Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  Other times, however, the logical conclusions from his assumption of a race's shortcomings led him to behave foolishly. In Cuba, black soldiers made a mixed impression on him. Some enlisted men could fight as well as their white counterparts but were “particularly dependent on their white officers.” Black noncommissioned officers “occasionally” had initiative as much as “the best class of whites…[although] this cannot be expected normally, nor is it fair to expect it.”

  The mixture of his racial views and his well-known impulsiveness could be volatile. Spotting Buffalo Soldiers in Cuba he assumed were running away from battle, “I…drew my revolver, halted the retreating soldiers…[and said] that I would shoot the first man who, on any pretense whatever, went to the rear.” When later told the men were not cowards or shirkers but only following an officer's orders to remove wounded men, Roosevelt went back to these men and apologized.

  Five days after the Brownsville raid (but unconnected to it), he was considering an odd choice for the Supreme Court, Democrat and former Confederate soldier Horace Lurton, because he “takes just the attitude we take as regards…the propriety of the National Government doing just what it can to secure certain elementary rights to the Negro” (author's emphasis).49

  Roosevelt's use of “the Negro” was criticized as an indication he failed to see individual differences among black people, preferring to see in each one traits common to all because of their race.50 Nevertheless, he recognized individual exceptions when he believed he met with them; Booker T. Washington was an example. A consideration of Theodore Roosevelt and race is incomplete without including his relationship with the educator from Tuskegee.

  For Booker T. Washington, it began when the hero of San Juan Heights was running for New York governor in 1898. Washington saw Roosevelt as someone on the way up and asked his intelligence agents in New York what they thought of him. “Two men we have in N.Y. whom we admire & are proud of but who are like a pair of Race horses on traces beyond the control of all but their own mood and cannot be led are Roosevelt and [T. Thomas] Fortune. We never know what they will do next,” was the judgment of newspaper reporter J. M. Holland.51 Fortune, the other uncontrollable man, was less cynical in his impression of Roosevelt. “He seems to be a very open and honest man and I rather like him,” he told Washington. He added that Roosevelt's admiration for Washington was “unstinted,” something Fortune knew would please the educator.52 Washington would not have been Washington if he did not grasp Roosevelt was a man just like himself. A man not to trifle with, just like himself.

  For Roosevelt, it began while he was vice president and planning for the 1904 presidential nomination. His intention to build a new Republican Party in the South arose to counter Senator Mark Hanna's control of Southern Negro delegates to the Republican nominating convention. He asked Booker T. Washington to help him. (This scheme shows how global Roosevelt's solutions to problems could be and how much work he was willing to put into them. To win the 1904 nomination, he needed delegates from the South; to get them, he had to bypass Mark Hanna; to bypass Hanna, he would build a new Republican Party down there; and to do this, he needed Booker T. Washington.) Washington agreed, and a trip to Tuskegee by Roosevelt was planned for November. By then, he was President Roosevelt and suggested they meet in the White House over dinner. In a handwritten note, Washington confirmed he would “accept your invitation for dinner.”53

  No black man ever had dined in the White House with a president before. Even though this meeting had nothing to do with black rights or social equality and was exclusively to talk politics, the blowback was intense. Roosevelt admitted to Albion W. Tourgée (the lawyer for Homer Plessy of Plessy v. Ferguson) he had a “moment's qualm [that] made me ashamed of myself.”54 Henry Cabot Lodge assured him, “Everyone here, literally everyone, is with you heart and soul on the Booker Washington matter. Needless for me to say how utterly right you are,”55 and Roosevelt became adamant he did the right thing. “If these creatures had any sense they would understand that they can't bluff me.”56 Outwardly, Roosevelt stuck to his guns and said he would invite anyone he pleased to the White House. But he may not have been so sure he was right. A week after Washington's visit, Roosevelt bumped into Mark Twain at an awards ceremony at Yale, and Roosevelt asked Twain if he had done the right thing. Recalled Twain, “I judged by his tone that he was worried and troubled and sorry about that showy adventure, and wanted a little word of comfort and approval.”57

