Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  John Milholland understood and forgave him. On May 18 he wrote in his diary, “He was ill & Tired and felt alone.”47

  FOUR DAYS LATER ON December 14, 1908, President Roosevelt sent another special message about Brownsville to the Senate.48 He announced a new investigation had with “tolerable definiteness” (a further retreat from “beyond a reasonable doubt”) confirmed what he said all along and proved that “almost all the members of Company B must have been actively concerned in the shooting” and “practically every man” in the three companies knew it and covered for them.49 In making this boast Roosevelt said he was relying on an investigation by Herbert J. Browne (the man who showed up on Foraker's door in 1907), whom Roosevelt called a Washington journalist, and his colleague “Captain” William Baldwin. They said they had the goods on the soldiers. Actually, Senator Foraker had the goods on them.

  The previous April, Browne had sent a letter to Secretary Taft telling of his investigation a year earlier (but not that it had been for Foraker) and that it had convinced him soldiers from Company B had shot up the town. Taft, uncomfortable with the split decision by the Military Affairs Committee, aware that Foraker was planning his Black Battalion speech, and still not quite sure he had nailed down the Republican nomination, was about to be suckered as Foraker had been a year earlier. He recommended to Roosevelt that Browne and Baldwin, “a railroad detective” with “large experience and unusual ability” and recommended “by the presidents of several of the principal lines of railway in the South,” be hired to get the evidence that had so frustratingly eluded the army. With the advice from the army's judge advocate general that their fee of $5,000 could be paid from an “emergency fund to meet unforeseen contingencies…at the discretion of the President” (and kept from the Senate and the public), Roosevelt told Taft to go ahead.50 The agreement, signed only three days after Browne's letter to Taft, required the shooters’ names, the names of those in the “subsequent conspiracy of [silence],” and, most important, “affidavits of witnesses” to back everything up. Crucial for candidate Taft, the final report had to be in “not later than June 15, 1908,” the day before the Republican nominating convention convened in Chicago.51

  On April 20 the first quarterly installment of the fee was paid, and the newspaperman and railroad sleuth were on their way. Tantalizing hints that they were making progress encouraged Taft, but nothing of value turned up by June 15. Taft easily won the nomination without it. By saying he and Baldwin were unable to locate the former members of the regiment, Browne coaxed a second agreement (for a second $5,000) out of the army on September 1 (by then Taft had resigned as secretary of war), which required a report by October 10. Browne missed that deadline too, but on December 5, 1908, he at last submitted a report to General Davis, the army's judge advocate general, “relative to the investigation of the Brownsville Raid.”52 In the report, Browne asked for additional time, which he got (and a third $5,000 payment).53

  After Browne and Baldwin leveraged their ineptitude in finding soldiers and witnesses into a nine-month sinecure paying them a total of $15,000, they quickly located former Private Boyd Conyers of Company B in Monroe, Georgia, and along with their illiterate black employee named William Lawson they went down there to talk to him. They used everything from conversation to persuasion to threats to try to get him to sign a statement incriminating himself and the soldiers. Sure Conyers eventually would crack, Browne had written Taft back on July 10 saying that Conyers had confessed. Conyers never did and never would. Unknown to Browne, Baldwin, or anyone else in Washington, Conyers had written to Senator Foraker asking for his help.54 Meanwhile, Browne continued to mislead Roosevelt and the new secretary of war, and Conyers and Foraker continued to correspond with each other.55 The ex-soldier kept the senator up to date as he was pressured, and the experienced lawyer and senator kept a record of it all.56

  In November, Browne went back to Monroe and told Conyers he might be sent to Texas to be tried for the Frank Natus murder. At the end of the month a new Browne-Baldwin investigator, who turned out to be Browne's brother, told Conyers that the detectives had obtained sworn statements from others nailing him. Conyers did not know this was a lie and wrote Foraker with this latest news.57

  The agreement between Browne and the War Department required that he produce “affidavits of witnesses,” and still Browne had none. His solution to that annoying omission was to have his illiterate employee Lawson sign one. This sort of hearsay evidence from a third party never in Brownsville was hardly what the agreement contemplated, but it was all Browne had. On December 9 Lawson signed his affidavit (with his X) swearing Conyers had confessed to him “as a criminal boasting to one of his own race of his crime and of his success in escaping discovery.”58 Now Browne had a witness and a sworn statement. But it was a lie.

