Roosevelt's hope was that what he said about the facts of the shooting would soften up the Senate for Senator John Spooner (whose job the next day was to show that with these facts the law permitted the discharges), and together they would convince the Senate there was no reason to investigate Brownsville. Spooner's role was critical; if what Roosevelt did passed constitutional muster, his position was impregnable, and no one could touch him. The legal impossibility of Congress overruling his action made an investigation a waste of time.
ON JANUARY 15 THE Senate entered what would be its final week of considering Brownsville. It had grown tired of this endless debate. The momentum favoring an investigation had generated a sense of inevitability that one would take place. Spooner knew this and was not comfortable. He agreed Roosevelt had the authority to discharge the soldiers but believed he was wrong to do it. He gave in to White House coaxing and said he would defend President Roosevelt, but only if he could confine himself to the question of his authority. He had hoped to fulfill his obligation by drafting the poorly received Lodge amendment. When it was withdrawn, Spooner was in for the duration and wound up making this final appeal. He had negotiated a further concession: rescinding the prohibition against future federal civilian employment.39
Spooner neatly turned the question of authority on its head. Instead of questioning presidential authority, he questioned the Senate's authority to investigate President Roosevelt. Congress may “make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces…[but] can not in the guise of [making these rules] impair the authority of the President as the Commander in Chief.” If the Brownsville discharges were an abuse of Roosevelt's power as commander in chief, the proper action would be to impeach him in the House of Representatives. Then the Senate could investigate what he did in order to see if it should remove him from office.40 Otherwise it would be jumping the gun.
Spooner felt more comfortable when he echoed the “public safety” argument invoked by Major Blocksom and adapted by President Roosevelt in his December 19 message as “public interest.” Roosevelt was right, he said, in concluding soldiers had been the shooters but it had been impossible to identify any of them as guilty. “What should the Commander in Chief do? Nothing but transfer…the murderers of that battalion to some other community, emboldened by successful concealment of identity to do the same and worse the next time somewhere else…?”41 This was his strongest argument, and he should have stopped there. Instead he confused civilians’ fears of murderers posted in their communities with the soldiers’ fears of retaliations from civilians who viewed them as escapees from justice. “Even Mingo Sanders…is served with notice by the Senator from South Carolina [Tillman] that he must not go to the State of his birth lest he should be shot down…. What about the…other communities and other States?” To which Tillman retorted, “Would you like to have him sent to Wisconsin?” Spooner shot back, “I would not have the slightest objection,” taking all the wind out of the public-safety argument he had just made.42
Sensing he was not doing well, he turned to criticizing Senator Tillman, a man he hated, perhaps thinking he could persuade senators to oppose anything Tillman advocated and support Roosevelt solely to oppose a man like Tillman. He denounced the South Carolinian for threatening a race war when he spoke a few days earlier. “I do not know of a more certain way to precipitate a struggle between the two races in such an environment than to be constantly and violently declaring it to be imminent and inevitable.” The Congressional Record reflects at this point there was “applause in the galleries.”43 With it ringing in his ears, Spooner sat down. That night the Roosevelts and Spooners both attended a dinner party at the Taft home. In her diary, Mrs. Spooner gushed, “John spoke 4 hrs.—A great speech—all say—John was the hero of the hour.” She said nothing about praise from President Roosevelt.44
THE NEXT DAY, SENATOR Joseph C. S. Blackburn brought back the question of President Roosevelt's authority. Modifications to Foraker's resolution and his own denials that it authorized consideration of that authority should have put this matter to rest. Foraker shuddered at yet another detour.
Blackburn was a Democrat, and recalling the discomfort Lodge's amendment caused Republican senators he saw an opportunity to make further mischief. He noted that as it stood the resolution said the investigation would not “question” President Roosevelt's authority. He wanted an “express disclaimer” that it would not “deny” it either.45 This put the Republicans in the same corner as Lodge's amendment had earlier in the month. It implied the authority might be deniable, only that in Brownsville it would not be questioned. It was a masterstroke. Roosevelt would favor Blackburn's amendment to slam the door on any possibility that his authority would be questioned.46 Foraker said he would vote against Blackburn. Which of course made it more likely Roosevelt would want it approved. Republican senators would have to line up behind one man or the other, exposing the split in the party's ranks. Democratic senators were delighted. Their Republican counterparts were in knots, and Roosevelt would accept nothing less than their full and enthusiastic support for the Democrat Blackburn.
