THE 158 SOLDIERS OF the Black Battalion not reenlisted in the army soon faded into the vastness of America. Those called to Washington, DC, to testify before the Senate committee and later the Court of Inquiry resurfaced briefly, and then most were lost.4 By 1970, when Brownsville historian John D. Weaver wrote The Brownsville Raid and brought the incident back into public awareness, all but two of the soldiers had died. The army they served in had remained segregated until President Harry Truman integrated the American armed forces in 1948.5 Never again would America have military units designated “Colored.” After Weaver's book was published, Augustus F. Hawkins, a black member of Congress from California, prodded the army into investigating the incident with the goal of correcting the injustice to the Black Battalion. In 1972 the now-renamed Defense Department amended the first paragraph of Special Orders No. 266 to replace “discharged without honor” with “honorably discharged from the army.”6 By then, only Private Dorsie Willis of Company D was still living, and on February 11, 1972, at the Zion Baptist Church in Minneapolis, on his eighty-seventh birthday, Dorsie Willis received his Certificate of Honorable Discharge attesting to his honest and faithful service.7 (Private Edward Warfield of Company B also was still alive, but he was one of the soldiers readmitted to the army after the Court of Inquiry. He already had his honorable discharge.) A little less than a year later, Congress awarded Willis $25,000, and on January 11, 1974, an army general came to Minneapolis to present it.8 When he died in 1977 at the age of ninety-one, he was buried at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, with the military honors he was entitled to. Congress awarded $10,000 to Black Battalion widows; there was only one of them, Bettye Conyers Hardeman, the wife of Boyd Conyers. “He never talked about it. The only thing he would say was he didn't do it.” When she received the check she told the New York Times, “Big deal. There was no letter of apologies. This was in exchange, of course, for a man's whole life.”9
FIRST SERGEANT MINGO SANDERS made his way to Washington very soon after leaving Fort Reno to get back into the army. President Roosevelt angrily and publicly refused even to consider letting him in. Sanders's last words to the Court of Inquiry weighing his eligibility for reenlistment came as he ended his testimony on February 8, 1910. “As I have been laboring three years or more, trying to prove my innocence to each individual person who has examined me, and now I am on my last examination, I suppose, by this grand court, and I am now passed half a century, and I am also pleading to this court for mercy for my sake, because when a man gets to be my age there is nobody wants him, and I wish that this court would consider my case to the bottom of their heart, to the full extent, and see that I do not die in agony, as I labored hard all my young life for the Government, honest and faithfully, and can prove it by a dozen or more officers, and I hope the Court will consider my case.”10 It turned him down.
In the summer of 1912, during his reelection campaign, President Taft ordered the Interior Department to hire Sanders as a messenger. Roosevelt accused Taft of hypocrisy for having his “campaign managers in Ohio” hire a man whom Taft, six years earlier, agreed was, because of his senior rank, “more responsible for what had occurred than any others.”11 Seventeen years later, still holding that job Taft gave him and Roosevelt would have denied him under Special Orders No. 266 as first written (“forever debarred…from employment in any civil capacity under the Government”), former First Sergeant Mingo Sanders entered Freedmen's Hospital at Howard University in Washington with a gangrenous infection of his foot. To save his life, the leg was amputated, but he died three days later on August 15, 1929.12 His discharge without honor did not disentitle him to burial in Arlington National Cemetery, where he is today.
WITH TAFT ELECTED AND Foraker's Senate hopes on life support, on Christmas Day 1908 Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to attend a conference in Washington in January to consider ways to help destitute and orphaned children. It was a measure of the deterioration in their relationship that he now saw the Wizard as something of a social worker. Washington had always promptly responded to requests from the White House, and almost always said yes, but four days later the notation “No reply as yet” was penciled on the White House copy of the letter.13 Washington's dependence on Roosevelt was also over; there was a new king to counsel and seek influence from, and he lost no time working to stay in the game. It started off well. During the campaign he wrote Taft strongly suggesting he modify how he planned to discuss state constitutions and black voting. “Negro newspapers will…misinterpret your meaning.” Taft accepted the changes word for word.14 But when safely elected and securely ensconced in the White House, Taft paid less and less attention to the man from Tuskegee.
