Ray Stannard Baker was a white journalist who was both progressive and something of a simpleton on the question of race. In his biography of Du Bois, David Levering Lewis repeated the assessment of someone else that Baker was “a young person whose mother didn't know he was out.”33 But he was influential and spoke often with Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. And he would be one of the few notables over whom Washington still held sway. While working on his Following the Color Line articles, Baker had sought his ideas and Washington was only too pleased to give them.34 He politely corrected a statement Baker planned to write about Negroes being driven out of communities (Washington told him it happened in “very few communities in the South”) and suggested he not ignore the problems of “the Convict System, the Public School System and Voting.” It seemed to pay off. Washington happily wrote to Emmett Scott from New York, “It is a fine article, clear and clean-cut, and I am satisfied with his treatment of the subject…. When Du Bois, Trotter and his crowd read what Baker has written I think they will squirm.”35
But if he was going to struggle with Du Bois, Washington needed the black newspapers on his side, and he renewed his efforts to use them to influence their readers. He wrote an editorial for the New York Age, poking fun at Du Bois's Niagara Movement, and had its new editor Fred Moore, for whom he had facilitated the newspaper's purchase, publish it.36 Washington thought about investing in Max Barber's The Voice in Chicago when T. Thomas Fortune got involved with it after selling the New York Age to Moore. But Washington worried that the now-distant Fortune would reveal the truth about him and his manipulations, and he preemptively countered with a campaign of disinformation and denial. Most troubling was his portrayal of Fortune as mentally disturbed.37 He was, as the playbook called for, continuing to use the Tuskegee Machine to gain information about those in the civil rights movement and pass it on the others.
Charles Anderson wrote to Emmett Scott with information about a Du Bois meeting in New York and rumors of Judge Robert H. Terrell's misdeeds.38 Anderson also was on the receiving end of instructions. (Where did the busy Mr. Anderson find the time to collect custom duties for the federal government?) “[Constitution League secretary A. B.] Humphrey to have meeting tonight his headquarters. Think important you have friend on inside. B. T. W.”39 The “friend” was Roscoe Conkling Simmons, who reported directly back to “Uncle Booker” to tell him the Constitution League was planning a “huge demonstration” to arouse the country over Brownsville. In a postscript Simmons added, “If you want me to prevent Senator F.'s coming to this [Constitution League] meeting, let me know.”40 Simmons was a longstanding tripwire in the Washington–Du Bois clashes. As early as 1904 he was fanning Washington's suspicions and antagonism with news about an upcoming article in the Colored American critical of Washington and supportive of Du Bois and inflating his importance to the black race.41
Little was gained by Washington from all of this. Journalist T. Thomas Fortune sloughed off pressure from his former friend and former creditor. “I have lost faith in Roosevelt…. His action in the soldier business and appointment by threat in Ohio is bad policy, not based in sincerity. He has done you dirt…[and] should not have dragged you into it.”42
The matter of any progress for Negro advancement seemed to have been put aside.
