Roosevelt's last event that day was the Gridiron Club dinner at the New Willard Hotel. He was tired and in no mood for the sharply sarcastic “entertainment” he knew was, along with quail, on the evening's menu.
“WHAT DID HAPPEN AT that Gridiron Dinner between the President and Foraker?” asked W. Sturgis Bigelow in an undated letter to Henry Cabot Lodge.6 Bigelow was close to the Roosevelts and occasionally a guest in the White House. Roosevelt thought him “a delightful man, and as easy as an old shoe.”7 They shared an interest in Japan, and Bigelow was one of the few Americans of the time to have lived there. (He introduced Kaneko Kentaro to Roosevelt when Roosevelt was civil-service commissioner. They were at Harvard at the same time but never met. During the Russo-Japanese War, Kaneko was in Washington as Japan's special envoy, and it was he who asked Roosevelt to mediate an end to the war.) Bigelow read Boston newspaper accounts of the Gridiron dinner, and they made it sound, as one reporter would write, “as if the affair were a political convention instead of a dinner attended by gentlemen.”8 Bigelow wanted to learn the real story.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT TOOK HIS seat at the head table. Glancing down at the printed program, as much a part of the entertainment as a description of what it would be, he saw himself portrayed in caricature. The cartoon Roosevelt was writing with one hand, shooting a bear with another, and kicking a black man with his foot. Underneath was a jingle,
“I'm busy with things night and day,”
A Rough Rider was once heard to say.
“Writing views, singing tunes,
Killing Bears, firing coons,
Or composing an Irish lay.”
The reference to firing coons signaled Brownsville was to be in the center ring that evening.9
From the cartoons of other men attending the dinner, Roosevelt knew he was in for teasing for the dismissiveness he was thought to show too many important men. Looking around the room, he saw the banker J. P. Morgan. Almost five years earlier, when Roosevelt was still learning his way around the White House, he directed his attorney general to sue Morgan's railroad trust to break up its monopoly under the until then relatively toothless Sherman Antitrust Act. The surprised Morgan could not believe the government would do such a thing and tried to resolve the matter with Roosevelt in person. Unaware Roosevelt wanted a favorable court decision that would be a precedent to deter other monopolies, and not yet fully realizing just whom he was dealing with, at their meeting Morgan said exactly the wrong thing. As recounted by Edmund Morris, the meeting (attended by Attorney General Philander Knox) went something like this:
Morgan: Why had the Administration not asked me to correct irregularities in the trust's charter?
Roosevelt: That is just what we did not want to do.
Morgan: If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.
Roosevelt: That can't be done.
Knox: We don't want to fix it up, we want to stop it.
Morgan: Are you going to attack my other interests, the Steel trust and others?
Roosevelt: Certainly not—unless we find out that in any case they have done something that we regard as wrong.10
Morgan left the meeting not quite sure what to make of Roosevelt. When the US Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt, he found out.
Not far from Morgan sat H. H. Rogers of Standard Oil. Rogers and the financially inept Mark Twain were close friends, and Rogers guided the humorist's family finances. For Roosevelt, who thought Twain “a real genius…wholly without cultivation and without any real historical knowledge,” Rogers's good deeds for Twain were a tepid endorsement of the financier.11 (Twain was just as bipolar in his feelings for Roosevelt. In February 1910 he wrote to his daughter Clara of his “bitter detestation of him.” At the same time, he thought Roosevelt was also “one of the most likable men that I am acquainted with.”12) What really bothered Roosevelt was the enormous wealth Rogers had accumulated as an associate of John D. Rockefeller.
Turning his head to those at the table extending out in front of him, Roosevelt grimaced. Directly in his view, almost unavoidably so, sat Joseph Foraker. It was going to be a long night after what already had been a long day. But if entertainment was what the Gridiron Club wanted, he was gearing up to give it to them.
