Foraker's influence in Washington had evaporated and everyone knew it. “The conclusion cannot be escaped that Senator Foraker is not to be consulted as is the custom when the President prepares to distribute patronage.”52 After the Adams rejection, Foraker “never again made a recommendation to [Roosevelt] of anybody for anything.” He knew it was a waste of time.53
ANOTHER MAN WAS WHISPERING into President Roosevelt's ear about Foraker and federal appointments. Foraker biographer Everett Walters suggests Congressman Theodore Burton, the man Foraker blew away at the state convention in Dayton the previous September, helped put the stakes through Judge Adams's and Foraker's hearts at a meeting on March 5, where he told Roosevelt that Foraker had recommended Adams as a reward for helping him outwit Burton.54 Roosevelt was determined to help Burton win Foraker's Senate seat. That same day, Roosevelt made Burton chairman of the Inland Waterways Commission, which planned the use of rivers to move goods throughout the country while preserving them as natural resources.55 This put Burton on the national stage and permitted him to say he did something important for Ohio. The Republican insurgents beaten by Foraker in Dayton were newly emboldened to cripple Foraker's chances in the Ohio Senate, which would select the next US senator in January 1909. It was not good news for Foraker.
IN THE SPRING OF 1907 Foraker was besieged. The Brownsville hearings were a full-time preoccupation. His Senate seat was under threat. He received worsening news from his niece Ethel Marie. “My dear Uncle Ben, I believe [Papa] has begun to realize that he can not live but a little while longer. The disease has eaten through his cheek to the right of his nose. He found it out Sunday for the first time. Of course it came as a shock to him. Try to see him as soon as it is convenient for you. Doctor Martin…gave him two months to live.”56 Jim bested the doctor's prediction by two weeks. When he died in April, his brother the senator had been unable to leave the committee hearings to see him.57
And now the presidential election forced itself on Foraker.
“He has done you dirt in the soldier business and the Ohio business, as he should not have dragged you into it.”
T. Thomas Fortune in a letter to Booker
T. Washington, February 12, 1907
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON HAD to rethink and regroup. Like Foraker, by the spring of 1907 he was under siege from different sides. President Roosevelt worked to cast Foraker out of public life, but to Washington he was merely indifferent. For a man called “the Wizard” because of his influence with powerful white men, this was just as cruel. The thanks for his support of Roosevelt in the Brownsville Incident was a resurgent effort by other black leaders to displace him, and little help came from the man he called “our friend” to deal with it. Unmoored from his patron in the White House, Washington was a man at sea.
He tried to show his worth to the administration, the Republicans, and the likely candidate in 1908, William Taft. When Charles Anderson, New York collector of customs, learned about a meeting in New York to protest Taft's nomination, Washington told Anderson to let Roosevelt know about it.1 One of Anderson's accusations—that a Department of the Interior employee named L. M. Hershaw was the “head devil” inspiring newspaper attacks against Roosevelt—was false. But Roosevelt sent Anderson to Secretary James Garfield to do something about it. The pettiness, insignificance, and falseness of this “intelligence” so quickly and hopefully passed on to Roosevelt tell something of Washington's discouragement and despair. To get to Taft, he went through his Ohio campaign manager Arthur Vorys. He wrote there was “danger…to the Negro race in this Brownsville agitation and I am doing some quiet and effective work with colored newspapers in changing that tendency.”2
He turned to blacks, including George Myers in Cleveland. Myers was already disenchanted with Washington and ready to help lead the former faithful out of the land of Tuskegee. In June 1907 Washington asked him to attend the upcoming meeting of his National Negro Business League. “The story of the success you have won, as a business man, as told by you, would inspire and help many other young men, who need some such stimulus as your story would give them.”3 Washington got nowhere with him. After Brownsville, Myers saw Washington as separated from the future of the Negro civil rights movement just as Roosevelt saw Foraker split from the Republican Party. Myers would stay a Republican, but not a Roosevelt man. For supporting the black soldiers, Foraker was entitled to the support of the black people and certainly had earned Myers's. Ralph Tyler, sitting comfortably at his desk, auditing the navy courtesy of Roosevelt, tried to make him see that it was still Roosevelt's party and black Republicans would recognize this and stay with him. As Washington was doing. “Fact is, George, you can't keep the colored man off the bandwagon. He sees it coming, the music grows louder.”4
Myers understood that Brownsville could shift the balance in black factionalism from Washington to Du Bois. Would it provoke a factionalism for blacks within the Republican Party? Tyler thought not and for the moment was staying with Roosevelt. Myers saw things differently. Politics might mean going with the winner, but no longer with this winner. He was not with Roosevelt. Brownsville had done this to him.