As did black leaders. Booker T. Washington's failure to help the Black Battalion showed that his influence in politics and with white industrialists and business leaders was an illusion and his program of accommodation had little value. The conflict between Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois was increasingly shaded in Du Bois's favor. By 1911, the split was complete. There was an effort at reconciliation after a bizarre incident in which Washington was chased down Central Park West in New York and beaten up by a white man named Alfred Ulrich, who would tell police he thought Washington was a burglar. What Washington was doing in Ulrich's apartment building in a white neighborhood on West Sixty-Seventh Street, what his relationship may have been with a white woman who was somehow involved, and just what he may have done to merit a severe beating from Ulrich has never been completely understood. Washington's reluctance to press charges against Ulrich suggests he may have wanted to cover the matter up. The photos of a severely beaten and bandaged Washington and the anger among blacks that a well-dressed, well-spoken, and nonthreatening black man could be treated this way in a white neighborhood, regardless of why he was there, produced an outpouring of sympathy for him from those he would not have expected. Washington biographer Louis Harlan wrote that Washington was so moved he decided “this business of having a divided race” must cease, and he asked Oswald Garrison Villard, one of the founders of the NAACP, to help bring it about. The NAACP sent a mild expression of sympathy, written by Monroe Trotter, who detested Washington, but failed to give Washington a vote of confidence.15 The moment for reconciliation passed.
On a trip to New York in 1915 Washington collapsed and was told he had only days to live. He announced, “I was born in the South, I have lived and labored in the South, and I expect to die and be buried in the South.” He arrived in Tuskegee at midnight, November 14, 1915, and died in the South five hours later.
The movement away from Washington and accommodation became irreversible. Committed Bookerites now found themselves ignored as Du Bois firmly closed the door to any role in the new black leadership. But the Tuskegee Machine's divisiveness had passed away with him. In 1926 at John Milholland's funeral, Washington's aide Emmett Scott joined W. E. B. Du Bois to praise the man Washington scorned and bedeviled.16
W. E. B. DU BOIS CONTINUED to influence the more aggressive drive for civil rights, but not as the yang to Washington's yin. With Washington no longer a foil, Du Bois's philosophy to guide the Negro struggle had to ride on its own into the future.17 In the obituary he wrote in the December 15, 1915, issue of Crisis, the magazine he founded for the NAACP in 1910 to articulate the crusade for civil rights, he continued his message of the Washington who did much good overshadowed by the Washington who did so much more wrong. But he did generously acknowledge the good.
In 1934 Du Bois broke with the NAACP after years of abrasive personal relations with others in the organization. He came back ten years later as its director of research but left for good in 1949. Increasingly convinced America would never acknowledge its own injustice, in 1961, when he was ninety-three years old, he joined the Communist Party. He surrendered his American citizenship and left his country for good, moving to Ghana, where he died on August 27, 1963, the day before the March on Washington. His death was noted by the executive director of the NAACP Roy Wilkins, standing be
fore the Lincoln Memorial; many were surprised to realize he had still been alive, so far back had he been a leader, so far ahead had the struggle progressed.
In his late years in Ghana, Du Bois chastised a student who, as they were chatting on his porch, made an unkind comment about Booker T. Washington. “Don't say that. I used to talk like that.” He remembered the words of an aunt to him, “Don't you forget that that man, unlike you, bears the mark of the lash on his back. He has come out of slavery…. You are fighting for the rights here in the North. It's tough, but it's nothing like as tough as what he had to face in his time and in his place.”18 The old Du Bois had softened, it seemed, and now was giving greater weight to Washington the good.
