Theodore Rex (112 page)

“
STEVENS AND HIS MEN,”
the President wrote Kermit a few days later, “are changing the face of the continent, are doing the greatest engineering feat of the ages, and the effect of their work will be felt while our civilization lasts.”

He was returning home on the
Louisiana
, with two other war vessels in convoy, able for the first time to visualize the true enormity of his achievement in Panama. What he had made possible, Stevens was making real. The chief engineer was just his kind of person: “
a big fellow, a man of daring and good sense, and burly power.”

Kermit, who was expected to keep this letter for posterity, may have recognized the unconscious, if slightly enlarged, self-portrait his father always painted when he described someone he admired. Stevens was actually five years older and an inch taller than the President, but the key words, perhaps, were
daring
and
burly power
.

A newer element in Roosevelt’s letter was what the Kaiser might call the
Erdenton
, or earth note. Its implication, again unconscious, seemed to be that Stevens and his technicians, “
so hardy, so efficient, so energetic,” were not the only Americans changing the face of the world in 1906. Theodore Roosevelt, too, wanted to leave his impress on civilization.

That made the cable that awaited him at Ponce, Puerto Rico, on 21 November all the more annoying:

If press reports were to be believed, Taft had actually granted such a suspension, pending the President’s return. Roosevelt was quick to countermand it. “Discharge is not to be suspended,” he wired back, “unless there are new facts of such importance as to warrant your cabling me. I care nothing whatever for the yelling of either the politicians or the sentimentalists.”

While he continued his voyage north (bypassing Cuba), Army processors obediently reduced the ranks of the Twenty-fifth Infantry to zero. The last “Brownsville raider” surrendered his uniform on 26 November, a few hours before Roosevelt got back to Washington.

BY NOW, A BURGEONING
editorial consensus had begun to express dismay at the insubstantiality of the War Department’s reports on Brownsville.
The New York Times
noted that there was “not a particle of evidence” in any of them to justify dismissal without honor. Read in sequence, the documents showed that every authority concerned, from Major Penrose to the President, had proceeded on an assumption of guilt and challenged the soldiers to prove their own innocence.

This case was made most forcefully by the Constitution League, a new, progressive, multiracial alliance dedicated to fighting discrimination and disfranchisement. Financed for the most part by the sort of rich white goo-goos Roosevelt despised—men lacking in “burly power”—it found in Brownsville the cause it was looking for, and began an independent investigation.

At the end of November, Gilchrist Stewart, a black attorney for the League, came to Washington to present Roosevelt with a four-page memorandum of reasons why the discharged soldiers might be innocent. William Loeb, forewarned, made the President unavailable, so Stewart presented the memorandum to Joseph B. Foraker instead.

The Senator, too, was looking for a cause, now that railroad rate regulation was a fait accompli and Cuba no longer a scare. He had aspirations to succeed Roosevelt in the White House. If he could find some way of discrediting Taft as presidential heir apparent—for that matter, discrediting Roosevelt, too—he was sure that he was good-looking and eloquent enough, and popular enough in corporate boardrooms, to be nominated in 1908. Brownsville offered him both the means and end of this grand plan.

Beyond ambition, and in contrast to his otherwise negative disposition,
Foraker had a passion for racial justice. As a young Union soldier, he had wanted the Civil War to go on “until slavery is abolished, and every colored man is made a citizen, and is given precisely the same civil and political rights that the white man has.” Political opponents accused him of caring only for the Negro voters of Ohio. He certainly never professed any particular fondness for blacks in general. Senator Foraker merely felt the same about the Constitution in 1906 as Private Foraker had felt in 1862.

He was so electrified by the Constitution League’s memorandum that he began to amass his own archive of Brownsvilliana at home, muttering as he studied letters and clippings. Julia Foraker recognized the signs: her husband was planning a resolution on the subject as soon as Congress reconvened.