It was becoming clear to Washington that the music from Tyler's oncoming bandwagon was disturbingly off-key and disorienting. A letter from Winfield Forrest Cozart of Manitou, Colorado, outlining the dilemma facing him, the Republican Party, and black Americans after Brownsville might have given him the compass points to find his sense of direction. Cozart was speaking for himself but made it clear his feelings represented where the race as a whole stood. He still admired Washington because his “great industrial movement…is beneficial to…both races,” and he did not believe the criticisms and the “false light” shone on him by Negro newspapers (Cozart specifically mentioned Trotter's Guardian). He also believed “the President meant well [with the discharges] and we are still devoted to him, and do not question his honesty, and sincerity…because we have faith enough in him to believe that when he is thoroughly convinced of his mistake he will rectify” it. But “I have met only one Colored man who says the dismissal of the soldiers was right…. The race stands almost as a unit, in condemnation of their discharge without trial…nothing short of restoration will settle the matter.” Meanwhile only party loyalty has kept him and “millions of others…silent [about] the effort of Senator Foraker.” “If the administration and the [Republican] party wish to retain the support of the Colored Vote in the next National election, the time for action has come.” If Washington too wished “to retain the support” of blacks, his time was at hand.5
Winfield Cozart was a western George Myers: smart, successful, solidly Republican, in touch with the street, and sounding a warning. But where Myers was barely deferential to Washington, Cozart still saw him as the Principal of Tuskegee and treated him with respect. But how the race saw Washington mirrored how they saw Roosevelt.6 Whither will it drive the race?
SINCE 1905, WHEN HE feared it would interfere with his efforts to end the Russo-Japanese War, President Roosevelt was bedeviled by ongoing problems from the treatment of Japanese in the American West, particularly in California.7 A good deal of this was based on race, but there was more to it than that. American workers did not want cheap Japanese labor competing for jobs, but California businesses wanted access to Japan for their goods and services. San Franciscans did not want Japanese children in their schools, and California's governor and legislature did not want the federal government meddling with their schools, but Japan did not want its citizens unjustly treated by Americans and its self-image as a world power tarnished. Theodore Roosevelt wanted California and San Franciscans to calm down and not pass discriminatory legislation that would make matters worse and, most important, not interfere with his ability to soften Japan's aggressive tendencies.
In its war with Russia, Japan surprisingly and overwhelmingly defeated the hapless Russian military and its hopeless czar, but it required Theodore Roosevelt to help it negotiate the peace. He earned the Nobel Peace
Prize for it. The victory gave the Japanese people a new sense of their potential, the taste of being a powerful nation, and feelings of envy, jealousy, and resentment of the West, including America, its former friend and teacher, now seen as a rival. According to historian Thomas A. Bailey, when the war ended, so did the golden age in Japanese-American relations.8 There was a swagger to the Japanese leaders, especially its military, that did not go unnoticed by Roosevelt. Roosevelt the martinet admired these virtues; Roosevelt the president worried about them. In a letter to British General Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, an observer with the Japanese army in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt congratulated him for his book on the war, and noted, “Nothing in your book imprest me more than…that little play given by the Japanese soldiers.” In it, a Japanese soldier murders his wife and children, lest concern for them back home hamper the enthusiastic and ruthless performance of his military duties in the war. Roosevelt thought the play “gruesome” but quickly added, “[It] gives one a thoro realization of what it is that makes them such formidable fighters.” He speculated that these martial qualities could be enhanced only by “the extraordinary increase of industrialism” in Japan.9 Roosevelt elevated Japan to a position of importance and respect accorded no other Asian nation and remained “profoundly friendly toward them.”10 Avoiding antagonisms, confrontation, even war itself became part of his and America's new foreign policy. Roosevelt saw America as a brake on Japanese hostility in Asia, as when he negotiated the treaty ending its war with Russia. California's bellicose and insulting actions made it harder for him and America to influence Japan to more peaceful behavior and to eliminate its aggression in Asia and elsewhere.11 Roosevelt knew Japan and America would bump into each other in the Pacific Basin as each country extended its influence there, and he wanted Japan's reaction to be, “Excuse me,” not “Get out of my way!” If he and the country did not handle Japan correctly, war between the two countries was not out of the question.
