Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Read online

  In 1886, twenty-one years after Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate Army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox to effectively end the Civil War, Foraker was still engaged in oratorical hostilities against the rebellion and its leader, Jefferson Davis. The Methodist Church withdrew its invitation for him to speak at a conference in Richmond, Davis's former capital city, after Foraker bitterly criticized Davis at a Grand Army of the Republic encampment in Cleveland. Foraker retreated not an inch and responded, “This man, Jeff Davis, represents only human slavery, the degradation of labor, the treason of secession and rebellion, the horrors and infamies of [the Confederate prisoner-of-war camps] Libby and Andersonville.”10

  A year later, as part of his reelection campaign for Ohio governor, Foraker tongue-lashed West Virginia governor Emanuel Wilson for criticizing the Union Army and for defending “those who organize Ku Klux Klans…and with the short gun and bull whip and all kinds of violence, with ballot box stuffing and all kinds of fraud…made the South solid.” Having dispatched Governor Wilson, Foraker next welcomed the challenge from Georgia governor John B. Gordon, a former Confederate general, to defend his aggressive attacks on the South. “We want peace and union on the basis of the results of war and no other. We were right and they were wrong.”11 For Fire Alarm Foraker, that was all there was to it. When President Grover Cleveland thought it was time to return captured Confederate regimental flags held by Northern states, Governor Foraker's response was simple, direct, and what he knew Ohioans wanted to hear: “No rebel flags will be returned while I am governor.” President Cleveland backed down, and Ohio kept the flags her sons had taken.12 Foraker had not held back from confronting a president. It would not be the last time.

  When he entered the Senate, Foraker tried to put the war behind him. Soothed possibly by the chamber's august serenity, he would speak not with the piercing clang of a fire bell but with the patient persuasion of the successful lawyer he had been and the statesman he hoped to become. Because of his impressive senatorial demeanor and bearing, he was selected by the Senate for the honor of reading George Washington's Farewell Address on Washington's birthday. He now addressed issues and took stands on matters broader in scope. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Pacific Islands and (what was then spelled) Porto Rico, he structured the territorial government for this island in the Caribbean that came under the protection of the Stars and Stripes in 1898. A critic nevertheless conceded it may have been “the most liberal territorial legislation in U.S. history.”13

  Becalmed as he now was, Foraker could still spit back. When President Roosevelt lumped him together with oil magnate John D. Rockefeller and railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman as part of the Wall Street “combination,” Foraker deflected the charge by poking fun at it and, by extension, at Roosevelt. Piously he recalled the only time he had been with Rockefeller was “twenty years ago or more…at the laying of the corner-stone of the Young Men's Christian Association Building [in] Cleveland.” As for Harriman, Foraker turned Roosevelt's accusation back onto him: it was true, Foraker admitted, he had been with Harriman, but only three times; two of them were at Roosevelt's White House, and the last time was when Harriman was an honored guest at the wedding of President Roosevelt's daughter.14

  TODAY IT SEEMS AN odd way to say thank you. A century ago, a standard award to present to a man, especially a politician, was an oversize silver trophy resting on a heavy base, girded with two or three handles on its sides, festooned with Greco-Roman figures to suggest a classical pedigree, and etched with names, dates, and events being commemorated. It was meant as a measure of respect and admiration. They called it a loving cup.

  On March 6, 1909, the black community in Washington presented one to Joseph Foraker, whose time in the Senate had ended three days earlier. The Afro-American Ledger, a Negro newspaper in nearby Baltimore, described his loving cup as “a beautiful work of the silversmith, standing nearly two feet high with three massive handles…. Around the base are the words, ‘Twenty-fifth U.S. Infantry;’ on the bowl the engraver has quoted from one of Foraker's speeches on Brownsville.”

  TWO DAYS BEFORE THE presentation to Senator Foraker, on the morning of the presidential inauguration, a storm seemingly from an ice age froze Washington to a stop. The National Weather Service deems the weather worse that day than any presidential inauguration in history.15 “I knew there would be a blizzard when I went out,” Roosevelt said.16 Ten inches of snow fell overnight, and more than six thousand workers shoveled through the darkness to remove fifty-eight thousand tons of it along the route the inaugural parade would take. Winds made things worse, downing trees and telephone lines. Only the occasional spectator ventured out onto the snow-choked streets between the White House and the Capitol, where the outgoing President Roosevelt with satisfaction would witness the success of his efforts to make William H. Taft his successor.