DU BOIS SAILED THROUGH Washington's dirty little war. After The Souls of Black Folk, Washington's weak response to the Atlanta riots, and his support for Roosevelt in Brownsville, there was no chance of any rapprochement. Du Bois biographer Lewis characterized the “civil estrangement” between them as “civil war within the race.”43 Du Bois preached that Negroes no longer could live in a nightmare while putting their trust in Washington's plea for patience until a better future that was coming, God only knew when. “Brownsville tore the veil of trust to shreds.”44
In 1905 Du Bois called together like-minded Negroes to form the Niagara Movement as a “militant alternative” to Washington.45 At its meeting on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls (they were unable to find accommodations in Buffalo), they proclaimed their Declaration of Principles. These included the refusal to remain “submissive under oppression” and the declaration that “persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.”46 Washington said he shrugged off this new organization. But he made sure to infiltrate it with his moles.47
Its 1906 meeting was held only two days after the Brownsville shooting, too soon to say or do anything about it. Booker T. Washington was another matter, and Reverdy Ransom, whose plan for achieving racial equality was an odd mixture of socialism and Christianity, blasted Washington's ideas (but not Washington himself by name) in his address “The Spirit of John Brown.” To the delegates assembled on a hilltop at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, Ransom said, “The spirit of John Brown beckons us to arise and seek the recovery of our rights.” There was no going back to passivity. “Today, two classes of Negroes, confronted by a united opposition, are standing at the parting of the ways.” “The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations…. The other class believes that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place.” Max Barber said this was “the most eloquent address this writer has ever listened to.”48
At the Niagara Movement's annual meeting in 1907, Du Bois was ready to use Brownsville to spear Washington and Roosevelt. While the Senate committee's hearings were underway and in the news, he had prepared the ground with two pieces in the May issue of his recently inaugurated magazine The Horizon.49 One criticized Washington for his shabby treatment of T. Thomas Fortune and used this portrait of Washington as “Arch Tempter” to trash him and, by inference, his ideas. Of Roosevelt, he wrote that Negroes, notwithstanding Brownsville, had little to thank Roosevelt for. “If the truth must be told, Theodore Roosevelt does not like black folk.”50
The Wizard had his spy James A. Cobb, a Washington lawyer, registered at the August meeting in Boston. Cobb reported on the day he arrived, “There seems to be no Esprit de Corps…there is no definite program as yet. The leaders seem to be disgruntled among themselves.” When the meeting ended, he wrote Emmett Scott, “The N. M. [meeting] seemed to have been beset with misgivings and discord…. I think the Movement has about met its ‘watermellon-lou.’”51 Cobb must have missed the session where Foraker was toasted as “the man of the hour for his condemnation of the evidence upon which the soldiers were dismissed from military service.”52 Or where Du Bois told “‘500,000 free black voters of the North’ to vote against Taft's nomination or that of any other ‘Brownsville Republican’ who had supported Roosevelt's dismissal of the soldiers.” If one of them got the nomination, “I shall vote for Bryan.”53 Du Bois was taking on the Republicans as well as Booker T. Washington, and riding Brownsville he was preparing to upend both.
“There is probably not a doctor in the State who is not working overtime and after hours to beat Foraker, and the influence of a doctor, particularly a country doctor, is not to be despised.”
“Sad Awakening Awaits Foraker,”
New York Times, April 7, 1907
IT IS GOSPEL TRUTH with Brownsville historians and commentators that Joseph Foraker defended the black soldiers because he thought it would help win the Republican presidential nomination. It would change his Old Guard image while attracting blacks and whites outraged over the discharges.1 But accepted belief is not always historically correct, and this Foraker dogma may be particularly questionable. There are reasons to believe that very early in his Brownsville involvement he did not want to be in the White House, did not think he could get it, and was worried more about keeping his Senate seat in 1908.
Political insider Julius Chambers, whose column in the Brooklyn Eagle was thought to be influential, tried to get him into the presidential race just before the Brownsville shooting. In a May 1906 letter, he wrote Foraker that he and those he influenced would support him. “We have closed up all our other business affairs and are to concentrate our efforts on the ne
w task…. Action is highly essential because other people are at work very actively.”2 Without any encouragement from Foraker, Chambers talked him up in his newspaper column. “Foraker was somebody in Ohio before Bill Taft was more than a ‘cub’ reporter for the Cincinnati Star.”3 He told Foraker, “I believe matters are looking more favorable every day.”4 Foraker threw cold water on Chambers and his hopes. He wrote to Charles Kurtz, his secretary and confidant since his time as Ohio governor (he was in Foraker's hotel room in 1888 when Blaine supporters offered him their support), and who was Chambers's accomplice in the plotting, “The more I think of the matter the less I think of it, or rather the more I think it unwise and futile to undertake to do anything about it…it would be, I think, a mistake.”5 Two months later, as Foraker was thinking about Burton and the insurgents at the upcoming state Republican convention in Dayton, he told Kurtz, “Work such as you are doing is good at the right time, but just now it will hurt rather than help. I hope, therefore, that you will restrain.”6 Realizing this message was weaker than he intended, two days later he wrote directly to Chambers, “I do not want to be a candidate, and unless something wholly unforeseen should transpire to change the situation, I will not be.”7