EVEN WHILE THE RUSSO-JAPANESE war was still going on, President Roosevelt got wind of what would be called “insolent” behavior by Japanese in Hawaii. In February 1905 he instructed his secretary of war to see “if a regiment or two of troops” might be needed there.12 Back on the mainland, Californians felt there were too many Japanese slipping into their state, joining the already too many Chinese. They wanted something done about it and did not “give a rap” about the relations between the two countries.
Aware that the influx of Japanese to the West Coast was a problem, the Japanese government itself started to alleviate it. In August 1900 it stopped issuing passports to laborers for the mainland United States but continued issuing them for Hawaii. This cut the number of Japanese entering California directly but solved little.13 Hawaii was American soil, and many Japanese workers who arrived there legally proceeded on to the mainland.14 Foreshadowing later efforts in 1920 to limit worldwide immigration of people from elsewhere than northern Europe, bills were introduced in Congress to exclude specifically the Japanese. If such a law had been enacted, Roosevelt probably would have vetoed it. In his December 1904 annual message to Congress, Roosevelt made clear he had no sympathy for a discriminatory immigration policy, although he made no specific reference to the Japanese.15
But Californians had reached their limit. If they could not keep the Japanese out, they would be treated as Californians thought they deserved once they got in. On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education set up a separate school just for Japanese students in the city's public schools.16 Japan threatened a diplomatic crisis over it. President Roosevelt sent newly appointed Commerce and Labor Secretary Victor Metcalf, a native Californian, to San Francisco to persuade the school board to change its decision, but he was unable to. The problem was at an impasse: until the school order was rescinded, the Japanese refused to deal with the immigration problem; California officials would not reverse the school segregation plan until Japanese immigration was curtailed.
Stirring the pot, the California legislature started to work on discriminatory legislation, going beyond attendance at public schools and with statewide implications. On February 28, to increasing resentment in Japan, it passed a bill restricting Japanese ownership of land.17 A week later it mimicked the San Francisco school plan and forbade Japanese children older than ten years from attending classes with whites. Roosevelt could understand why Californians and westerners might object to foreigners flooding in and believed it was not different from his own inclination to put reasonable limits on their entry. But once in, Roosevelt could not abide a denial of American rights, even citizenship. “We cannot afford to regard any immigrant as a laborer; we must regard him as a citizen.”18 Two years earlier he had written to Lodge, “The California Legislature and various other bodies have acted in the worst possible taste and in the most offensive manner to Japan…. How people can act in this way…I cannot understand. I do all I can to counteract the effects, but I cannot accomplish everything.”19 Since then the situation had gotten worse.
