Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  Unexpectedly, one of the most nettlesome, frustrating, and time-consuming tasks I encountered was obtaining the book's illustrations. There are no words to describe the patience, helpfulness, and friendliness of people across the country who held my hand and soothed my frustrations as they guided me through their collections and secured what I needed. Special thanks to John Anderson of the Texas State Library and Archives in Austin, Kia Campbell of the Library of Congress in Washington, Jillian Carney of the Ohio History Connection in Columbus, curator Heather Cole of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard, Ayla Jaramillo of the Brownsville Historical Association, and Nicole Joniec of the Library Company of Philadelphia. One man, the photographer of the photo of the elderly Dorsie Willis, has become a friend. Boyd Hagen, you deserve a medal.

  At a conference in Chicago the exceptionally talented writer and historian David McCullough recommended I speak to the Roosevelt family genealogist Timothy Beard, who then was kind enough to see me at his home in the most beautiful town in Connecticut and share with me what he knew. Archibald Grimké biographer Dickson D. Bruce cordially and candidly spoke to me about Grimké and about the research room at Howard University. His Honor Judge James Cissell of the Hamilton County (Ohio) Probate Court invited me to his chambers to talk about the Forakers and to help with the Foraker probate file, long filed away and forgotten. Professors Emeritus Lewis Gould in Austin and John M. Blum in New Haven shared their insights on Theodore Roosevelt and the world of politics in the early twentieth century. They could not have been more gracious and helpful to a stranger whose only endorsement was a love of history.

  James and Marjie Pehta, wonderful friends from the Theodore Roosevelt Association, remembered so often to give me encouragement. Fred Bateman, Doug Callander, and Rabbi Tom Liebschutz read chapters and were unafraid to point out the many parts that needed improvement. Heather Pudvin talked to me about the book, brightened many a day, and, on my “Book Mondays” devoted only to Brownsville, nourished me with her delicious treats. She is a special friend to me and my family.

  To very dear friend Joanne Harrison, who read drafts of more chapters than anyone other than my wife and my editors and always asked for another, I give uncommon thanks and my special love. Her telephone calls to “my favorite writer” made the writing itself easier.

  My family in Florida, Lee and Claire Hager, did more than encourage, although they did that too. The three weeks of solitude and concentration at their place in North Carolina gave me what I needed to surge, and it was there the narrative turned the corner. Without it there would have been no book. My brother Fred Lembeck, the first of us to write a book, was an inspiration.

  Agent Don Fehr and Prometheus Books editor in chief Steven L. Mitchell took a chance on me when others would not.

  From syntax to spelling to style sheet, my editor Jennifer Peterson. What the practice of law lost when she turned to editing is my and the book's gain. As I told my friends Sam and Lisa Olens, who were our matchmakers, “Wow, what a find!” Thanks, Jennifer. Together, Mariel Bard, my copyeditor at Prometheus Books, and I weathered “the perfect storm” as cascading events fell upon us during the final editing. Together we got through it.

  To my children and grandchildren, from now on there will be no more Little League games not gone to, family get-togethers postponed, memories not made because there will be no more “Grandpa's writing his Brownsville book.”

  Fourteen years ago the love of my life, my wife, Emily, told me I had a book in me and I should write it. After a few years she convinced me to get started, cheered me on, supported me throughout and comforted me by never failing to say at those times I needed to hear it the most, “Oh, this part is really good.” For twenty-seven years she has given me all the love any man would want and has inspired me to be my best in all I do. As she is in all she does. This book is Emily's from cover to cover; she is on every page. For whatever value the book has, the credit is hers, and I accept its failures and lapses as my own. As its writing ends I dedicate Taking on Theodore Roosevelt to her with all my love.

  Harry Lembeck

  PROLOGUE

  1. Julia Foraker, I Would Live It Again (New York: Arno, 1975), p. 190. His biographer, Everett Walters, described the house as a “great yellow brick mansion,” four stories high. “Inside, a wide stairway led from the first floor to the spacious Louis XVI ballroom and drawing room on the second floor [where there also was] a library and a large dining room, both finished with Flemish art effects.” Everett Walters, Joseph Benson Foraker: An Uncompromising Republican (Columbus: Ohio History Press, 1948), p. 250. Its value was about $150,000 (about $3.5 million today).

