32. There is an empty envelope from Foraker to A. B. Humphrey, c/o Constitutional League, returned by the post office for a street address. Its postmark is May 30, 1906, when the proposed amendment to the Hepburn Bill to ban Jim Crow passenger cars was being discussed. Also see correspondence between Foraker and A. B. Humphrey, Constitution League secretary, regarding copies of the “The Affray at Brownsville” War Department Pamphlet and Foraker's analysis of the testimony it contained, and a letter from Foraker asking to meet with Gilchrist Stewart. Box 50, Foraker Papers.
33. A. B. Humphrey, letter to Joseph B. Foraker, November 25, 1906, box 50, Foraker Papers; Joseph B. Foraker, letter to A. B. Humphrey, November 29, 1906, box 50, Foraker Papers.
34. “President Will Reconsider.”
35. Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Horace Voss, November 27, 1906, roll 343, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress; Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Sen. John Kean, November 27, 1906, roll 343, Theodore Roosevelt Papers.
36. “President Will Reconsider.”
37. Theodore Roosevelt, letter to William Howard Taft, n.d., reel 320, William Howard Taft Papers, Library of Congress.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: BETWEEN TWO STOOLS
1. Mary Church Terrell, letter to Mingo “Saunders [sic],” December 6, 1906, American Memory from the Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/master/ipo/qcdata/qcdata7/naacp/tiffs/na0011_01.tif (accessed March 17, 2010).
2. Affray at Brownsville, Tex.: Hearings Before the Comm. on Military Affairs…, S. Doc. No. 60-402, pt. 4 (1908), p. 302 (affidavit of Mingo Sanders, May 16, 1886). Which would make him fifty-four years old when he came to Mrs. Terrell's home. She must not have asked him his age, but she was pretty close when she estimated he was “not much more than fifty years old.”
3. Mary Church Terrell, “Sketch of Mingo Saunders,” Voice of the Negro, May 1907. Both the letter and the article spelled Sanders's name as “Saunders.” It is possible Mrs. Terrell was unaware of its spelling when she sent the letter, but it's odd that Sanders did not correct her in time for the article's publication five months later.
4. W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World” (speech, Pan African Convention, London, July 25, 1900), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, by David L. Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 251.
5. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” in The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), p. 144.
6. In 1903 Du Bois described this in an essay titled “The Talented Tenth.” The term referred to his belief that blacks needed and were entitled to what was then called a classical education, and those who received it would become leaders of their race and change its place in the world for the better. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-talented-tenth/ (accessed May 19, 2014).
7. See Thomas E. Harris, “The Black Leader's Rhetorical Dilemma: An Analysis of the Debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the New York State Speech Association, Loch Sheldrake, NY, April 1974).
8. Elliott M. Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), p. 15.
9. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 64, cited in Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, p. 20.
10. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 8.
11. See Thomas Allan Scott, Cornerstones of Georgia History: Documents That Formed the State (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 141–42. A careful reading of Du Bois's petition suggests he made a “Washington-light” argument. Keeping lower-class blacks was not objectionable, so long as lower-class whites were treated the same. See Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership, p. 54.
12. See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, pp. 231–37.
13. Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership, p. 58. He cites three letters in the Du Bois papers: W. E. B. Du Bois to G. R. Parkin, January 1, 1903; G. R. Parkin to W. E. B. Du Bois, January 28, 1903; and Booker T. Washington to W. E. B. Du Bois, February 3, 1903.
14. He was as outspoken and “in his face” with everybody he didn't like. He so angered President Woodrow Wilson at a White House meeting, he was thrown out of the building. “President Resents Negro's Criticism,” New York Times, November 13, 1914.
15. August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p. 174.
16. Boston Guardian, November 8, 1902, shown as an illustration in T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist, by Emma L. Thornbrough (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 233.
17. “Solving the Race Problem,” Session 2, National Afro-American Council, December 30, 1898, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aaprace.html (accessed September 28, 2014).
18. Alexander J. Opsahl, “Afro-American Council (1898–1907),” BlackPast.org, http://www.blackpast.org/aah/afro-american-council-1898-1907 (accessed May 19, 2014). Also involved was Congressman George Henry White of North Carolina, the only black member of Congress at the time, later a vice president of the organization. Members included Mary Church Terrell, former Louisiana governor Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, Professor William S. Scarborough, and Henry O. Flipper, the first black West Point graduate, who became a conservative Republican when Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House.
19. With Washington's recommendation, Lewis recently had been appointed by Roosevelt as assistant US attorney in Boston.
20. See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, pp. 300–301; and Hae-sung Hwang, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Race Leadership, 1895–1915 (Seoul: American Studies Institute, Seoul National University, 1992), pp. 99–100.
21. Du Bois, Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 248. One of the Niagara Movement's founders was John Milholland. Its name came from its inability to find a suitable place in the United States to hold a meeting, so it came together on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.
22. The Niagara Movement is now the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
23. See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, pp. 393, 341–42. He writes Brownsville would help them tear it “to shreds.” Possibly, but not as quickly as this suggests.