ROOSEVELT’S SIXTH ANNUAL
Message, delivered on 4 December, was notable for the fervor of its condemnation of race hatred, in particular the “bestial” nature of lynch law.

Unfortunately for the President, these fine words had a hollow ring in the upper chamber, where Senator Foraker had already introduced his Brownsville resolution. It “directed” the Secretary of War to supply the Senate with every official document pertaining to the case, along with the service records of every black man dismissed.

The resolution was approved, giving Taft no choice but to comply. Resentfully, he complained to reporters that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army was empowered to dismiss soldiers without honor. Foraker’s response, measured and scholarly, made Taft sound like a whiner. Roosevelt indeed had that privilege, but the articles of war did not permit him to inflict it “as a punishment—as though it had been in pursuance of the sentence of a court martial.” Taft, as a former judge, must surely remember that “no man can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”

Roosevelt remained silent. He closeted himself with the original Brownsville report of Major Blocksom, rereading it carefully. Its findings did not
alter his conviction as to the guilt of the men. But after studying another view of the case, by a retired Union Army general, he betrayed the first trace of regret over the hastiness of his action. He wrote Taft a confidential note, saying he was now “uncertain whether or not the officers of the three colored companies … are or are not blamable,” and asking for “a thoro investigation” to clarify his thinking.

ALL IN ALL
, this was not a propitious moment for Theodore Roosevelt to be officially informed that he had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work in ending the Russo-Japanese War. “I am profoundly moved and touched …,” he cabled the chairman of the Nobel Committee. “What I did I was able to accomplish only as the representative of the Nation of which for the time being I am President.”

He added that, upon reflection, he had decided to donate the prize money—almost thirty-seven thousand dollars—to “a foundation to establish at Washington a permanent Industrial Peace Committee.”

To Kermit, he explained that after consultation with Edith, he could not accept as a personal gift a sum of money earned as a public figure. “But I hated to come to the decision, because I very much wisht for the extra money to leave to all you children.”

SIR MORTIMER DURAND’S
last public view of Roosevelt occurred at a Gridiron dinner on 8 December. He thought that the President’s
laughter seemed strained, and noticed a flash of anger when somebody joked about a possible third term.

“
Now don’t let us have any damn nonsense,” Roosevelt said, raising a hand to quiet the crowd. “When I made that declaration on the night of my election, I knew what I was about.”

He continued with his speech, his voice constantly breaking into falsetto. Durand studied the bulldog profile, the bared teeth, and strange neck scar.

A good motto for him, Durand thought, would be
Rem facias rem, si possis recte, si non quocunque modo rem
—“The thing, get the thing, fairly if possible, if not, then however it can be gotten.” Roosevelt believed himself to be righteous, and his nature was to believe things with such passion that he
took no prisoners when contradicted. “I regard him as a man who might at any time be extremely dangerous, for neither his temper nor his honesty can be trusted.”

As if in proof, Roosevelt the righteous attacked on 19 December, with
a special message to the Senate totally upholding the Blocksom report. “Scores of eyewitnesses” in Brownsville had established beyond any doubt that “lawless and murderous” Negro soldiers had “leaped over the walls from the barracks and hurried through the town,” blasting away with their guns “at whomever they saw moving.” The testimony of those who watched in horror was “conclusive,” and there was the corroborative evidence of Army-issue “shattered bullets, shells and clips.”

As to the shared guilt of all the men he had discharged, there was “no question” of their complicity in “shielding those who took part in the original conspiracy of murder.” Roosevelt searched, rather too hastily, for words to communicate the dastardliness of their crime. “A blacker,” he wrote, “never stained the annals of our Army.”

He used his strongest language in repudiating Foraker’s assertion that the dishonorable discharge was not a legitimate punishment. The only thing wrong with it was that it was “utterly inadequate” in this case: “The punishment meet for mutineers and murderers such as those guilty of the Brownsville assault is death; and a punishment only less severe ought to be meted out to those who have aided and abetted mutiny and murder and treason by refusing to help in their detection.”