MEANWHILE, ROOSEVELT RECEIVED A confidential message from Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany that Japanese soldiers ready for war were in Mexico disguised as farm workers.20 Roosevelt became more alarmed and came to believe war was possible between the two countries. To avoid it, he came close to declaring war on California.21
A FEW DAYS AFTER the Military Affairs Committee began its hearings, Senator Foraker received a letter from a man named George V. S. Michaelis. Other than displaying the name “Michaelis & Ellsworth” on its letterhead and indicating the firm had offices in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, there was not a clue who the man was or what he did. He reminded Foraker that they had met before, “in company with the late Joseph Manley of Maine, whose daughter I married.” Joseph Manley was someone Foraker surely knew. Manley was a Republican national committeeman and a close friend and political associate of James G. Blaine of Maine, whose decision not to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1888 led to the middle-of-the-night offer of support to Foraker.22 Manley was a delegate to that convention and almost certainly was one of the Blaine people there. If he was not, he knew of the offer to Foraker and agreed to it. He may even have been the one who asked Blaine, vacationing in Scotland, for permission to make the offer.
George Michaelis was one of the founders of the business of public relations or political consulting or both. He and two other men formed the Publicity Bureau in Boston in 1900 as the nation's first press agency. Its first client was Harvard University, but when its president Charles William Eliot decided its monthly retainer of two hundred dollars was an unnecessary expense and the prestige of having Harvard as a client was pay enough, the Publicity Bureau agreed to work for that. It soon added Harvard's neighbor in Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as a client, along with the American Telephone Company.23 Another client was a consortium of railroads hoping to defeat the Hepburn Bill. When the Hepburn Bill was passed, Michaelis & Ellsworth lost the client.24
Michaelis told Foraker his brother Francis Woodbridge, a lawyer with the prominent New York firm of Lord, O'Day & Lord, would like to come to Washington to discuss “a matter concerning the 25th U. S. Infantry.”25 Michaelis was ready to finance a lawsuit, “a test case,” that would “lead to a judicial review” of the discharges. Two months earlier President Roosevelt dared the Senate to do anything about the discharges. He thundered he would veto any bill seeking to reinstate the soldiers, and if Congress passed it over his veto, he would pay no attention to it.26 But he said nothing about a court order. Disregarding Congress was one thing; staring down a federal judge was something else entirely. Sixty-seven years later, when US District Court Judge John Sirica ordered President Richard M. Nixon to turn over White House tapes of conversations, Nixon had to do it. A generation after, when President William Jefferson Clinton lied under oath in front of US District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright to hide his sexual misadventures with Paula Jones, Judge Wright found him in contempt of court and
he had to pay a fine. When US District Court Judge Norma Holloway Johnson ruled Clinton could not invoke executive privilege to keep his relationship with Monica Lewinsky under wraps, he had to disclose everything.27 This latter Clinton case was more relevant to Roosevelt's defense. Clinton was claiming a right under the Constitution, as Roosevelt would have.28
Foraker immediately recognized the value of this collateral attack and the second front it would open. On Michaelis's letter he drafted his reply: “Your letter rec'd and will be very glad to see Mr. Woodbridge whenever he may call. J.B.F.”29
HEEDLESS OF WHAT HE was hearing from men like Fortune, Myers, and Cozart, the Wizard kept with his old playbook and wooed wealthy and influential whites. Was Andrew Carnegie preparing a lecture to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh on the progress of the American Negro? Washington would be pleased to help. (He assigned the task to Emmett Scott.)30
An approach to Oswald Garrison Villard, the respected and influential publisher of the New York Evening Post, was a disappointment. He had stood with Washington against Du Bois two years earlier, when W. E. B. Du Bois told him that Washington bribed black newspapers for his favorable coverage. Upset by the news, Villard nevertheless stood by Washington because of the great contributions he had made.31 Now when Washington told him Secretary Taft turned away his suggestion that a black artillery regiment be created “when the Brownsville affair suddenly took a political turn,” Villard responded, “Pray when did the Brownsville Affair take a fresh political turn? Was it not political from the start?” and added that Taft's action “confirms my own unfavorable impression of the man as a candidate.”32 The publisher saw Washington as a political naif for misunderstanding Brownsville, an increasingly ignored voice in the Roosevelt administration, and knew more was coming with Taft in the White House. If Villard was not supporting Taft, it would be something else they would differ over.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 34