  2. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 323.

  3. It was Roosevelt's idea that his powers were more than those precisely delineated in the Constitution. Unless an action was specifically prohibited by the Constitution or Congress, he could take it. “I declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization to do it.” H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 420. Brands has a particularly well-written explanation of Roosevelt's thinking at pp. 420–21.

  4. Lewis L. Gould, Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 73.

  5. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, p. 61.

  6. Jim Crow was a derisively stereotypical Negro character created by actor Thomas Rice. Rice got the idea when he saw an old black man in the street singing a simple ditty about a man with the name, and in 1828, Rice appeared on stage as “Jim Crow.” Before the end of the nineteenth century, the term described laws and habits in the southern United States that oppressed blacks and denied them their rights and often their lives. See “What Was Jim Crow?,” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm (accessed June 1, 2014).

  7. Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919 (New York: Macmillan, 1930), p. 6.

  8. Quoted in TR, Champion of the Strenuous Life: A Photographic Biography of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Theodore Roosevelt Association, 1948), p. 109.

  9. Siena Research Institute, “American Presidents: Greatest and Worst,” July 1, 2010, http://www2.siena.edu/uploadedfiles/home/parents_and_community/community_page/sri/independent_research/Presidents%20Release_2010_final.pdf (accessed September 12, 2014).

  CHAPTER ONE: THE IRON OF THE WOUND ENTERS THE SOUL ITSELF

  1. Ralph Tyler, letter to George Myers, February 6, 1909, George Myers Papers, Ohio History Connection (hereafter cited as Myers Papers).

  2. Ralph Tyler, letter to Joseph Foraker, September 15, 1906, Joseph Foraker Papers, Cincinnati History Library and Archives (hereafter cited as Foraker Papers).

  3. Ralph Tyler, letter to Joseph Foraker, September 27, 1906, Foraker Papers.

  4. Ralph Tyler, letter to Joseph Foraker, December 6, 1906, Foraker Papers.

  5. George Myers, letter to Ralph Tyler, April 17, 1907, Myers Papers.

  6. 42 Cong. Rec. 4723 (1908).

  7. “Presidency Foraker's Aim in Brownsville Inquiry,” Washington Times, March 16, 1907, in Newspaper Clippings, Archibald Grimké Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University (hereafter cited as Grimké Papers).

  8. Joseph B. Foraker, Notes of a Busy Life (Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd, 1917), 1:278. It did not hurt that Wilson was a Democrat, not a Civil War veteran, and a populist. In Foraker's eyes, these were three strikes against him.

  9. Earl R. Beck, “The Political Career of Joseph Benson Foraker” (PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 1942), p. 13.

  10. Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, May 7, 1886, cited in Everett Walters, Joseph Benson Foraker: An Uncompromising Republican (Columbus: Ohio History Press, 1948), p. 43.

  11. Cited in Walters, Joseph Benson Foraker, p. 115. As late as 1905, Foraker was saying th
e same thing, though in softer tones. See John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), p. 219.

  12. In 1905, prodded by President Theodore Roosevelt, Congress authorized the return of Southern battle flags, but even this did not affect those held by the states, since it was limited to flags “now in the custody of the War Department.” H.R.J. Res. 217, 59th Cong., 33 Stat. 1284 (1905). Even Foraker agreed with this action. He could change with the times when he needed to.

  13. Ronald Fernandez, The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger, 1992), p. 15.

  14. Joseph B. Foraker (speech before the Canton Board of Trade, Canton, OH, April 10, 1907). See also “Foraker Opens Presidential Campaign by Speech at Banquet,” San Francisco Call, April 11, 1907, p. 3.

  15. “Presidential Inaugural Weather,” National Weather Service, last modified January 10, 2013, http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/lwx/Historic_Events/Inauguration/Inauguration.html (accessed September 12, 2014).