At his place setting, Senator Foraker read the evening's program that had made President Roosevelt's foul mood even more so. Along with cartoon images of Morgan, Rogers, and others to be maligned that evening (only in good fun of course), he saw one of himself, and beneath it was a jingle showing what the press thought of him and Brownsville. It was all about votes.
“All coons look alike to me,”
J. B. Foraker, says he, says he,
Even they is black as kin be,
An’ is dressed in blue or yeller khaki.
“All coons look alike to me,
Since ’mancipation set ’em free,
Nigger vote hold the balance,
All coons look alike to me.”
This ditty was a parody of the chorus of an immensely popular song of the day, “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” Its original chorus was
All coons look alike to me,
I have got another beau you see.
And he is just as good to me
As you ever tried to be.
He spends his money free,
I know we can't agree
So, I don't like you no how
All coons look alike to me.13
Lyrics like these were commonplace in what were called “coon songs” with lyrics mimicking speech patterns of slaves and uneducated blacks. Coon, short for raccoon, was a disparaging term for blacks, who were thought to prefer their meat during slavery. The melodies were similar to ragtime in their structure and pace. Songwriter, composer, and music historian Arnold Shaw maintains “All Coons Look Alike to Me” is “one of the justly famous examples of true ragtime” and may be the first example of rock ’n’ roll.14 Before the days of records and radios, when the success of songs was measured by sales of sheet music, the song would sell more than one million copies, and its composer, Ernest Hogan, made $26,000 from it (almost $670,000 today). Hogan regretted writing it for the rest of his life because of the shame it would bring to his race.15 By 1907 the song remained popular, but only with whites. Blacks hated it, and if they heard it whistled by a white man, they considered it a personal insult.
As the evening played out, Roosevelt and Foraker would engage in their own prize fight, at one point with fists punching the air.
IN ADDITION TO ITS prohibition against scalding its political prey, in 1906 the Gridiron Club had two other rules for these all-male dinners: ladies are always present (a reminder to the gentlemen to mind their language), but reporters never are (nothing seen or heard was on the record or to be reported). This time, as Julia Foraker put it, “the news was too good to keep.”16
After the journalists’ parodies and jokes it was not yet time for the speeches. After skits too pointed and cartoons too biting, President Roosevelt was at a boiling point surpassed only by the turtle soup, whose bowls had just been removed.17 Unable to contain himself, Roosevelt told the club's president, Samuel G. Blythe, he wanted to speak right away.18 The “raw encounter” was about to start.19
Roosevelt turned first to Morgan and Rogers. Raising his fist, he angrily told them to their faces they would have to learn to live with his administration's reform of corporate America, like it or not. He was the only thing preventing a takeover of Wall Street “by the mob.”20 This was not the usual levity and silliness masking true feelings. “The President was serious.”21
Roosevelt turned to face straight ahead at Foraker. When he again spoke, he was “extremely strenuous in a vocal and gesticulatory way.”22 Just who did the senators think they were, presuming to question a decision of the army's commander in chief, he asked Foraker. It was none of their business, because “all” power in the matter was constitutionally his and only his. He could discharge the soldiers if he wis
hed, and no one could review his actions. The Senate could discuss it all it wanted to, but “it served no good purpose, could have no result, was purely ‘academic,’” and suggested Foraker's motives were political.23 He went on like this for almost half an hour before taking his seat. The Gridiron Club had never heard anything like it.
