Taking on Theodore Roosevelt
Page 24
IT IS NOT KNOWN for sure where this act of murder got its name. Usually cited is one man or another with the surname Lynch. Perhaps it was William Lynch, a Virginian who wrote a compact among the slave owners of Pittsylvania County to deal with errant slaves. Or a different William Lynch, whose father was the founder of Lynchburg, Virginia. Charles Lynch, yet another Virginian, tried accused criminals in his front yard and, after finding them guilty, tied them to a tree and whipped them. Some suggest its etymology was Irish, in the person of James Fitzstephens Lynch, a fifteenth-century mayor of Galway, who hanged his own son for robbing and murdering a Spaniard.7 Wherever it began, it found a home in the post-Reconstruction American South. From there it metastasized elsewhere in the country. Kelly Miller claimed that between 1889 and 1920 there were lynchings in every state and territory except Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Utah. Even faraway Alaska had four. In those thirty-one years he counted 3,372 lynchings, and overwhelmingly the victims were black (2,656 versus 716 white). The eleven states of the Confederacy witnessed 2,426 lynchings (more than 91 percent of the total); Georgia had the most in the nation with 416. Sixty women and girls were lynched, of which forty-nine were black. The offenses charged to the victims were murder (1,219; 900 black, 319 white), rape (523; 477 black, 46 white), an attack upon a woman (250; 237 black, 13 white), crimes against property (331; 210 black, 121 white), and miscellaneous crimes (438; 303 black, 135 white). The rest of the victims had not been charged with any crime.8
Lynching's continuing presence in the American republic was like a disease for which there was no cure in a patient who had no other choice. Resistance was futile.
Roosevelt began his discussion of lynching in his annual address by saying, “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse than murder.” This was not a good beginning for him. Of the 3,372 lynchings counted by Miller, only 477 were of black men accused of rape. This hardly justifies Roosevelt's claim that rape was “the greatest existing cause of lynching.” It's not clear he believed it himself. In 1906, after the shooting in Brownsville, in a letter to John M. Parker of New Orleans (“You are a mighty good friend,” he began the letter) he said, “You are of course aware, however, that three-fourths of the lynchings are not for rape but for other offenses.”9 At different times he found different reasons to explain lynching. Just after he was elected vice president, it was delays in the criminal justice system.10 Three years after that, in a letter marked “Personal” to his attorney general Philander Knox, he suggested it might be because of a general era of lawlessness the country was passing through.11 (He repeated this thought in the 1906 annual message, calling the nation's attention to “the prevalence of crime among us.”) In that same letter he thought too many “clever criminal lawyers” secure too many acquittals for too many guilty men, and this was disturbing enough to drive other men to lynching. He repeated this idea less than two weeks later to Indiana governor Winfield Taylor Durbin after a three-day race riot in Evansville, Indiana.12 People seemed to share Roosevelt's discomfort with how criminal trials were conducted and, like Roosevelt, saw a connection between this and lynching. After a mob in Wilmington, Delaware, lynched a black man accused of killing a white man, the grand jury wanted to condemn the judge for not bringing him to trial faster. This tardiness, it was said, encouraged people to take matters in their own hands.13
In his annual message, Roosevelt, of course, did not say these or any other circumstances excused lynching. It was “inexcusable anywhere.” But at the same time, seeing it as a natural consequence of “the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all the category of crimes” took all life out of his censure of lynching and made its victims the problem.
Then Roosevelt carried his argument too far. Into the braided lynching and rape he now wove the notion of a conspiracy of silence. “The white people of the South indict the whole colored race on the ground that even the better elements lend no assistance whatever in ferreting out criminals of their own color. The respectable colored people must learn not to harbor their criminals, but to assist the officers in bringing them to justice. Every colored man should realize that the worst enemy of his race is the negro criminal, and above all the negro criminal who commits the dreadful crime of rape; and it should be felt as in the highest degree an offense against the whole country, and against the colored race in particular, for a colored man to fail to help the officers of the law in hunting down with all possible earnestness and zeal every such infamous offender.”14
Then he tied rape to a lack of education. “The lowest and most brutal criminals, those for instance who commit the crime of rape, are in the great majority men who have had either no education or very little.” (He added a plug for Booker T. Washington, “Of course the best type of education for the colored man, taken as a whole, is such education as is conferred in schools like Hampton and Tuskegee; where the boys and girls, the young men and young women, are trained industrially.”)
