a single man broke rank, Garlington recommended that the entire battalion be dishonorably discharged at once. Although “this extreme penalty” undoubtedly meant that men with “no direct knowledge” of “who actually fired the shots” would be found guilty, because they stood together, he argued, “they should stand together when the penalty falls.”
Taft was on the campaign trail in early November when Roosevelt accepted Garlington’s recommendation. The president directed that all 167 men be dishonorably discharged from the Army, a status that not only prevented them from reenlistment but barred them from any civil service position. The battalion included several Medal of Honor winners, soldiers with a quarter of a century of distinguished service, and men who had fought beside Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. To prevent negative publicity, the order was deliberately delayed until after the midterm elections.
When the order was finally revealed, telegrams and resolutions condemning the president’s “despotic usurpation of power” flooded both the White House and the War Department. “Deep resentment” percolated in the black community, where Roosevelt had once been lionized for opening “the door of hope” by inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner and publicly fighting to confirm several high-level black appointees. The decision was deemed “a truckling to sectional prejudice” and a bid by the president to capitalize on newfound popularity in the South in the wake of his wildly successful trip through the region. “Once enshrined in our love as our Moses,” one black preacher lamented, Roosevelt “is now enshrouded in our scorn as our Judas.”
Reading through the pile of telegrams and petitions on the Saturday of his return, Taft consented to meet Mary Church Terrell—a leading black educator, graduate of Oberlin College, and member of New York’s Constitutional League. All she wanted, Mrs. Terrell informed the secretary, was for him “to withhold the execution of that order” until a trial could be set to determine “the innocent ones.” With “a merry twinkle in his eye,” she recalled, Taft responded with gentle irony: “Is that all you want me to do?” She “realized for the first time what a tremendous request” she had made, Terrell explained, and “how difficult it would be to change the status of the soldiers’ case.” Still, there was something in Taft’s “generous-hearted” manner that made her believe he would do what he could.
That very day, Taft cabled Roosevelt—then en route from Panama to Puerto Rico—that he intended to “delay the execution of the order” until he received a response. He did not think the president fully realized “the great feeling that has been aroused on the subject,” or the negative impact on Army morale and racial rela
tions. Taft always believed it better to reconsider a case when a decision raised serious questions. “If a rehearing shows that the original conclusion was wrong, it presents a dignified way of recalling it; and if it does not, it enforces the original conclusion.”
Upon learning that Taft had delayed the order, reporters speculated that the terms of the soldiers’ discharge might be modified. Taft publicly remarked that he would prefer honorable discharges, which would allow eventual reinstatement and access to the Soldiers’ Homes. Furthermore, he questioned the president’s legal power to preclude employment in the civil branch. The New York Times reported that the incident had placed such “a severe strain upon the relations between the President and his Secretary of War” that a new appointment to the cabinet might be required.
Taft heard nothing from Roosevelt over the weekend. On Monday, he left Washington for a daylong meeting at Yale, where he had been elected to the Yale Corporation. When he returned on Tuesday afternoon to find that there was still no response to his cable, he met with William Loeb, Roosevelt’s private secretary. Loeb showed him a letter the president had written to Massachusetts governor Curtis Guild, Jr., just before leaving for Panama. “The order in question will under no circumstances be rescinded or modified,” Roosevelt had declared. “There has been the fullest and most exhaustive investigation of the case.” Viewing this document, Taft sadly concluded that he no longer had a right to delay the order. The next morning, a telegram from Roosevelt confirmed that he remained inflexible: “Discharge is not to be suspended,” he wrote. “I care nothing whatever for the yelling of either the politicians or the sentimentalists. The offense was most heinous and the punishment I inflicted was imposed after due deliberation.”
Criticism of the Brownsville order mounted into early December. When Congress convened on December 3, the conservative Republican senator Joseph Foraker introduced a resolution calling for a full investigation into the matter. Foraker’s inquiry, which proposed to study whether the president’s order overstepped his authority, provoked what the New York Times characterized as a “fighting mad” reaction from Roosevelt. Foraker had been among the most outspoken opponents of Roosevelt’s railroad legislation; consequently, his resolution was seen as a blatant political maneuver to wrest control of the Republican Party from Roosevelt, Taft, and the progressives. “It is impossible to admit that he could be sincere in any belief in the troops’ innocence,” Roosevelt testily asserted.
In a letter to Congress “tingling with indignation,” Roosevelt insisted that “he was not only acting well within his constitutional rights, but that it was his duty to strip the uniform” from “murderers, assassins, cowards and the comrades of murderers.” The discrimination that the soldiers had endured at the hands of the townspeople offered no “excuse or justification for the atrocious conduct.” Indeed, the president asserted that dismissal was “utterly inadequate”—had the murderers been identified and found guilty, they would have been executed. Several days later, Roosevelt underscored his defiant stand, informing reporters that he would “fight to the last ditch” rather than abandon his order. If Congress should adopt legislation to reinstate the soldiers, he would veto it. If the legislation passed over his veto, he would find another means to prevent the soldiers’ reenlistment. “Not even the threat of impeachment proceedings,” one paper remarked, “would deter him from the stand pat course he had decided to follow.”
Roosevelt’s strident response provoked both anger and sorrow in the black community. The Suffrage League of Boston predicted that his “extraordinary language” would likely incite “race hatred and violence” against 10 million innocent Negro citizens. The Washington Bee declared that “the colored man [would] be deceived no more,” for Roosevelt, “intoxicated with peevishness and vindictiveness,” had made it evident that he was no friend to their cause. “We shall oppose the renomination of Theodore Roosevelt,” the Bee concluded, “or anyone named by him.”