IT DID NOT TAKE Theodore Roosevelt long to lose patience with President Taft. Roosevelt kept his word and stayed away hunting big game in Africa to keep from overshadowing him, but word came from his acolytes back home that his successor had become a renegade. To the extent there was any truth to these charges, it was nothing more than a new man handling the job his own way. It was hardly a betrayal of Rooseveltian principles or the man who had put him in the White House. Giving in to what Philander Knox called “whims” and “imperious, ambitious vanities and mysterious antipathies,” Roosevelt took the bait, and inevitably the men clashed.19 In 1912 Roosevelt tried to take the Republican nomination away from Taft, only to find out the rules favoring incumbency, rules he himself used (and in some cases wrote) in 1904 when he was the incumbent, still worked. Enraged when these rules denied credentials to his own delegates, he ran as the Progressive Party candidate against both President Taft and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, thereby dividing the Republican Party and handing the White House to the Democrats. In January 1907, angry when the Senate acquiesced to Foraker's argument that some sort of Brownsville investigation was needed, Roosevelt had warned the Republicans “if they split off me [from the Republican Party] they would split the party neatly in two.”20 In 1912 Roosevelt did just that.21
FORMER PRESIDENT TAFT ACCEPTED an invitation to teach at Yale Law School. He was happy there, happier that he was out of the White House, and happiest when he finally got from President Warren Harding, an Ohioan not destined for Cornelia's statue in Columbus, what he always wanted, an appointment to the US Supreme Court. As chief justice he returned twice more to presidential inaugurations to administer the oath of office to two other Republicans, Calvin Coolidge in 1924 and Herbert Hoover in 1928.
Taft was puzzled, then bitter, then immensely saddened when Roosevelt turned against him in 1912. “I have a sense of wrong in the attitude of Theodore Roosevelt toward me which I doubt I can ever get over,” he wrote his Aunt Delia. “I do not want to fight Theodore Roosevelt. But I am going to fight him,” he said at a campaign stop. He told a reporter who saw him sitting alone with tears in his eyes, “Roosevelt was my closest friend.” Eventually the two former friends reconciled at a chance meeting in the dining room of the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, but Taft would weep again for his lost friend at Roosevelt's funeral in 1919.22
JOSEPH FORAKER RETURNED TO private life in Cincinnati and reestablished a successful law practice. He continued to receive letters from people praising and thanking him for what he did.23 The most appreciated were from the Black Battalion and its officers who were sure their soldiers were innocent. “Your efforts in behalf of the ‘Black Battalion’ will cause your name to go down into history as the one man who braved every thing in behalf of justice and fair play and we…render you all honor and homage for your heroism and courage,” wrote the battalion's commanding officer, Major Charles Penrose.24 On the day Foraker received the loving cup, Captain Samuel Lyon's wife thanked him for his persistence in the creation of the Court of Inquiry and added, “I feel a love for and pride in the Regiment that such a close association with it must bring.” She was a “proud member of our beloved Regiment.”25
Foraker wrote his memoirs in 1916, and when Theodore Roosevelt, the man who tormented him over Brownsville, read it, he half admitted he may have been wrong (“There were some things told me against you, or in reference to you, which [when I consider what I now know of my informants] would have carried no weight with me at the time”) and invited Foraker to visit him at Sagamore Hill.26 Their tentative reconciliation actually started four years earlier when Roosevelt asked him for his views on the Sherman Antitrust Act, “of course merely for my private use.” Roosevelt also asked him to “come around…. It will be a real pleasure to see you.”27 Foraker regretted he received the invitation too late in a letter that began, “Dear Colonel Roosevelt: That title does not seem just right but I guess it will have to answer for the present.”28
Foraker never made a visit to Oyster Bay; a year after Roosevelt's unclearly expressed apology, he was dead. His friend and mentor Harry Smith of the Cleveland Gazette wrote, “Our people have lost their last great, aggressive white friend.”29 In reporting his death, the New York Times used the word fight or some variation of it six times in the first two paragraphs, making him appear to be antagonistic and pugnacious, something he was not. It highlighted his poor health since he left the Senate but did not link it to the brutal wear and tear he endured in the Brownsville Incident. In fact it did not mention Brownsville other than the indirect comment, “He…fought Roosevelt in [his] second term.” 30 At a memorial service for him in the US Court of Appeals courtroom in Cincinnati, there were nine eulogists; not one mentioned Brownsville.31 Six days earlier at a Foraker Memorial “under the auspices Cincinnati Branch, NAACP, assisted by Churches, Lodges, Clubs, etc.,” the black community turned out to pay its respects to a man it knew to be great. Harry Smith sang a baritone solo of “Beyond the Gates of Paradise,” and Gilchrist Stewart was the principal speaker. Brownsville was mentioned often.