24. The printed “programme” for the meeting indicates Du Bois was scheduled to speak that day, but Lewis writes the address was given later that evening and was read by a Du Bois loyalist. Ibid., p. 330. The handsomely printed “programme” is available at http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b161-i230.
25. Du Bois's opposition to Washington had a personal component. He was frustrated with Washington's blocking his recognition and advancement. He also was irritated with the cool way his leadership ideas were treated by whites and jealous of the warmer relationships they had with Washington. These too were considerations in his developing a program of pressure and agitation. See Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership, p. 93.
26. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Value of Agitation,” Voice of the Negro, March 1907, in The Social Theory of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Phil Zuckerman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), p. 115.
27. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, p. 238.
28. It would take time. The next month H. G. Wells, the English science-fiction writer and dabbler in socialism, wrote a series of articles for Harper's Weekly that urged Booker T. Washington to fight Jim Crow and contrasted him favorably with W. E. B. Du Bois, who seemed to Wells “more like an artist, less the statesman.” Chronology, September 1906, John D. Weaver Papers, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA.
29. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, p. 227. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “On the Passing of the First-Born,” in Souls of Black Folk
, p. 147.
30. Each chapter in The Souls of Black Folk begins with poetry. Du Bois's prose comes close to poetry in its cadence and elegance. “On the Passing of the First-Born” is the most searing.
CHAPTER TWELVE: GRIM-VISAGED WAR
1. Garlington had begun his career with a fast promotion. In 1876, just out of West Point, he chose the Seventh Cavalry, beginning to rebuild its strength after the Sioux wiped out Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Immediately he was promoted to first lieutenant. Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 231.
2. 41 Cong. Rec. 1 (1906).
3. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 11.
4. “Penrose Scores First,” Washington Post, December 4, 1906.
5. Paul B. Beers, Pennsylvania Politics Today and Yesterday: The Tolerable Accommodation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), p. 41; Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 75.
6. Beers, Pennsylvania Politics Today and Yesterday, p. 37.
7. Ibid., p. 48.
8. Walter Davenport, Power and Glory: The Life of Boies Penrose (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1931), p. 13.
9. Beers, Pennsylvania Politics Today and Yesterday, p. 48.
10. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), p. 128.
11. Beers, Pennsylvania Politics Today and Yesterday, p. 49.
12. Robert D. Bowden, Boies Penrose: Symbol of an Era (New York: Greenberg, 1937), p. 210.
13. Ibid., p. 154.
14. Ibid., p. 155.
15. “Senator Penrose Here,” Washington Herald, November 5, 1906.
16. “About People and Social Incidents,” New York Tribune, November 6, 1906.
17. White House visitor log, September 20, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress.
18. Theodore Roosevelt, report to Boies E. Penrose, September 20, 1906, reel 342, Roosevelt Papers.
19. Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Philander Knox, September 22, 1906, box 2, Philander C. Knox Papers, Library of Congress.
20. Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Philander Knox, November 5, 1906, box 2, Knox Papers.
21. “Roosevelt, Rain-Soaked and Exposed to Storm Gets Splendid Ovation at Capitol's Dedication,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 5, 1906.
22. “Results of the Election,” Washington Herald, November 7, 1906; “Stuart's Plurality is 70,000,” Washington Herald, November 8, 1906.
23. Julia Foraker, I Would Live It Again (New York: Arno, 1975), pp. 295–96.
24. “The President of the United States, especially such a figure as Roosevelt, cannot be successfully withstood by any individual.” Quoted in The Memoirs of Joseph Gurney “Uncle Joe” Cannon, ed. Helen L. Abdill (Danville, IL: Vermilion County Museum Society, 1996), p. 130.
25. See “Dismissal of Negro Troops,” New York Tribune, December 2, 1906.
26. See chapter nineteen.
27. Gen. Fred C. Ainsworth, report to Headquarters, Southwestern Division, December 1, 1906, 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. 1 (2d sess. 1907) (hereafter cited as SD-1), p. 200.
28. Ainsworth Memorandum for Secretary of War, December 5, 1906, 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), pp. 311–12.
29. Private Secretary, instructions to Mr. Young, Foreman of Printing, Government Printing Office, December 2, 1906, reel 489, William Howard Taft Papers, Library of Congress.
30. “Congress Meets Again; Negro Troops Issue Up,” New York Times, December 4, 1906; 41 Cong. Rec. 2 (1906). In I Would Live It Again, Julia Foraker mistakenly recalls the debate that day. She writes, at page 278, “The Vice-President was on the point of proposing adjournment when Senator Penrose sprang upon the Senate a message from the President of the United States. This message was a request that the Brownsville matter be left wholly in the President's hands. The Senate would be so good as not to concern itself with Brownsville.”
31. 41 Cong. Rec. 2 (1906).
32. “Penrose Scores First.”
33. See “In Foraker's Favor,” Dayton Evening News, December 18, 1906; John D. Weaver, Notes on the Debate on a Senate Investigation, John D. Weaver Papers, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA.