What the message seemed to be saying was that lynching was unfortunate, but if black men stopped raping white women, and if black citizens would help the police find these men, and if black men and women all learned a trade, the whole awful mess would go away.15 Roosevelt, without mentioning Brownsville, had opened a window into how he thought about what he did to the soldiers. If black civilians could hide black criminals, black soldiers could just as easily remain silent about black wrongdoers in the army.
A WEEK EARLIER IN a letter marked “Personal” to Silas McBee, editor of the quasi-official magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Roosevelt said it was Negro indifference to Negro crime that “had an undoubted effect in helping to precipitate the hideous Atlanta riots.”16
The riots in Atlanta joined Brownsville in making up what biographer David Levering Lewis called the watershed summer and fall of 1906, and like two fire alarms they sounded the turn against Roosevelt's man in the Negro community, Booker T. Washington and his Atlanta Compromise. The break can be seen in the different reactions to two of his speeches, one made in August as Brownsville was unfolding and Atlanta was heating to a boil, and the other in October, when the riots had scalded the city and burned Washington himself. In August, as the Twenty-Fifth Infantry soldiers were on the train from Fort Brown to Fort Reno, Booker T. Washington was telling people what he thought of black criminals. In the keynote address before the Atlanta convention of the National Negro Business League he said, “The negro is committing too much crime,” and the race's leaders had the duty to see that “the negro criminal is gotten rid of” or the race will “suffer permanently.” Black crime was as great an enemy as lynching. “Our southland today has no greater enemy to business progress than lynchers and those who provoke lynching” (author's emphasis).17 He was applauded. Two months later, speaking to the Afro-American Council in New York, he said again that blacks had to get rid of their criminals. This time he was ignored.18
Less than two months after that, in his annual address, President Roosevelt, now completely out of step with Negro thinking on the matter, said Negro crime and Negro refusal to help do anything about it was “the larger crime, and it provokes such atrocious offenses as the one at Atlanta.” Roosevelt had embraced the idea as his own.
“MY DAY OPENED WITH hearing the massacre of Negroes in Atlanta. A horrible, horrible affair,” John Milholland wrote in his diary.19 The rioting would be worse than any the country had seen since the New York draft riots during the Civil War.
Race riots, inevitable as summer humidity in the South, regularly occurred mainly there but also throughout the United States in the late nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth.20 Over the summer and fall of 1906, there had been a series of assaults reported in Atlanta. T. Thomas Fortune, in Atlanta in August for the National Negro Business League meeting, later would say, �
��The better class of black men knew that…trouble was coming.”21 On September 22, stories of new assaults that day by blacks on whites were spoken of on the street. Neither of these involved rape; one was a “negro rough” supposedly pushing a white woman off the street when she refused to make way for him, and another was a black woman assaulting a white man, who in turn pushed her.22 That was all it took. A man got up on a box on Marietta Street downtown and cried out to the crowd, “Are we Southern white men going to stand for this?” Cries of “No!” were followed by “Kill the negroes,” and the mob was off and running. Its first victims were two innocent black men riding a nearby trolley. The first was killed with a knife; the other pulled into the street and trampled to death. The rampage went on for four days, and only after the governor brought in the state militia was order restored. The official death toll was fourteen, twelve of these blacks, but unofficial reports place it at twenty-two, twenty blacks and two whites.23
The rumored assaults the first day of the riots were said to have been the spark, and white anger at earlier alleged assaults by blacks was considered the tinder. Atlanta's Mayor James G. Woodward blamed it on “black brutes who assault our white women.”24 A contributing reason was thought to be Atlanta's skyrocketing population after General William Sherman depopulated the city in the Civil War, with blacks increasing at a far greater rate and racial tensions growing apace.25 One factor might have been the three-way contest for governor that year among Tom Watson, an out-and-out racist; Hoke Smith, almost as bad; and Clark Howell, who gave Watson and Smith as good as he got. In Washington, DC, Archibald Grimké's brother Francis said the riots were “the result of envy, born of hatred. It hurts this class of whites to see the Negro prospering. They don't want him to succeed; they don't want him to get along.”26