  16. “Taft Is Sworn in Senate Hall,” New York Times, March 5, 1909, quoted in Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 551.

  17. He would have to take the oath a second time the next day. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, administering his sixth presidential oath of office, bungled it when he asked the new president to “execute the Constitution” instead of “execute the office of the President,” and Taft dutifully repeated the error. “Taft Swore to ‘Execute the Constitution,’ Slip by Chief Justice,” Washington Sunday Star, March 7, 1909.

  18. William Howard Taft, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1909, available online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25830 (accessed September 12, 2014).

  19. “Mr. Taft on the South,” New York Times, December 9, 1908.

  20. See Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 38. A fictional treatment of the black high society in the nation's capital was written by Edward Christopher Williams and serialized in the literary magazine The Messenger in the 1920s as The Letters of Davy Carr. In 2003, it was published as the novel When Washington Was in Vogue: A Love Story (A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance) (New York: Amistad, 2003). It has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in the way it captures the spirit of the 1920s. Its love story, beautifully written, knows neither race nor the intrusion of white discrimination.

  21. The author acknowledges that much of this history was obtained from the Metropolitan AME Church's website, and he gives full credit to it. See “Who We Are,” Metropolitan AME Church, http://www.metropolitanamec.org/history.asp (accessed April 28, 2014), and “About Us,” Metropolitan AME Church, http://www.metropolitanamec.org/aboutus.asp (accessed April 28, 2014).

  22. Dickson D. Bruce, Archibald Grimké: Portrait of a Black Independent (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), p. 48.

  23. Booker T. Washington did more than bless it; he actively—and secretly—worked for its approval. Using former senator Henry W. Blair as his lobbyist (and paying him three hundred dollars), Washington supported the amendment until he heard that the more militant W. E. B. Du Bois and W. Monroe Trotter opposed it for the same reason as Grimké. The normally astute Washington quickly realized his mistake and directed Blair to continue his lobbying, but now in opposition. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), p. 116; and Booker T. Washington, The Booker T. Washington Papers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 9:xxvi.

  24. See Daniel W. Crofts, “The Warner-Foraker Amendment to the Hepburn Bill: Friend or Foe of Jim Crow,” Journal of Southern History 39, no. 3 (August 1973): 341–58.

  25. Bruce, Archibald Grimké, p. 159.

  26. What Grimké and others said that night was reprinted in full in a pamphlet, Presentation of Loving Cup to Hon. Joseph Benson Foraker, United States Senator, in Appreciation of His Service on Behalf of the Members of Companies A, B, and C, Twenty-Fifth Infantry, by a Committee of Colored Citizens: The Ceremony and Addresses, March 6th, 1909, at Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC: Murray Brothers, 1909). A copy is in the Cincinnati Public Library.

  27. “A Noble Roman. Metropolitan Church Filled. Hundreds Turned Away. Attorney Scott's Great Speech,” Washington Bee, March 13, 1909.

  28. “Race Honors Foraker,” Washington Post, March 7, 1909.

  29. Presentation of Loving Cup to Hon. Joseph Benson Foraker.

  30. Archibald Grimké, “Why Independents Should Support Roosevelt for President,” folder 416, box 39-21, Manuscripts, Grimké Papers.

  31. Archibald Grimké, “The President's Message,” folder 406, box 39-21, Manuscripts, Grimké Papers.

  32. Grimké's use of “hoisted with their own petard” illustrates his command of the language and how he could sift more than one meaning from his words. A petard was an explosive device used to blow a hole in a wall. To “hoist on one's own petard” means to be caught in one's own trap. Grimké is continuing the military metaphor and, at the same time, reminding his audience that Roosevelt's evidence for the dismissal of the soldiers blew a hole in Roosevelt's own arguments.

  33. Presentation of Loving Cup to Hon. Joseph Benson Foraker.

  34. Morris, Theodore Rex, p. 465.

  35. Percy E. Murray, “Harry C. Smith–Joseph B. Foraker Alliance: Coalition Politics in Ohio,” Journal of Negro History 68, no. 2 (1983): 171.