Republicans tried to get Blackburn to withdraw his amendment. He refused. “He had them in a hole and he knew they knew it.” Republican Nelson Aldrich threatened to conduct “an investigation of the race question” in the Senate Judiciary Committee to see whether any state had violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This was really a threat to reduce congressional representation from Southern states, and “how would Blackburn and the other Southern Democrats like that?” Blackburn called his bluff.47 “Fine. The South had been trying for a long time to get the attention of the country focused on the difficulties it was having with its race problem, and if the Senate would give it a general investigation it would be delighted. Nothing could suit it better.” The Republicans had to go back and think about all this. Blackburn had put Foraker's resolution off until the next week.48
TO HIS SON KERMIT Roosevelt wrote, “[The senators] are nearly at the crisis…. I do not know how it will come out [but], it will not make the slightest difference in my attitude.” In fact he was anything but blasé.49 On January 20 he left the White House for Senator Lodge's home, where he met with Republican senators dragged there by Lodge and made it clear that a vote against Blackburn or even a vote to table his amendment was a vote against Roosevelt. He was there for two to three hours, no doubt knowing it would be hard to say no to his face, and he got what he wanted. The New York Times reported that “the less courageous of his party supporters in the Senate [got] a new stiffening of the backbone.” They would support Blackburn “as the President desired.”50
Meanwhile Foraker said he would agree to changing his resolution to accept language that neither the “legality nor the justice” of the president's act was to be questioned. Blackburn said there was “not a shadow of difference” between this language and his proposed amendment.51 With everyone's concerns at long last addressed, Foraker's resolution was laid before the Senate for consideration the next day.
IT SHOULD HAVE TAKEN no time at all. It took quite a bit. As the session opened, Senator Julius Burrows of Michigan wanted to be recognized and jump ahead of Foraker's resolution and everything else to talk about Reed Smoot of Utah, who had been elected to the Senate in 1903 but whose Mormon religion still provoked efforts to unseat him. The previous summer the Committee on Privileges and Elections had reported to the Senate by resolution that Smoot was not entitled to be what he had in fact been for more than three years, a member of the Senate. Senator Burrows wanted something done about it. He held the floor for more than fifteen pages of the Congressional Record, including questions asked and comments made by other senators. When he concluded, the Senate did what it had been doing since 1903. It put the Smoot matter aside.52
Then it turned to Brownsville. But not to approve the resolution everyone had agreed upon. Stephen Mallory of Florida was not sure—really sure—everyone understood that considerati
on of Roosevelt's authority was off limits. He had an amendment to correct this. It had to be debated but in the end was rejected. Porter J. McCumber of North Dakota, a Republican, had an amendment to spell out in detail what the investigative committee could do. It too was turned away. Charles Culberson of Texas still was not ready to risk any investigation; he feared it might end with the black soldiers back in the army. After forty-four days of debate, he now wanted the resolution to simply say the President did the right thing and discussion of the Brownsville Incident “will be closed.”53 Culberson had to accept his amendment's defeat.
And then, “with a great sigh of relief that the month-long flood of talk was over at last,” it was done.54
The Vice-President: The question is on agreeing to the resolution of the Senator from Ohio [Mr. FORAKER].
Mr. Foraker: I move that the resolution, under the rule, be referred to the Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses of the Senate.
[The motion was agreed to.]
Mr. Kean: I ask for unanimous consent for its presentation.
The resolution was agreed to by unanimous consent and agreed to.55
IN HIS MEMOIRS WRITTEN a decade later, Senator Foraker described with brevity the events over the forty-four days it took the Senate to decide what to do with his resolution. “[There was] a running debate that continued until January 22, when my resolution authorizing an investigation was adopted.” He added, “I was all the while hoping that, with the truth established, as I believed an investigation would establish it, that the President would in a manly fashion undo the wrong he had done.”56 It is hard to believe after all Roosevelt had said about him and the soldiers that he could expect this to happen.
President Roosevelt did not see it the same way. He thought Foraker had taken a drubbing. As he said in a letter marked “Personal” to George Spinney, an old friend from his New York days, Foraker accepted the amendment with no inquiry into either the legality or the justice of his action. “There has never been a more complete case of backdown and humiliation than this of Foraker's.”57 Lodge agreed. In a letter to W. Sturgis Bigelow of Boston, both his and Roosevelt's friend, he wrote, “We came out completely on top in the Brownsville fight, which was very satisfactory, especially as they had us down at first.”58
Unsaid by Foraker was what he failed to gain. There is in our Constitution an unending tension among the three branches of government to gain power at the expense of one or both of the other two. In his time in the Senate, Foraker boldly stood up to presidential action that he and others believed intruded in the business of Congress. Roosevelt pushed back, drawing into the executive branch authority that, once there, would be hard to evict, thereby strengthening him and his successors and correspondingly weakening Congress. By yielding to Roosevelt's demand that the investigation have nothing to do with his right to discharge the soldiers, Foraker weakened what the Senate would be able to do in Brownsville and thereafter what Congress could do as a legislative body, nourishing a stronger Roosevelt and a more dominating presidential office. The tension exists today.
THE BATTLE OVER BROWNSVILLE continued in the House of Representatives. Back in December, Republican Ernest W. Roberts from Massachusetts introduced a bill to permit the soldiers “to be eligible to reenlistment…with the same standing, rights, and privileges to which they were entitled at the time of their discharge.”59 Democrats took the opposite view. The day after the Foraker resolution was approved, Thetus W. Sims of Tennessee introduced Resolution No. 785, which said Roosevelt's action “was within the scope of his authority and power and is approved and commended as a proper exercise of same.”60 It was referred to the House Military Affairs Committee, where it died in its sleep when the Fifty-Ninth Congress ended. John Nance Garner, Brownsville's congressman, introduced a bill that “called for the elimination of all Blacks currently in the military and barring Black enlistment.” When it did not pass, he introduced similar bills in each of the next three sessions.61 The War Department, citing gallant service of Negro troops, always opposed it.