34. John Milholland Diary, December 3, 1906, John E. Milholland Papers (1887–1924), Ticonderoga (NY) Historical Society.
35. “Dismissal of Negro Troops,” New York Sun, December 4, 1906.
36. John D. Weaver, The Brownsville Raid (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992), p. 113. “Foraker, by chance, happened to have in his coat pocket a draft of a similar resolution he had dictated to his stenographer and intended to introduce the following day” (author's emphasis). John D. Weaver, The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son: Exoneration of the Brownsville Soldiers (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), p. 120. Foraker biographer Walters believes Foraker was prepared to ask the Senate to look into the discharges, but he planned first to consult with other senators about when. Penrose forced him to act that day. See Everett Walters, Joseph Benson Foraker: An Uncompromising Republican (Columbus: Ohio History Press, 1948), p. 235.
37. “Congress Meets Again; Negro Troops Issue Up.”
38. “Dismissal of Negro Troops.”
39. “Senate after Roosevelt on Negro Troops,” New York Evening World, December 3, 1906.
40. “Congress and the President,” New York Times, December 4, 1906.
41. Abdill, Memoirs of Joseph Gurney “Uncle Joe” Cannon, pp. 55–56.
42. Theodore Roosevelt, letter to “Nannie” Lodge, December 3, 1906, Roosevelt Papers.
43. “Resolutions Go Over,” New York Tribune, December 6, 1906.
44. “Dismissal of Negro Troops,” New York Sun, December 4, 1906.
45. “In Foraker's Favor,” Dayton Evening News, December 3, 1906.
46. “The Brownsville Affair as a Political Weapon,” Literary Digest 33, no. 24 (December 15, 1906): 895, 896.
47. New York World, December 4, 1906, cited in Henry Fowler Pringle, Research Notes for Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography, 7th year, p. 4, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
48. Joseph B. Foraker, Notes of a Busy Life, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd, 1917), 2:234–35.
49. Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Sherlock Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
Arthur Conan Doyle and Leslie Klinger, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), see specifically “Silver Blaze, p. 411.
50. “Taft Defends Penalty on Negro Battalion,” New York Times, December 6, 1906.
51. Ibid.
52. SD-1, pp. 301–307. Examples of enlisted soldiers who denied either hearing about mistreatment or harassment by Brownsville civilians or hearing any soldier upset about it include Private Jones A. Coltrane of Company B, SD-1, p. 466; Corporal Wade Harris of Company B, SD-1, p. 468; Corporal Wade H. Watlington of Company B, SD-1, p. 469; Private Thomas Jefferson of Company C, SD-1, p. 475; and Private Erasmus T. Dabbs of Company C, SD-1, p. 478.
53. “Taft Defends Penalty on Negro Battalion.”
54. The Senate's procedures can be baffling. The reader will recall that on December 3, after Penrose jumped ahead of him, Foraker did in fact “offer as a substitute” his own resolution. On December 5, it was treated as “an amendment in the nature of a substitute.” To disentangle it from Penrose's, Foraker first had to have it decla
red “independent.” 41 Cong. Rec. 2, 55 (1906).
55. David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), p. 261.
56. 41 Cong. Rec. 83–97 (1906).
57. 41 Cong. Rec. 97.
58. 41 Cong. Rec. 99.
59. He confirmed it years later when he told this same story “at a Patriotic Race Service, Held by the Negroes of Philadelphia” and made himself sound like a hero. Boies Penrose, “The Progress of the Negro Race” (speech, Philadelphia, March 1, 1914), http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/eb/supp/4890/index.pdf (accessed September 28, 2014).
60. 41 Cong. Rec. 101 (1906).
61. 41 Cong. Rec. 102.
62. Ibid.
63. “In Foraker's Favor,” Dayton Daily News, December 18, 1906.
64. “Call for the Facts,” Washington Herald, December 7, 1906.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: STRANGE FRUIT
1. “Strange Fruit” is the name of a poem by Abel Meeropol that later was made into a song recorded by, among others, Billie Holiday. Though the words lynch and lynching do not appear in its lyrics, the title refers to lynched bodies swinging from trees, a strange fruit. In 1999 Time magazine proclaimed it the song of the century. When he wrote the poem, Meeropol was a teacher in New York City and an active member of the Communist Party (years later he would leave it). He and his wife adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who stole secrets of the atom bomb to help the Soviet Union develop one of its own and were executed for it.
2. Washington very early on was given an advance copy of Roosevelt's address and circulated it among trusted members of the Tuskegee Machine for their thoughts. He warned Roosevelt his comments on lynching would not go over well, but Roosevelt ignored him. See Booker T. Washington, letter to Whitefield McKinlay, October 25, 1906, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, eds. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, vol. 9, 1906–8 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 103; Whitefield McKinlay, letter to Booker T. Washington, November 2, 1906, in Harlan and Smock, Booker T. Washington Papers, 9:113–14; also see T. Thomas Fortune, letter to Booker T. Washington, December 8, 1906, in Harlan and Smock, Booker T. Washington Papers, 9:156–58.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 51