  IN JUNE THE REPUBLICANS nominated William Howard Taft. By then he had no effective competition for the prize he still was unsure he wanted. The only suspense at the convention was the hope by some and fear by others (especially Mrs. Taft) that Roosevelt would change his mind and snatch the nomination at the last minute, even though he had taken himself out of the race earlier in the year. On December 11, 1907, Roosevelt's secretary William Loeb, who by then had become more than a secretary, told him the only way put to rest all suspicions about his intention was to commit himself to someone else's candidacy. The next day Roosevelt wrote Taft he “decided to make one more public statement, quoting what I said the night after [the 1904] election, and adding that the decision was final and would not be changed.”59 But Mrs. William H. Taft for one never believed him.60 When the demonstration by delegates at the mention of Roosevelt's name was louder, more boisterous, and almost twice as long as it was for her husband's (forty-one minutes versus twenty-two), she held her breath. But these convention hijinks meant very little. Taft won with 702 delegate votes; only 258 were scattered among five others. As Edmund Morris wrote, “The color returned to Helen Taft's high cheekbones.”61

  Joseph Foraker received only sixteen votes (eleven of which were Negro delegates thinking of Brownsville), fewer than any of the other names offered to the convention.62 He immediately sent his good wishes to the victorious Taft. “Although I fear it may be unwelcome and probably misunderstood it is nevertheless my pleasure to avail myself of my privilege to send you heartiest congratulations and best wishes for success in November.” He made no offer to help in the campaign. The decent Taft responded from his heart that same day, “I assure you that your kindly note of congratulation gave me the greatest pleasure and I thank you for it from the bottom of my heart. I have never ceased to remember that I owe to you my first substantial start in public life, and that it came without solicitation.”63 But he asked for no help in the campaign.

  Foraker did little campaigning for Taft, and on one of the few times their paths crossed, Foraker was accused of deliberately turning it to his advantage by making it seem that the two men had reconciled and Taft was going to endorse him for the Senate. Taft's campaign denied this, and Taft himself immediately wrote to reassure Roosevelt that he “would take no part in the Ohio contest for Senator.”64 Taft knew whose support he really needed.

  Black Americans played almost no role in the election campaign. Roosevelt had helped insulate Taft from Brownsville when he took the responsibility for what happened to the soldiers.65 But it was not needed for Taft's victory in November and probably was more a gesture to clear the decks of Brownsville for Taft's presidency.66 All blacks understood the Democrats did not want them and there was no place for them other than the Republican Party.67 Booker T. Washington, aware that if Taft won without support from Negroes his race would be even deeper in the political wilderness, worked his diminished influence where he could.68 Ralph Tyler formed a bureau to feed positive news about Taft to the black press and keep it in the Taft camp.69 Remarkably, T. Thomas Fortune, who broke with the Tuskegee Machine over Brownsville, worked for the Republican National Committee during the campaign.70 W.
E. B. Du Bois and his confrontational allies spoke against Taft and supported William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats. At the 1908 meeting of his Niagara Movement in Oberlin, Ohio, it was proclaimed, “We say to voters: Register and vote whenever and wherever you have a right. Vote not in the past, but in the present. Remember that the conduct of the Republican party toward Negroes has been a disgraceful failure to keep just promises. The dominant Roosevelt faction has sinned in this respect beyond forgiveness. We therefore trust that every black voter will uphold men like Joseph Benson Foraker, and will leave no stone unturned to defeat William H. Taft. Remember Brownsville, and establish next November the principle of Negro independence in voting, not only for punishing enemies, but for rebuking false friends.”71

  This appeal went unheeded. “Experience has shown that the negro, even in States where he possesses the power to overturn a Republican majority, has always remained true to the party…. There is every reason why this should be the case [in 1908],” predicted Henry Litchfield West, political editor of the Washington Post.72 He was right. Taft won the black vote and the White House with 321 electoral votes to 162 for the Democrat Williams Jennings Bryan.

  “What a cleverly managed and malicious fraud the Brownsville business was.”

  Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to

  Theodore Roosevelt, September 21, 1908

  WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION over, Joseph Foraker had to get himself back in the Senate and get the innocent soldiers from the Black Battalion back in the army. The calendar dictated that the Senate would be decided first.

  The day after Foraker's virtual announcement in March 1907 that he would try for the presidential nomination in Chicago, Charles Taft wrote in his newspaper, the Cincinnati Times-Star, that whichever man failed to be nominated by the Republicans for the White House should be eliminated from politics. His brother never contradicted him, and pundits wondered if, now that he was the nominee, William Taft believed Foraker should be retired from the Senate.1 Other Republicans, considering how it would sound to be greeted as “Senator,” were thinking of getting in the race. Dr. Charles Reed, a physician who led the medical community's opposition to Foraker, was an old friend of Taft's and was jumping in. Arthur Vorys, who would become Taft's Ohio campaign manager, expressed an interest.2 Congressman Theodore Burton, hungering to move to the other end of the Capitol since the Dayton Republican convention in 1906, was rumored to be Taft's choice. But Taft held his tongue. Foraker, on his way to Maine for his vacation, did the same. Tranquility prevailed until August 7, when the Republicans, for the first time in a generation, did not arrange for Foraker to speak at the campaign's opening event in Youngstown. The local committee tried to calm the waters by ignoring the state committee and inviting Foraker on its own.3 Taft was forced to comment on the situation, and incautiously wondered aloud why someone who “only a short time ago, made a severe attack on the policies of President Roosevelt,” was invited to be part of the campaign.4 What had been a restrained and awkward pas de deux became a more forceful and intentional stepping on toes accompanied by the atonal suite conducted by the retiring Maestro Roosevelt. By September Foraker's and Taft's seconds thought they had written a duet for their principals that would end the bickering. On September 10 Vorys told Foraker “it was the special desire of Mr. Taft” that he preside and introduce him at a Republican club meeting at the Music Hall in Cincinnati. Foraker accepted.5