  The Theodore Roosevelt–Booker T. Washington collaboration shows the Jekyll and Hyde of Roosevelt and race. The good Dr. Jekyll saw Booker T. Washington every bit as entitled to meet and eat with him as anyone else. The dishonorable Mr. Hyde never had a black man to dinner again. The Roosevelt-Washington relationship also paralleled the overall relationship between whites and blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century. Roosevelt would be dominant, occasionally dismissive; Washington was content to be secondary and obsequious, just as he counseled Southern Negroes to be. Publicly, Washington would understate his influence, though few believed him: “Whatever conferences I have had with the President or with any public official have grown out of my position, not as a politician, but as an educator.” After that dinner, their partnership prospered for almost five years, until it was stunted by Brownsville.

  IN A BOSTON SPEECH in May 1907, John Milholland condemned Roosevelt's race policy as having “done more to strengthen the Bourbon Democracy in the South than any administration since the days of Buchanan.”58 Oscar Straus, a Jew and therefore a legatee of group hatred and one who understood what it was, attended a dinner at the White House after the 1906 election, where President Roosevelt and others discussed his upcoming message to Congress. “First there was the negro question…. His position plainly was that he would do anything in his power for the white man South without, however, doing a wrong or an injustice to the colored man.”59

  These three descriptions of Roosevelt and race, two at opposite extremes, one in the middle, suggest three different Theodore Roosevelts on the question of race. Not one of them comes near describing a man who would cashier three companies of infantry soldiers from the army simply because they were black.

  Roosevelt was a product of his youth and a man of his era. On race, his beliefs and behaviors were more advanced than most but nowhere near those of the twenty-first century. He has to be judged by the times he lived in. But we may test him by more than his actions. We are entitled to judge him on his words as well, and as we shall see, they were angry and cruel, and they shaded what he did. As the debate over the Brownsville discharges boiled over, Roosevelt would overheat his words and rhetoric and aim them at the black soldiers and their defenders.

  “Ohio had such a plethora of aspiring statesmen that they jostled one another and were in one another's way.”

  James Beauchamp (“Champ”) Clark,

  Speaker of the US House of Representatives,

  My Quarter Century of American Politics, vol. 1

  ON THE GROUNDS OF the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus is a statue of Cornelia of ancient Rome. When a friend boasted about her fine jewelry, Cornelia pointed to her sons and said, “These are my jewels.” Cornelia represents Ohio, and on her pedestal surrounding her are life-size statutes of seven Ohioans who served the nation during and after the Civil War, including Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James A. Garfield. By 1906, three other Ohioans had been president, and it looked like two more were competing against each other for the prize in 1908.1 Both were from Cincinnati.

  IN SIX NARROW COLUMNS on page one, crammed with small typeset but no pictures or drawings, the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer on August 16, 1869, reported that Parisians were celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Napoleon I.2 In England, the Harvard crew was racing on the Thames. Closer to home, Columbus had an attempted robbery of a jewelry store, but an alert policeman caught the burglars in action. In Cincinnati, four businessmen had formed a partnership to distill alcohol and
whiskies. From Indiana came news of “Another Steamboat Disaster.” And another on the Mississippi River seven miles below St. Louis, in which eighteen to twenty lives were feared lost. In a river city like Cincinnati, this was important news. But as a transportation hub, Cincinnati already was losing out to other Midwestern cities with steel railroad tracks going almost everywhere. The railroads were cutting into Cincinnati's steamboat business. The newspaper had ads from a score of them; one, the Old Reliable Little Miami Railroad, claimed to be the shortest and fastest route to the “Eastern cities, towns, villages and stations.” The local news was on page eight under the heading “City Matters.” A building owned by Mr. George Martin was destroyed by fire. The Mayor's Office reported weekly receipts of $183, including $77 from peddlers and $1 from dog licenses. The Eckford BaseBall Club from Brooklyn, “champions of the United States,” were staying at the Gibson House and preparing to play the Red Stockings at Union Grounds. (The next day's edition happily reported a “victory for our boys,” who beat the champs by what sportscasters today would call a “football score,” 45–18.) From the single “Law Card” by H. S. Brewster, attorney at law and master commissioner of the Court of Common Pleas, who would have guessed there were already three hundred lawyers in Cincinnati?3 Not Joseph Foraker, who came that day to practice law.4

  WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT'S WEIGHT always had been a problem, though as a young man he carried it well. He loved sports, especially baseball.5 Playing the infield in high school, he was a quick-footed second baseman able to make the out and then pivot to throw accurately to first base to get the back end of the double play. He took jokes about his weight in good fun and loved repeating Secretary of State Elihu Root's response to his telegram from the Philippines when he was governor there. Taft wired he had ridden a horse that day and was “feeling good.” Root wired back, “How's the horse?” As he aged, Taft added more pounds (at one point he reached three hundred), and they became the visible image of his other frustrations.

  His father, Alphonso Taft, was a lawyer and later a judge in Cincinnati and achieved respect enough for President Ulysses S. Grant, trying in his last year in the White House to scrub away the stain of scandal, to bring him and his good name and character into the cabinet as secretary of war and then as attorney general. Taft's mother was Alphonso's second wife. In time they would have five children, four of whom would be boys, the first “the large and smiling Willie.”6 He was “good nature personified.”7

  SITTING ACROSS THE OHIO River from the slave state of Kentucky, Cincinnati was while Willie Taft was growing up there a Southern city in a Northern state. Ohio was a free state, and before the Civil War both free and slave blacks crossed the river to get to it. Because of this next-door accessibility to the South, it was a station on the Underground Railroad, the lacework of secret routes used by slaves to escape slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book Abraham Lincoln is said to have joked “started this whole war,” lived in Cincinnati, and she and her husband hid fugitive slaves in their home. (Her father, the abolitionist minister Lyman Beecher, lived on Gilbert Avenue just a few steps from its intersection with what is today Foraker Avenue.) Not all white Cincinnatians supported the abolitionists; in 1862, Wendell Phillips was booed and pelted with eggs and rocks and caused a riot when he spoke there against slavery.8 By the time Foraker decided to stake his future there, of the 216,000 or so people in Cincinnati (it was the nation's sixth-largest city), 5,900 were Negro.9

  The Ohio River was not the River Jordan, and Ohio was not the Promised Land. Its black residents may have been free, but legally they were not equal to whites. Ohio had “Black Laws.” Negroes could not testify against whites, serve in the militia or on juries, or enroll in public schools.10 In 1829, relying on an 1804 law prohibiting blacks from entering Ohio, and aware many slaves came anyway and simply remained there, Cincinnati expelled them. Irish immigrants hastened blacks on their way, leading to riots between the two. Before things quieted down, more than one thousand Negroes (half of the pre-riot black population) had abandoned Cincinnati.11 Those who stayed lived with the violence that could be brought to bear on them.12

  Still, just before the Civil War, the city had a small, educated, and affluent black upper class. Robert Harlan “exemplified [its] life style, tastes and self-perception.”13 He was able to see to it that his son, Robert Jr., attended Woodward High School, where a classmate was Will Taft.14 The senior Harlan's white half brother, with whom, according to historian Willard Gatewood, he shared a relationship of “intimacy and mutual respect,” was US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who wrote in his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, “Our Constitution is color-blind…. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law…. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.”15

  BORN INTO A LARGE family with nine children (two more died in infancy), Joseph Foraker used his childhood to acquire the disciplines—hard work and thorough preparation—necessary for a family farm “where there was always more work to do.”16 In school, his favorite subject was history, especially military history. He had “an aptitude for declamation” and later remembered how well he recited “Henry V at Harfleur”:

  Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

  …

  In peace there's nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility:

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger.17

  Young Joe, at fourteen years still only a tiger cub and unable to enlist in the Union Army when the “blast of war” began with cannon fire at Fort Sumpter, stayed behind when his older brother Burch joined the Twenty-Fourth Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Two years later, just after his sixteenth birthday, he lied about his age and enlisted in the newly formed Company A, Eighty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, as its first volunteer.18 It can be said of Foraker's wartime service that he did his duty and he did it well. But he saw practically no fighting himself, and when the Eighty-Ninth was bloodied at Chickamauga, he was by “a great piece of good fortune” back in Ohio on recruiting duty.19

  His most significant recollection from the war was learning of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862.20 From then on, the war “was to involve…the abolition of slavery [and] had been placed on a higher and better plane, both morally and patriotically; that Union victory in consequence meant something worth fighting for, and if need be, dying for.”21

  RUBBING SHOULDERS WITH THE officers, Foraker learned that he was uneducated. When he left the army (he bookended his regiment's existence as the first man enlisted and the last mustered out), he prepared himself to get an education. After a year he was ready for Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.22 “It was there I met, courted and became engaged to Miss Julia Bundy.”23 There must have been something in Delaware, Ohio, that encouraged future leaders of the nation from Ohio to woo and win the young ladies at Wesleyan's sister college, Ohio Wesleyan Women's University. As Julia coyly put it, “It was quite against the design of the founders of old Delaware that ‘the sexes,’ students-under-the-elms, should meet. (Ah, but didn't they…!)”24 Future president Rutherford B. Hayes and future vice president (in Theodore Roosevelt's second term) Charles W. Fairbanks also did the trick.

  Julia was as lively and vivacious as her husband could be dour. She would add balance to him and, from her father, Hezekiah Bundy, a congressman from Jackson County, Ohio, she supplemented his political perspective. Of course there were activities at college not quite as absorbing as Julia that also brought perspective to Foraker. The Lyceum Circuit would come through Delaware, and Foraker would often attend the lectures, hearing, among others, the former slave Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips.25 These hardened Foraker's views on the antebellum South and the mistreatment of Negroes.

  He decided to become a l
awyer and left Ohio Wesleyan to join the senior class at Cornell University where in July 1869 he was part of its first class to graduate with a law degree. When he and Julia then married in the Bundy home in Wellston, Ohio, their nuptials had to be at 9:00 a.m. so Mr. and the new Mrs. Joseph Benson Foraker could make the only train of the day to Cincinnati and their new home.26 Where they would thrive.

  IT WAS NOT LONG before Foraker felt the tug of politics. He started with local elections but was spectacularly unsuccessful, losing a run for Common Pleas Court judge in 1876 and, in an election tainted by outrageous fraud unconnected to him, for county solicitor in 1878.27 He tried again the next year, and this time he rang the bell and was elected to the Superior Court of Cincinnati. He served for three years, when, “on account of a temporary illness that gave my friends as well as myself serious concern,” he resigned.28 “The year following my resignation…I was nominated by the Republicans of Ohio for the office of Governor.”29 He lost to George Hoadly, also of Cincinnati and once a Republican, but who left the party when it split over the sale of liquor.30 In losing the election, Foraker nevertheless mastered the art of the stump speech.31 He was learning to be a compelling speaker, a “fire alarm.”

  “AS FAR BACK AS he could remember, there had always been a Yale for William Howard Taft.”32 His father, Alphonso, and his brother Charley were Yale alumni, and it would be Old Eli for the young man now calling himself Bill. It was at Yale where he developed a love for scholarship and critical thinking, and he graduated second in his class of 132 students. When still a young man, he set his heart on appointment to the US Supreme Court, and this dream reflected the pleasure and reward he enjoyed by exercising his wits where knowledge, thoughtful reflection, and clever reasoning were the stock in trade.