Club president Blythe wondered what to do now. Another Gridiron Club rule was, “[The President's] Criticisms of all Matters, Public and Private, must be Respected.24 By custom and protocol, therefore, no one spoke after he did. Should Blythe order the waiters to bring in the rest of the meal? Or, newspaperman that he was, get a good story? He chose the good story. “The hour for bloody sarcasm has arrived. I take the liberty of calling upon Senator Foraker for some remarks.”25
Foraker rose, “stark white in the face.”26 He acknowledged his speaking after President Roosevelt was a breach of protocol, and he was embarrassed to be asked to do so, but since the attack was so clearly on him, he had no choice but to respond. He spoke without notes but as if he had an advance copy of Roosevelt's remarks. He addressed what Roosevelt said almost in the same order Roosevelt had expressed it but in a manner the Washington Post would characterize as “more serious.”27 Who was President Roosevelt to question the Senate's right to discuss his actions in the Brownsville matter? Such a discussion was not merely academic; it had significance. As a member of the Senate, he would ignore any direction to stay quiet and would continue to express his opinion on the Senate's floor. A few moments earlier, Roosevelt had said, “Well, all coons do not look alike to me.” Now Foraker one-upped him by responding, “Not only all coons, but all persons look alike to me,” substituting the word used in the Constitution.28 No longer hesitant to confront Roosevelt publicly, Foraker continued to give “the President the plainest talk he has probably ever listened to.”29 “I did not come to the Senate to take orders from anybody, either at this end of the line or the other.” Using an expression common then but out of place for a man committed to equality, he added as a way to justify his independence from Roosevelt, “I am free born, white, over 30 years of age.”30 He brought up Sergeant Mingo Sanders. “In dismissing him [President] Roosevelt had violated a very plain law of Congress and thereby made himself amenable to the processes of law, besides laying himself open to a well-founded charge of having done the greatest injustice to a man who, it might be supposed, would have no powerful friends to assist him.”31
“Champ Clark was seating some fifteen feet from Roosevelt and declares that while Foraker was speaking the President was gritting his teeth, clenching his fist, shaking his head and muttering ‘That is not so; I am going to answer that; that is not true; I will not stand for it.’ He was on his feet two or three times…and Justice Harlan with help from Blythe pulled him down.”32 Foraker took a different tack. “You know, Mr. President, I love you so.”33 And then, his face red as the stripes on the flag, he sat down to hubbub, cheering, and congratulations, with diners “rising from their places to get over to him.”34
The show was too good to end there, and President Roosevelt certainly did not want it to. No longer restrained by Blythe and Justice Harlan, he jumped to his feet, but in the wild tumult for Senator Foraker, he had trouble getting the audience's attention. Blythe was equally frustrated trying to gavel the event back to order. Finally allowed to speak, Roosevelt called the Brownsville soldiers “bloody butchers…the only reason I didn't have them hung was because I couldn't find out which ones did the shooting.”35
Nothing could top this, and Blythe, knowing everyone was eager to “catch their breath and gossip,” called for the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” the signal that the evening was over.36
CHAMP CLARK SAID THE evening was a draw.37 History gives the edge to Foraker, and so did many at the time. Cincinnati lawyer John Galvin believed “the whole country agrees that the President came out of that little mix-up second best.”38 Foraker scored points with calmness in the face of Roosevelt's provocation, command of the facts, and quick thinking. There was encouragement for the underdog senator taking on an aggressive president and sympathy for the battle Foraker undertook for the Black Battalion. Senator Albert Beveridge sent him a note, “I am against you, but I never so admired you as this instant. You are game, and you are masterful. You were altogether thoroughbred tonight.”39
To Washington insiders Roosevelt seemed the clear winner, in spite of his bruising and pugnacious belligerence. Those in the president's official family were the most supportive. His new secretary of commerce and labor Oscar S. Straus was almost delusional in how recalled it. “[The President] referred incidentally, and in a somewhat humorous way to the Brownsville incident…. When President Roosevelt finished the President of the Gridiron Club called upon Senator Foraker. After a few pleasant preliminary remarks his face seemed to light up with a vindictive cast and he made an anti-President speech that I think jarred upon the sensibilities of everyone present. The President seemed to be very much agitated. Mr. Foraker's speech, while caustic and emphatic, certainly was out of place in the surroundings. At the end he moderated his language a little. The President stood up and replied, but he evidently did not make the reply that his face indicated he would like to make. He doubtless thought this was not the place to continue what developed into rather an unpleasant controversy.”40