  President-elect Taft's swearing-in had to be moved inside to the warm Senate chamber, where, after taking the oath of office, President Taft delivered his inaugural address.17 The fears of Republicans that Taft's role in the Brownsville Incident might drain Negro votes from him and the Republicans turned out to be overblown. During the campaign, Taft had made calming (though bland and limited) statements to reassure black voters he had no intention of abandoning their constitutional protections. In an otherwise broadly ranging campaign speech in Hot Springs, Virginia, on August 5, 1908, he made sure to praise the Negro for his remarkable progress since emancipation. Referring to the Republican platform plank that called for justice for all men without regard to race or color and the explicit declaration for enforcement “without reservation in letter or spirit” of the post–Civil War constitutional amendments that outlawed slavery and articulated equal treatment for blacks, he said, “I stand with my party squarely on that plank.” In his first address to the nation as president, Taft's message for Negroes was discouraging. He expressed his “friendship for the south” and with an abandonment of syntax added, “It may well admit of doubt whether in the case of any race an appointment of any one of their number to a local office in a community in which the race feeling is so widespread and acute as to interfere with the ease and facility with which the local government business can be done by the appointee is of sufficient benefit by way of encouragement of the race to outweigh the recurrence and increase of race feelings which such an appointment is likely to engender.” As muddied as this sentence was, its meaning was clear: fewer black federal appointees in the South.18

  Negroes should not have been surprised. During the campaign, Taft told the South he believed that a “white man's government” was not inconsistent with the Constitution. The New York Times expressed sympathy for the idea. It editorialized, “The South has it in its power fully to protect itself from the domination of ignorant and unfit negro voters, and to secure that control of affairs by the more intelligent which for a long time at least, and probably for all time must be controlled by the whites.”19

  THE NEGRO COMMUNITY IN Washington, DC, at the turn of the twentieth century would have surprised the editor of the New York Times. In the nation's capital, the “center of the black aristocracy in the United States,” black culture and intellectual life flourished without the control or even help of whites.20 Washington contained a strong, smart, successful, educated, and vibrant community of what has been dubbed by a historian “Aristocrats of Color.” Along with this black upper crust there was, because of the availability of government jobs on a more or less integrated basis, the strongest black middle class of any American city. Washington was where Joseph Foraker made his stand, and in Washington at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, the black community would show its appreciation to him.

  The church was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) movement founded in Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century by a former slave named Richard Allen, who bought his freedom and become a licensed Methodist minister. In 1816 it became the nation's first independent black denomination.
A few years later in Washington, black parishioners in the mainly white Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church, chafing under its discriminatory treatment, divided into two AME churches that would recombine in 1870 into the renamed Metropolitan AME Church.

  Its building, dedicated in 1886, was in the Victorian Gothic style. Though never as upper class as some other black churches in Washington, from its re-created medieval style, a passerby on the street might have thought it was a well-endowed white church. Frederick Douglass was a parishioner and spoke from its pulpit. His funeral and that of the United States senator from Mississippi Blanche K. Bruce were conducted at the church.21 Many years later, Martin Luther King Jr. would speak to its congregation and to the world.

  If the Metropolitan AME Church was the right venue, Archibald Grimké, the principal speaker that evening, a man of talent and background, was the perfect choice to express the community's gratitude. He was a thoughtful speaker whose speeches were considered literary gems.22 Born a slave, his father was Henry Grimké, a plantation owner in upstate South Carolina, and his mixed-ancestry mother, Nancy, was Henry's slave. Unlike the more common situation in which a master, to satisfy a sexual craving or simply on a whim, would ravish the slave of his choice, Henry, after his wife's death, developed as committed a relationship with Nancy as would be possible in the antebellum South. She even came to adopt the name Nancy Grimké when referring to herself. Henry allowed her and their sons—Archibald (as a boy, called Archie), Francis, and John—a house of their own with a small patch for a garden. He brought Nancy into his own house when she was ill and cared for her until she was well. At Nancy's insistence, he permitted the boys to get an education at a school in Charleston for free Negroes. Still, though he was affectionate with his black sons, more so Archie than the other two, Henry nevertheless never acknowledged them as his children.

  Archie and his family may have benefitted from his father's favorable attention to them, but they would suffer the consequences of Henry's neglectfulness when he died. Trusting his white son Montague to continue the more sympathetic treatment his black family was accustomed to, Henry gave them to him in his will, believing that informal instructions would protect them. Henry was hardly in the ground when Montague ignored his father's intentions. Archie learned that blacks could pay for white people's carelessness as well as their cruelty.

  But not all whites: not Henry's sisters Angelina and Sarah. Before the Civil War, revolted by slavery and their family's enthusiastic and profitable embrace of it, the sisters cut their bonds with them and the South and moved to Boston, the center of Northern abolitionism. After the war, when they found out they had black nephews, they reached out to the boys. The aunts thereafter stayed close to Archie and his brother Francis, established a loving and committed family relationship, and guided the boys into becoming strong and successful adults. Archie never forgot what they did for him and what he owed them. He would name his only daughter after his “Aunt Angelina.”

  With his Northern family's encouragement and financial aid, Grimké continued the education his mother made sure he began back in Charleston and eventually was admitted to Harvard Law School, where one of his classmates was Henry Cabot Lodge, who would be Roosevelt's best friend.