At the September 1906 convention in Dayton, Foraker thought he derailed Burton's hopes for the Senate. And he may have deliberately done the same for his chance at the White House. He told his people not to offer a resolution supporting him for president in 1908 even though “a blind man could see that it would have been adopted.”8 A serious candidate would never suppress such a show of strength. His stated reason in his memoirs—because the delegates had not been elected for that purpose—is simply not believable. More likely, as he wrote Chambers, “The results of the Dayton convention are entirely satisfactory in every way…. I do not want to be a candidate for 1908, and for that reason I would not allow the convention at Dayton to endorse me.”9 When Chambers warned the Taft Express was making steam, he replied, “I am not alarmed about Mr. Taft or anybody else. I simply don't want to be put in the attitude of a candidate and be for two years subjected to the annoyances and harassments that would arise in consequence.” But he unlocked the door a mite. “Another year might clear matters up, but that is only speculation, and I am not willing to commit myself…to a proposition that in all probability would bring only disappointment” (author's emphasis).10 When Chambers persisted in pestering, he made it very clear to stop bothering him. “I will not have anything to do with the subject,” he wired on January 4, 1907. Chambers tried sympathy and guilt as bait: “[Another supporter] and I are both grieved and disappointed.”11 Foraker would not bite, and in what Foraker biographer Everett Walters correctly called a “rather sharp note,” Foraker said, “I meant what I said when I told you that I would a great deal rather have you support Senator Knox or Vice President Fairbanks…kindly let the whole matter drop.”12 To John J. McCook, a New York lawyer and one of the army of ex-Ohioans now prominent in business and politics, and Foraker's fellow summer resident at Sea Bright, Foraker wrote the same day, “I prefer to have nothing more to do with [Chambers].”13 Foraker's disdain for Chambers had become dislike. Two months later, the irrepressible Chambers was still at it. Foraker was forced to write him, “My feeling of aversion to become a candidate has not changed.”14
Foraker was fibbing. He now had a reason to be a candidate, but it was not because he wanted to be president.
In January 1907, while he was dealing with Senate nitpicking to deny him and the Black Battalion any meaningful investigation, his political plight must have been obvious to him. He had stymied Theodore Burton's maneuver at the September state convention in Dayton to take his Senate seat from him, but that had been an opening gambit, and with two years until the election, Burton had plenty of time to regroup and keep working against him.15 Then came Roosevelt's performance at the Gridiron dinner, and Ohio politicians quickly understood its meaning. Roosevelt wanted Foraker out of the Senate. As shown by his instructions to Kurtz and his letters to Chambers, Foraker concluded it would be a waste of time to run for president and it would crowd into the efforts for what were now more important, saving the Black Battalion and his seat in the Senate. But for the latter, he would be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, hoping Taft would accept his reelection to the Senate as a small price to pay for eliminating him as a rival for the White House. To make his feint believable, Foraker had to secure the support of the Ohio delegates to the national convention.
His first step came during the first week in January 1907 when he tried to throw a scare into the Taft forces by denying the constitutionality of the Ohio law requiring delegates to the 1908 Republican nominating convention to be elected by Republican voters at primary elections. This method gave Taft an edge because Foraker allies were more likely to be delegates if selection was made at county conventions. But the Taft people preemptively and quickly obtained an Ohio Supreme Court decision upholding the law Foraker objected to. “The Foraker ruse had failed.”16
For the time being, Foraker had to put 1908 politics aside to get the Senate to OK an investigation and then prepare for the hearings. But a letter in February from Roosevelt saying he would need a couple of days to think about Foraker's routine recommendation for a federal judgeship alerted him that Roosevelt had not been sleeping.17 Foraker turned his attention back to his reelection to the Senate and his scheme to scare Taft. On March 26, three days before he told Julius Chambers he had an “aversion” to becoming a candidate, he asked the Ohio Republican State Central Committee to meet and issue a call for the election of delegates “to determine the Ohio Republicans’ choice for president and senator” at the primary elections. Walters, accepting at face value that Foraker wanted to be president, calls this the “virtual announcement of Foraker's presidential candidacy.”18
Charles Taft, publisher and editorial writer for the Cincinnati Times-Star and brother of William H. Taft, saw this as a Foraker blunder that could get Foraker out of his brother's hair once and for all. In his newspaper he accepted Foraker's proposal and argued that whichever man lost “would be eliminated from the political situation.”19 If Charley Taft was reading the situation right, Foraker's “virtual announcement” had failed.