When the riots began President Roosevelt was enjoying the last few days of summer at his home in Oyster Bay, New York. He had been there since July 1, badly in need of the rest and recharging he found at Sagamore Hill.27 The stresses of the legislative program he worked hard to get through Congress over the winter and spring had been calmed briefly and only slightly by the summer pleasures of that rambling and beloved house and his family before Brownsville broke and gave way to Atlanta. Booker T. Washington was not far away, attending a meeting in New York City to discuss industrial conditions for blacks there.28 Receiving reports of the horror in Atlanta as the brutality torqued itself up, Washington asked President Roosevelt to send in federal troops. Roosevelt refused, saying he lacked the authority to interfere in a local matter.29 Just as the brutality was easing off, Washington sent identical letters to the editors of the New York World and the New York Times to remind them and their readers he was “against the crime of assaulting women and of resorting to lynching and mob law as a remedy for any evil.” The immediate solution was for the “best” of both races to get together and change things.30 Though he encouraged people to think he had rushed from New York to Atlanta to work to calm things down, he did not arrive there until September 28, two days after the city was declared secure.31 Two days later he was back in Tuskegee.
Du Bois was living in Atlanta while teaching sociology at the Negro Atlanta University. When the riots began, he was in Alabama doing research for the Census Bureau but rushed home to protect his family in a nonaccommodating and very confrontational way—sitting on the steps with a shotgun in his hands. He was prepared to use it against any threatening white rioter. He never got his chance; they never got that far.32 It was on the train back to Alabama, in the Jim Crow railroad car, where he composed “A Litany to Atlanta.” In it he asked God to pay whites back for what they had done to his race. President Roosevelt made no public comment about the riot's causes until his annual message in December. By then, as we have seen, he settled on Negroes for not turning in their own criminals to the police. Six months after the riots, he adopted the opinion of journalist Ray Stannard Baker:33
For months the relation of the races had been growing more strained…. In Atlanta the lower class—the “worthless Negro”—had been increasing in members: it showed itself too evidently among the swarming saloons, dives, and “clubs” which a complaisant city administration allowed to exist in the very heart of the city. Crime had increased to an alarming extent; an insufficient and ineffective police force seemed unable to cope with it. With a population of 115,000 Atlanta had over 17,000 arrests in 1905; in 1906 the number increased to 21,602. Atlanta had more arrests than New Orleans with nearly three times the population and twice as many Negroes…. Race feeling had sharpened through a long and bitter political campaign.34
Booker T. Washington would say nothing about the riots while he was in New York, using as an excuse he spoke of race matters only in the South.35 No one was taken in by this preposterous answer, and when he had time to think of what to say, ever the accommodator, Washington condemned both alleged black rapists and white rioters evenhandedly.36 Du Bois, however, signaling how he intended to use the riots and Brownsville to topple Washington, pointed his finger at the man he called the “Arch-Tempter,” who, in the city now devastated by the riots, sold that bill of goods known as the Atlanta Compromise. That compromise was now a dead letter; none of the parties had any use for it. The South had changed since 1895. Its leaders no longer were willing to live up to the bargain made by their predecessors, who themselves had failed to live up to it anyway. They would not allow blacks to advance patiently and painfully; they would not permit them to advance at all. They would not control the violence. Black Americans were beginning to understand they had denied themselves the rights they were entitled to as American citizens and had not gotten anything for it.37 Du Bois biographer Lewis called Washington's accommodation a “fatal trap.”38 Washington biographer Harlan recognized it had become a “Faustian bargain.”39
The devil had come for his due, and to the Wizard his face was that of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois's message was starting to get through. In 1906, after the Brownsville Incident, Du Bois was overtaking Washington. He was gaining a growing number of black leaders, and Washington was seeing them fall away. Archibald Grimké once had a foot in both camps. He tended to see Washington's point of view but was tugged in a different way by men like Monroe Trotter, whom he knew from Boston. August Meier, historian and prolific writer on the era, believed Brownsville was the “turning point” in how Grimké saw things. Now he was firmly in Washington's opposition.40
The Atlanta Compromise of 1895, tottering from the awareness it was not working, was now shaking dangerously from the Atlanta riots and the Brownsville discharges of 1906. The riots came after the Brownsville shooting but before Roosevelt ordered the soldiers’ discharges, so it was Atlanta that broke the dishes and Brownsville that cleared them away. After Roosevelt's Brownsville order was made public in November, the table would not be set for Washington again.