Though he maintained his public bravado, Roosevelt gradually softened his position, sending a new round of investigators to Brownsville to ask further questions. At Taft’s urging, he even revoked the provision barring soldiers from civil jobs with the government. Eventually, he allowed individual soldiers to apply for reinstatement, though the burden to prove innocence concerning the raid and the raiders’ identities lay with each applicant. Regardless of these concessions, Roosevelt’s handling of the Brownsville affair became a permanent scar on his legacy. Six decades later, the U.S. Army finally “cleared the records” of all 167 soldiers “dishonorably discharged” in what had proved to be the “only documented case of mass punishment” in the institution’s history.
Privately, Taft continued to believe that had he been present in Washington during the Brownsville incident, he might have prevented the president from issuing his draconian order. In other difficult situations, he had successfully mollified Roosevelt’s pugnacity. Nevertheless, once the order was promulgated, Taft never wavered in his public support for the president. When Richard Harding Davis applauded his “courage and good judgment” in ordering the delay, Taft demurred, telling the reporter his action had “been misunderstood.” Because of his absence at the time of the original decision, he maintained to Davis, he had simply not been aware of the facts or of the extensive investigation the president had already carried out.
Only his innermost circle was privy to Taft’s continuing anxiety. “This Brownsville matter is giving me a great deal of trouble,” he confessed to Howard Hollister, adding plaintively that he sometimes wished himself “out of it all” and engaged in “some quiet occupation which did not involve crimination and recrimination.” William Taft understood that his chance for the Supreme Court had come and gone, that “when a man has got his face pointed in one direction the only manly way to do is to keep on and take the mud that is thrown.” He fully recognized the futility of agonizing over lost possibilities, he assured Hollister, “but the difficulty with worry is that it does not disappear with argument.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Taft Boom, Wall Street Bust
On Dec. 11, 1907, Puck paired this image of Roosevelt struggling to launch Taft’s ponderous candidacy with the caption: “How the Diabolo Can I Keep This Going Till Nomination Day?”
DURING THE SECOND SESSION OF the 59th Congress, which stretched from December 3, 1906, to March 4, 1907, Theodore Roosevelt’s long-standing apprehension over his waning influence on domestic legislation proved justified. Of the nearly five dozen measures the president had recommended in his annual December address, only a small number were given “favorable consideration”—the rest were rejected outright or simply “passed over in silence.” Reporters considered the session “an uneventful and poor spirited affair,” despite the passage of two important measures that had been held over from the previous session: a bill banning corporate contributions in federal elections and legislation preventing railroads from “knowingly” working their employees for more than sixteen consecutive hours. Aside from these two achievements many critical bills were blocked by the conservative Republican leadership: the Philippine tariff law, a child labor law for the District of Columbia, the eight-hour workday bill, a national inheritance tax, a progressive income tax, and a federal licensing law for corporations.
In addition, Roosevelt was deeply frustrated by new threats to his hard-won conservation measures. On February 25, 1907, the Senate passed an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriations Act, rescinding the president’s executive power to designate national forests in six western states. Thereafter, only an act of Congress could create a forest reserve, leaving “some sixteen million of acres,” Roosevelt later contended, “to be exploited by land grabbers and by the representatives of the great special interests.” Because a veto of the entire agricultural bill was not politically viable, Roosevelt and his chief of forestry, Gifford Pinchot, devised an ingenious remedy. With six days remaining before the bill would be signed, Pinchot mobilized his office
to work round the clock, some employees toiling forty-eight hours without interruption to draft proclamations placing all 16 million acres into forest lands. No sooner was each proclamation completed than Roosevelt signed an executive order withdrawing the land from development. Through these orders, nearly three dozen new national forest reserves were designated in the American West, including Rainier and Cascade in Washington and Oregon, Bear Lodge in Wyoming, and Lewis and Clark in Montana. Only with the amendment rendered meaningless did Roosevelt sign the agricultural bill. “Opponents of the Forest Service,” Roosevelt later boasted, “turned handsprings in their wrath.”
Though he was pleased with this successful maneuvering, the president was painfully aware that his strength on Capitol Hill remained seriously compromised by his renunciation of a possible third term. Each passing day emboldened conservative members of Congress to challenge the administration’s programs and policies. Looking ahead to the election, Roosevelt feared that if the reactionary wing of his party successfully nominated and elected one of their own, they would work to dilute or even repeal his historic regulatory bills and, in the end, gut his achievements and demolish his legacy.
Of paramount importance was a successor who would sustain and advance his agenda, and there was no man he trusted more to uphold the progressive cause than William Howard Taft. Reporters were fascinated by “the deep, unbroken friendship” the two shared, “like unsophisticated schoolboys when together,” one journalist expounded, “each apparently under the spell of a romantic affection, a strong, simple sense of knightly companionship in the great field of moral errantry and patriotic adventure.” Roosevelt knew he would have to proceed carefully to help his friend get elected. “I am well aware,” he told William Allen White, “that nothing would more certainly ruin Taft’s chances than to have it supposed that I was trying to dictate his nomination.” Nevertheless, he defiantly continued, “it is preposterously absurd to say that I have not the right to have my choice as regards the candidates for the Presidency, and that it is not my duty to try to exercise that choice in favor of the man who will carry out the governmental principles in which I believe with all my heart and soul.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 74