Even many of those who may have admired Foraker's moxie felt he had gone too far. Typical was a note from Senator Beveridge (who had written the complimentary note to Foraker) the next morning to Roosevelt, “I went down after the dinner, to spend an hour with the boys…. They said that Foraker was in damned bad taste.” In a postscript, Beveridge added, “Still now, Foraker was ‘nervy’ wasn't he? How I love a fighter.”41 By then Roosevelt had cooled down, and he wrote back, “Foraker ought not to have been called upon to speak; but as he was called upon, I do not blame him much for the speech he did make.” Having shifted the fault to Blythe and empathizing a bit with Foraker, he innocently suggested he intended nothing more than to “merely make a flat contradiction about what [Foraker said], point out the fact that I and not he would pass judgment upon the case, and that I should absolutely disregard anything except my own convictions, and let it go at that.” A day later, while strolling with Gifford Pinchot and James Garfield along the Potomac River, Roosevelt told them the whole thing began when Foraker attacked him.42 But he conceded what he said was perhaps a mite unrestrained: “I was in two minds what to say in answer; I was inclined to make a Berserker speech myself.”43 For Champ Clark it was berserk enough. “Of all the fantastic capers that President Roosevelt ever cut before high heaven, the most astounding and bizarre was his performance at the Gridiron Club in January, 1907.”44
FORAKER REALIZED THE EVENT was historic, and at the “insistence of your mother,” wrote an account of the dinner to his son Benson in Cincinnati. After an almost painfully detailed description of what “he said—I said—he said back” and the compliments those present paid to him, he wanted his son (and presumably posterity) “to know from me that I was not responsible for it…. I did not use a disrespectful word, or say anything to be regretted…. I am glad to believe that the overwhelming sentiment here is favorable to me.”45
Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was the same outside Washington too. But if so, was it because Roosevelt's ill-mannered and almost hysterical behavior cost him points? From the moment the discharges were made public, Roosevelt had argued loudly, carelessly, and personally. He jeered his opponents and responded to their concerns with bombast and threats. His behavior was frightening. Six years later, the defeated and lame-duck President Taft chatted with New York World reporter Louis Seibold as they rode together on a special train to the funeral of Vice President James Sherman. Seibold asked him, “Beyond the personal ambition of Mr. Roosevelt, what do you think chiefly actuated him [to make the unsuccessful run for president in 1912, when] there was really no demand for him?” Taft hesitated to answer, but then said,
Mr. Roosevelt is so const
ituted that it is impossible for him to go into controversy without becoming personal. What I mean is this: Mr. Roosevelt is not a logician, and he never argues. His power of concentrated statement is that of a genius. His power of making a statement in such phrases as to give them currency is equal to that of any man I know. He never makes a sustained argument that appeals to you. He is not looking for an argument. Each blow he strikes is a hard one, because it calls attention to some defect in his enemy's armor, or some great claim to right on his part, but he does not establish a conclusion by one step and then another and another. He has not either patience or power to do that. He once said to me, “When I fight I like to get close up to a man.” Well, by that he meant—he could not mean otherwise—that he fought not only the man's argument but the man himself. He could not ascribe to the man, differing from his radically, any other than an improper motive. He could not differ from a man in memory without imputing something more than a mistake of memory to him.46
Roosevelt's striking out against Foraker at the Gridiron dinner had little to do with defending his order to discharge the soldiers. When Foraker conceded Roosevelt's authority in the matter as part of a deal to get an investigation, Roosevelt knew the fight was won and the order could not be set aside. His public tongue-lashing that night was an act of anger and vindictiveness against Foraker. This was a shot across Foraker's bow to tell him to watch out, I'm coming after you. His anger at Foraker was as great—and as personal—as it was against the Black Battalion Foraker defended, and the consequences he wanted for him were the same: dismissal from the army for the soldiers and from public life for Foraker.
Foraker's reelection to the Senate in 1908 by the Ohio legislature was now in trouble.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 30