By the time of Roosevelt's annual message, this was clear to Washington. When he wrote Fortune that he had tried unsuccessfully to get Roosevelt to modify the annual address, Fortune wrote back, “I am sorry that the President did not let you blue pencil his address…. His advice that Afro-Americans who know nothing of their criminals shall help to hunt them down and his adoption of the lynch law method of slaying the innocent with the guilty are vile propositions calculated to do us great injury.”41 Fortune was through with Roosevelt; soon he too would break with Washington.
“Who could imagine that American soldiers in a body would try to murder unoffending women and innocent children?”
Report of Major Augustus P. Blocksom
before the Senate, August 29, 1906
ROOSEVELT WAS WELL AWARE of the racial element in the opposition to the discharges, and though he denied race had anything to do with what he did, it was a problem that had to be faced. His favorable relations with Negroes were based on just a few things: having Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner (but this was now five years ago), the protection Washington gave him through the Tuskegee Machine stan
ding with him on issues affecting black Americans, the federal jobs he dispensed to qualified blacks (in hindsight not very many), and the fact he was not a “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and the others like him in Congress who protected the South's Jim Crow culture and laws. This was no longer sufficient. Facing a Senate investigation and the attention the nation's newspapers would pay to it, he had to do better. Help came from the man in Tuskegee.
Someone sent Booker T. Washington a clipping from the New York Age that cited a Chicago Daily Tribune story about a white army officer's recent inflammatory comment about black soldiers.1 Colonel William L. Pitcher of the Twenty-Seventh Infantry was said to have wondered aloud why the army had sent Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry to Fort Sheridan, Illinois. It never would have happened, he said, “without a protest if I was to remain in command here…. For the life of me I cannot see why the United States should try to make soldiers out of them.”2 As a young second lieutenant, Pitcher had been assigned to the Tenth Cavalry and may have formed his opinions then.3 Or they may have had their genesis earlier, when his father, General Thomas G. Pitcher, was superintendent at West Point. The general ordered a court-martial for a black cadet who was alleged to have falsely accused white cadets of racial harassment. The black cadet was convicted and sentenced to dismissal from West Point. But President Grant, stating “that the ends of public justice will be better subserved and the policy of the government, of which the presence of this cadet in the Military Academy is a signal illustration, be better maintained by a commutation of the sentence,” allowed him to stay.4 The younger Pitcher might have seen this as an uncalled-for rebuke of his father.
Aside from race, Colonel Pitcher's army career was an uneven one, and as recently as 1904, he was censured by Secretary Taft for “unceremoniously breaking” an engagement to a young woman in Washington. Pitcher made things worse for himself with the “language he used in communications to the [war] department” about the matter.5 The Wizard saw Pitcher as an easy mark, and so did Roosevelt. He ordered the War Department to get an explanation from Pitcher about his antiblack remarks, and if it was not satisfactory, to court-martial the white officer for what he said.6 He would show he was an evenhanded man when it came to race. Perhaps it was coincidence that Roosevelt's Pitcher order was made public the same day as his Brownsville order and both appeared in the same article in many newspapers.7 Three months later, when Pitcher denied even having given an interview in which such comments could have been made, Roosevelt accepted this and the matter was closed.8