  FIVE DAYS EARLIER, PUBLISHING magnate and publicity magnet William Randolph Hearst found himself in Columbus where, according to Hearst biographer David Nasaw, he was tagging along with the campaign of “Honest Tom” Hisgen, a Massachusetts axle-grease manufacturer who was the presidential nominee of Hearst's Independence Party. Hisgen had no crowd appeal to speak of without Hearst and not much more with him. Finding himself unable to think of anything exciting to say, Hearst decided to draw attention to himself and, possibly only as an afterthought, to the hapless candidate Hisgen by reading portions of letters to Foraker from John D. Archbold, vice president and de facto chief operating officer of the Rockefeller-controlled Standard Oil Company.6 Hearst had acquired a sheaf of Archbold letters from a thief who stole them from Archbold's office four years earlier, and he had stashed them away for the right time to use them. The right time had come, and with no warning, Hearst decided to use them that night.

  There are differing accounts about which letters Hearst used that night and what they said. Nor is it clear if he read the letters or only referred to them. Much of this is because Hearst deliberately said things in a misleading way for the most toxic effect. The general understanding is that however he did it, he accused the Republican Party of being corrupted by big business trusts’ money. Perhaps because he was in Ohio's capital at the time, he used Ohio's senior senator Joseph Foraker as an example.7

  In his memoirs, Foraker wrote that Hearst “made it appear that I had some kind of improper relations with the Standard Oil Company, and he read a number of letters [written between 1900 and 1903] showing payments to me at different times of various sums of money.”8 Nasaw quotes from the next day's New York Daily Tribune describing the letters as “referring to legislation pending in Congress,” with one of them enclosing $15,000.9 The first letter mentioned by Hearst said, “In accordance with our understanding, I now beg to enclosure you certificate of deposit to your favor for $15,000. Kindly acknowledge receipt, and oblige.” The next letter Hearst spoke of referred to “another very objectionable bill [that] needs to be looked after, and I hope there will be no difficulty in killing it.”

  Foraker responded the next day and admitted he had been one of Standard Oil's lawyers in Ohio, that it had nothing to do with federal government, and it “was common knowledge at the time. I was pleased to have people know that I had such clients…. It had not then become discreditable to be employed by such corporations.”10 Foraker thought he had adequately responded to the vague charges against him and that would be the end of it. But his political feelers had atrophied under the strain of Brownsville. Mrs. Foraker would later write, “The whole country was swept by a mad rage at [Standard Oil's] wealth. The most damaging thing that could be done to a public man was to link his name with the trusts.”11

  The next night in St. Louis, Hearst made his accusation clear. Referring to the disclosures in Columbus the night before, he told his audience, “Foraker admits part of the truth, but not all of it…. If he had seen the letters I am going to produce tonight, he would have denied the whole matter.”12 He then read two other letters from Archbold. The first one was about legislation before the Senate to “protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraint and monopolies,” which Archbold thought was “unnecessarily severe” and hoped he and Foraker could “have a word” about.13 In the second letter, Archbold said somewhat cryptically, “Your letter states the conditions correctly, and I trust the transaction will be successfully consummated.” With that letter was a certificate of deposit for $50,000. The conclusion was that after a Foraker-Archbold meeting at which they had “a word,” Archbold sent Foraker $50,000. Foraker had been bribed. But this before-and-after cause and effect was only because Hearst had reversed the order of two letters. He read from a letter dated February 25, 1902, before one sent on January 27, 1902.

  Foraker was stunned and appears to not have noticed that the letters were out of order. Potentially frightening for him, he had no memory of a legitimate $50,000 fee. (“A lawyer's memory for a fifty-thousand-dollar retainer is usually excellent,” his wife would write.) After collecting his wits and hearing from a friend in Columbus, Foraker made a statement attempting to clear the matter up.14 He pointed out the payment came before the letter about the disliked pending legislation, and there was no reason to infer any connection. Better yet, he knew what the $50,000 was all about. The friend in Columbus had an option to buy a newspaper there and wanted Foraker to invest with him. Foraker was able to “advance a part of it” and asked, among others, Standard Oil if it wanted some of the deal. It d
id (being one of the owners of a newspaper ensured its proper coverage), and its share was $50,000, which it covered with the certificate of deposit. When the “transaction” was not “consummated,” Foraker returned the $50,000 to Standard Oil in a letter dated February 4, 1903. This was after Archbold sent him the money but three weeks before he asked to have “a word” about the antitrust legislation.