  36. Ibid., p. 172.

  37. Kenneth J. Cooper, Black Opinion in Early African American Newspapers in Boston (Boston: William Monroe Trotter Institute, 2007), http://cdn.umb.edu/images/trotter/trotterblackpresspaper.pdf (accessed September 12, 2014).

  CHAPTER TWO: “THEY ARE SHOOTING US UP”

  1. Summary Discharge or Mustering Out of Regiments or Companies: Message from the President of the United States…, S. Doc. No. 59-155, vol. 11, pt. 2 (2d sess. 1907) (hereafter cited as SD-2), p. 144 (affidavit of Dr. Frederick J. Combe).

  2. In 1906 the army's tactical units of interest in this narrative, going from the smallest to the largest, were companies, battalions, and regiments. There were four companies in a battalion, three battalions in a regiment. The “Twenty-Fifth Infantry” is properly the “Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiment,” but it was common then and now to drop the word “regiment” when referring to it. Not the entire Twenty-Fifth Infantry was transferred to Fort Brown, only its “First Battalion.” Of the First Battalion's four companies, Company A was detached from the battalion and sent to Wyoming on a temporary assignment. Companies B, C, and D went ahead of it, and the soldiers of these three companies are the men of the Brownsville Incident. Even though these three companies are less than a full battalion, they were referred to as the “Black Battalion.” And even though they were only a fraction of the complete Twenty-Fifth Infantry, at the time and in this narrative, they also are referred to as the Twenty-Fifth Infantry.

  3. Affray at Brownsville, Tex.: Hearings Before the Comm. on Military Affairs…, S. Doc. No. 60-402, pt. 6 (1908) (hereafter cited as SMAC-3), pp. 2380, 2392 (testimony of Combe).

  4. Henry F. Pringle (whose biography of Roosevelt received the Pulitzer Prize) had an uncharitable opinion of Brownsville in his 1939 biography of William Howard Taft. He called it “the dismal city on the Rio Grande.” Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft: A Biography (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964), 1:324. A lifelong New Yorker, Pringle, superb writer and biographer that he was, may have thought the same of any city west of the Hudson River.

  5. SMAC-3, p. 2380 (testimony of Combe). Historically, they were barely any blacks in Brownsville because it was on the Mexican border. Before the Civil War, slave owners would not bring them where escape to freedom was nothing more than a quick swim across the Rio Grand
e. SMAC-3, p. 2521 (testimony of William Kelly). After emancipation, blacks would from time to time come to Brownsville, but Mexicans worked for less money, so the blacks would leave. Ibid., p. 2527.

  6. The influence of Mexico was so great as late as 1905 that Mexican currency was the “circulating medium” in Brownsville. Ibid.

  7. The 1900 census shows that in Cameron County, Texas (Brownsville was its county seat), there were only 177 Negroes out of a total population of 16,095, or slightly more than 1 percent. US Census Office, Census Reports: Twelfth Census of the United States (1900), General Tables, table 29, p. 222. Compare this with two Mississippi counties, in which Negroes were more than 79 percent of the residents. In Texas itself, blacks were 20.4 percent of the population, twenty times greater than in Cameron County. See also Ann J. Lane, The Brownsville Affair: National Crisis and Black Reaction (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1971), p. 8, regarding the “decidedly Spanish quality to the town.”

  8. See “Brownsville Not Southern,” Topic of the Times, New York Times, September 12, 1906, which cited a statistical survey by the Houston Post. Of seven thousand residents, only twenty-five were Southern. There were more Jews (one hundred) and vastly more Northerners (thirteen hundred), and all identified groups were greatly outnumbered by five thousand Mexicans. No group was identified by the Post as “Westerners.”

  9. S. Doc. No. 60-402, pt. 5 (1908) (hereafter cited as SMAC-2), pp. 1003–1004 (testimony of Capt. Dana Willis Kilburn, Twenty-Sixth Infantry).