BROWNSVILLE BECAME AN EXCUSE to ask for presidential involvement in other soldier disturbances. On the day the Foraker resolution was approved, the Columbus Citizen reported, “President Roosevelt may be called upon to investigate into the conduct of the United States soldiers at the Columbus barracks, who ran amuck…Monday night, and may be requested to dishonorably discharge them, just as he did the colored troops at Brownsville, Tex…. Foraker's friends claim that President Roosevelt has established a precedent.”62
IN THE SPRING OF 1907 Roosevelt rewarded the Democratic leader in the Senate, Senator Joseph C. S. Blackburn, “by making him a member of the [Panama] Canal Commission…for standing by him during the Brownsville incident.”63 This was an even cushier job than being a senator. He would be “officially [the] Chief of Civil Administration,” a job and title that meant almost nothing. (Blackburn's duties were once described unofficially as “attending commission meetings, signing cab licenses, and drawing $14,000 a year.”)64 He had almost no responsibilities. When he and other commissioners were appointed, Roosevelt told them, “It will be a position of ample remuneration and much honor.”65 The Panama Canal Commission evidently was what street and water departments were for city bosses: a dumping ground to reward cronies with soft, well-paying jobs at the public trough.
ON JANUARY 28, WHILE the Senate was debating Foraker's resolution and Roosevelt was working against it, Booker T. Washington, who knew a thing or two about rewarding supporters with government jobs, wrote to Francis E. Leupp, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and mentioned “the feeling on the part of colored people against the President [over Brownsville].” But he still stood firmly with him. “Personally, I have the most implicit faith in everything the President does.”66
“Begin with your most vivid memory.”
Unidentified writer's advice for writing
memoirs
JULIA FORAKER BEGINS HER memoirs with what was the most vivid memory of her life with her husband—the Gridiron Club dinner at which he and the Brownsville Incident became the evening's entertainment.
One snowy night, January 1907, two or three hundred men sat down to dinner at a famous Washington club. The club was strictly a good-fellowship affair for chosen souls.
That dinner never got beyond the quail. When the waiters appeared with those trifles they were frantically waved away. Something was happening that had startled the guests out of all thoughts of birds, bottles, and brotherly love:
The President of the United States, reaching into the blue, had hurled a forensic bomb at the senior Senator from Ohio, and the Senator from Ohio was sending back at him from his own well-stocked arsenal, stinging shot; and Heaven knew how the affair would end.1
THE GRIDIRON CLUB WAS the gathering spot and watering hole of choice for Washington journalists. It took its name from the long handled cooking grill commonly called a gridiron in 1885, when the club was founded. At its dinners, the gridiron motif is repeated by setting the head table up against one end of the room and extending the other tables perpendicularly away from it, so the grouping resembles the gridiron. On the real thing, meats are grilled; at a Gridiron Club dinner, it is politicians and office holders, and journalists apply the heat with their searing cartoons, songs, pokes, and sketches. Though not dangerous to life and limb, this can be unhealthy for the careers of those made fun of (one of the club's rules is that the Gridiron's heat singes but never burns). Since the club was formed, every sitting president but one, Grover Cleveland, has attended a Gridiron dinner, and though some will avoid its heat as long as they can, eventually they show up and endure the discomfort.2 At the dinner in December 1906 both President Roosevelt and Senator Foraker were guests, and the journalists performed their usual hijinks and sang songs to well-known tunes but with words chosen to gently and slowly char the politicians, who took it with forced smiles and tried to look like they were having fun.3 Roosevelt had to suffer a derisive lesson in th
e simplified spelling he ordered the government to use. Styled the Gridiron Dikshunary, it included Demokrat, an indivijual representing the Nth degree uv politikal hopelessness; Obedientz, a kwalifikashun for the Supreme Kort. For the December dinner, Brownsville was merely an appetizer when cartoons of Foraker and Mingo Sanders, along with those of John D. Rockefeller and other “disreputable” men, were forced to listen to a phonograph record of Roosevelt shouting derisive names at them, while the Senate was in the middle of debating the proposal to investigate the soldiers’ discharges. The reporters seemed to leave Brownsville on the griddle's back burner that night for additional seasoning. By the January dinner, it was fully marinated.
THE PRESIDENT AS USUAL was the guest of honor. It had been a busy Saturday. In the morning he dealt with the seemingly endless Senate hearings over the expulsion of supposed polygamist Utah senator Reed Smoot. Roosevelt dismissed the tempest against Smoot as a sham and the polygamy problem as a fabrication. Using Idaho's large Mormon population as a point of reference, he noted that polygamy “was as sporadic there as, for instance, bigamy among the Gentiles.”4 The unmarried but philandering Senator Boies Penrose put the matter in a context only he could imagine. “As for me, I would rather have seated beside me in this chamber a polygamist who doesn't polyg than a monogamist who doesn't monag.”5 Smoot would win his case and stay in the Senate twenty-six more years.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 29