Cincinnati's “Boss” Charles Cox saw nothing good coming out of all of this. He was not a fan of Taft, especially since 1905, when Taft “openly and virulently assailed” him and his organization.20 But he recognized Taft's stronger position because of Roosevelt's support and the rumbles of discontent with Foraker echoing throughout Ohio. He would be happy not to see Cleveland's Theodore Burton in the Senate in place of his hometown's Joseph Foraker, whom he knew he could work with. At the beginning of April he proposed that Taft support Foraker for the Senate and Foraker agree to drop out of the presidential race and support Taft for the White House. Foraker raced to accept the “Cox Compromise.” This was not the action of a man history later decided wanted to be president and used the Brownsville soldiers to help him. But Taft turned it down. And not for the first time. “[Murray Crane] told me when I was in Washington that he has tried to bring Foraker and Taft together,” Henry Cabot Lodge wrote President Roosevelt, “and that Foraker was ready to support Taft for President if Taft would agree to leave Foraker alone for the Senate, but that Taft would have nothing to do with it.”21
On April 4, congressman and first son-in-law Nicholas Longworth announced he was for Taft, but added he was speaking only for himself.22 Cox knew better and quietly began to separate himself publicly from Foraker, who all along had thought him an ally.23 Charley Taft explained to his brother that Cox took his side because the “burden of Foraker” would break up his machine.24 Cox also saw Taft would most likely be the winner and Ohioans were losing patience with Foraker. Medical doctors were angry when he supported legislation creating an examining board for their competing medical practitioners, osteopaths (who treated illness by manipulating and massaging bones, joints, and muscles).25 Manufacturers in
the heavily industrialized state had not forgiven him for voting against the Hepburn Act to reduce shipping rates. Most damaging to Foraker, political leaders throughout the state believed what Cox would express later on: “I never remember having read in history, nor do I recollect of any person who is posted in history telling me an instance of where any United States Senator has yet beaten a President of this country.”26 Two days earlier Roosevelt had written his son Kermit, “I believe [Foraker's] teeth are pretty well drawn nationally, altho locally he may cause trouble.”27 In spite of this upbeat assessment, his “haunting fear” of defeat would not loosen its grip, and in a letter the next day to Lodge he warned, “Foraker is a strong and adroit man. Taft must get into the fight in Ohio, if he intends to be a candidate”28 (Roosevelt's emphasis). Taft got the message. A couple of weeks later, fellow Ohioan Jim Garfield took a few minutes from running the Interior Department to meet him early one morning “for full talks about the campaign. He is in for good no turning back and I am glad. We will win!”29
A few months later the State Central Committee met and lowered the boom on Foraker. It endorsed Taft for the presidency without endorsing Foraker for the Senate. Foraker found out a few days before the committee that Cox had again deserted him for Taft.30 In his memoirs nine years later, he was still angry, writing he was “double-crossed by occult methods.31 But not before one final attempt was made to bring about the “Cox Compromise” from April. Taft's Ohio campaign manager Arthur Vorys endorsed it to ensure no eleventh-hour surprise would stampede the State Central Committee away from Taft. Again Foraker agreed and Taft did not. “Rather than compromise with Foraker,” wrote Taft, “I would give up all hope of the Presidency.”32 Taft's “no talking to, no compromising with Foraker” was still in effect, which he confirmed in a letter from his summer home in Canada to William R. Nelson, owner of the Kansas City Star. “I hope you think that the action which was taken in Ohio by the state central committee was favorable. I distinctly declined to compromise with the Foraker forces, and I hope that the vote as taken shows there was no compromise in the result” (author's emphasis).33 Taft biographer Henry Pringle wrote of the committee vote, “The incident marked the virtual elimination of Foraker from public life.”34
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 35