Champ Clark, who did not like Foraker very much and was glad to see Theodore Burton take his Senate seat, may have written the most inappropriate obituary about him. “Foraker seems to me to be the most pathetic figure in Ohio politics…. More than once he appeared to be a presidential possibility; but something fatal to his ultimate ambition always happened.”32 Foraker would not have liked anyone to think he was pathetic; he probably would have preferred (though disagreed with) being thought pugnacious as described by the New York Times. Clark was wrong; Foraker was not pathetic. He took an action “expecting a useful reaction from his world, but instead the effect of his action [was] to provoke forces of antagonism.”33 Still he kept going to the very end. He was a man of character.
Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, who must share Mount Rushmore with three other men, Joseph Foraker has a mountain of his own. At 17,400 feet, Mount Foraker in Alaska is the third-highest mountain in the United States. (Mount Rushmore is only 5,725 feet.) Fourteen miles away is the highest, Mount McKinley, increasingly called Denali in the rush to multiculturalism. Should this movement overtake Mount Foraker, it would be called Sultana (meaning “the woman”) or Menlale (meaning “Denali's wife”), and Foraker would lose that vestige of the memory of him.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT LIVED TEN years after leaving the White House. Still a young man, he continued to lead the strenuous life. He salved the wound from the 1912 election loss by exploring the Amazon River basin, almost dying there, and discovering a then-unknown river that today is called Rio Roosevelt.
And he worked to bind together Lincoln's party, the Republicans. In 1916 he turned aside efforts to get him to fight the progressive battle again. “We are beaten. There is only one thing to do and that is to go back to the Republican party.”34 He was aging rapidly and visibly. Ignoring his age and health, the Rough Rider tried to form another group of volunteers to fight in France in World War I, but President Wilson turned him down. Roosevelt was making plans for a political comeback in 1920, was considered the leading Republican candidate for the White House, and “was likely to be President again.”35 It was not to be. In January 1919, only sixty years old, he died at Sagamore Hill. The last man to hear his voice (“James, will you please put out
the light?”) and see him alive was his black valet, James Amos. In 1927 Amos wrote a memoir of his time with Roosevelt from the White House to his death. Its title makes clear how he felt about Theodore Roosevelt: Hero to His Valet.
WHEN ROOSEVELT LOST THE Republican nomination to Taft, Du Bois, still nursing anger over Brownsville, wrote in an editorial in the August 1912 issue of Crisis, “We thank God that Theodore Roosevelt was eliminated. How many black people, with the memory of Brownsville, could support such a man passes our comprehension.” For him, Brownsville could never be forgiven.36 Seven years later, when Roosevelt died, he softened a bit, as he had with Booker T. Washington when he died. “Even in our hot bitterness over the Brownsville affair we knew that he believed he was right, and he of all men had to act in accordance with his beliefs.”37 Others who bitterly opposed him in the Brownsville Incident would be just as charitable. Oswald Garrison Villard wrote, “No more remarkably engaging personality than Colonel Roosevelt has ever figured in American public life. However bitterly opposed one might be to his policies or to his political philosophy, however one might be convinced that his influence upon the national life was a baleful one, it was impossible to be near him and not be profoundly influenced by his charm and the force of his individuality…. Young men thronged about Colonel Roosevelt eager to be of his party, his entourage, and to bask in the warmth and geniality of his presence…. Many who deserted at times, returned later.”38
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 43