  Grimké's first encounter with Foraker had left him disappointed. In 1906, when the Senate was considering President Roosevelt's Hepburn Act to regulate railroad rates, Grimké met with the senator and asked him to propose an amendment to the legislation to eliminate segregation on railroad cars. Foraker suggested the act require that railroads offer the same services and accommodations to all passengers paying the same fare. Grimké, though, knew the cars for blacks would never be equal to those for whites, and even if they were, segregating the cars was itself the evil he wanted eliminated. Foraker's suggested amendment implicitly blessed this indignity.23

  Eventually, Republicans on the conference committee scissored Foraker's poorly considered language from the final bill but made no accommodation for what Grimké wanted. The Hepburn Act passed, Roosevelt had his rate regulation, and the hopes of Negro railroad travelers were left at the station.24

  This was forgiven in the winter of 1906–1907, when Senator Foraker pressed the Senate to investigate Roosevelt's Brownsville actions. In his columns in the New York Age, Grimké praised Foraker and portrayed him as heroic for shouldering the challenge to Theodore Roosevelt.25 Now, for himself and for all black Americans, Grimké was about to thank Foraker and make it clear just how much they appreciated his efforts.26

  Coming to the pulpit, Grimké looked out at more than three thousand people. It was the largest event ever held in the city, according to the local Negro newspaper, the Washington Bee.27 Police fretted over the danger from an even greater crush and ordered the doors from the street closed, denying entry to three hundred more. Conspicuously on the podium that night was First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, discharged from the Twenty-Fifth Infantry and from the army by President Roosevelt's order after twenty-seven years of service, which included fighting in Cuba alongside Roosevelt's Rough Riders.28 Close by Sanders was a small bipartisan group of members of Congress who had supported Foraker against Roosevelt.

  In a place of honor on the podium facing the audience sat Senator Foraker. Over six feet tall when standing, still trim at two hundred pounds, he was a handsome sixty-two-year-old man. With a full head of steel-gray hair and a carefully trimmed handlebar mustache to match, he looked every inch the United States senator he no longer was.

  IN A VOICE GENTLED by the easy drawl of the Low Country of his youth, Grimké began to speak. His studies at Harvard and his many years in the North could not rinse the accent from him, and it was said it identified him as the gentleman he surely was.

  He immediately took on Theodore Roosevelt, reminding people how unprepared they had been for Roosevelt's action. “[There] is no precedent.” The act was “not warranted by law or justice,” “cruel in the highest degree, and a wanton abuse of executive power.” As if unable to get Roosevelt's betrayal out of his system, Grimké harshly criticized him again and again, calling what he did a “peculiar hardship,” a “crushing injustice,” a “cruel surprise.” Even more grievous, “crueler than death itself,” was that it was the “blow of an old friend” and therefore “the unkindest blow of all,” something “one is never prepared for and when it falls, the wound which it inflicts cuts deeper than flesh and blood, for the iron of it enters the soul itself.”29

  For Grimké, Roosevelt's betrayal was personal. A Democrat for almost twenty years, in 1904, he went over to the Republicans to support Theodore Roosevelt and urged all Negroes to vote for him. “I am going to [vote for Roosevelt] because the South has taken from me any disposition to do otherwise, since it compels me to cast my vote for the man whom it hates as it hates no other man because he dared as President to have [Booker T. Washington] lunch with him at the White House…. What is the issue, the paramount issue, raised by the South between itself and the President is the right of the Negro to equal treatment with all other citizens.”30

  Four years later, after the lesson of Brownsville and what he saw as other Rooseveltian failures to appreciate and do something about Negro concerns, Grimké changed his mind again. “[Roosevelt] has nothing to say [about] the everlasting question of the rights…of the colored people of the United States. They are denied in every Southern state the right to vote, the equal protection of the laws, and discriminated against and oppressed in countless ways by bad laws and…are sent to death every day by mobs. All of which denials and oppressions and violences are in open and defiant violations of the Constitution of the nation, which guaranties [sic] to these people equal citizenship and equality of rights with all other races. The President's ears which catches [sic] all other sounds the world over fails to catch the bitter cry of 10,000,000 of his fellow citizens merely because they are black and their oppressors white.”31

  Having purged himself of his rage, Grimké calmed his speech as he turned his attention
to Foraker. Adopting the language of war as a gesture to the soldiers Foraker defended and to make clear the stake each side had in winning, Grimké cried out, “The enemies of the Black Battalion…whether with their sappers and miners, or assaulting columns, there they found [Foraker] alert, dauntless, invincible, their sappers and miners hoisted with their own petard, their assaulting columns routed and driven to cover before the withering, the deadly fire from the flashing cannons of his facts, his logic, his law and his eloquence.”32 Every mention of the former senator's name by Grimké drew applause and wild enthusiasm from the audience. Using the oratorical flourishes more common to that era, he described “the grandeur of soul of a great man,” who, “sleepless on the Senate floor defending a just cause” with the “genius of an orator, lawyer and defender of the first rank[,]…carried the case of the Black Battalion in his big and tireless brain, in his big and gentle heart as a mother carries under her bosom her unborn babe.” Turning to face Foraker, Grimké asked, “Sir, did you know what love went out for you during those tremendous months of toil and struggle, and what prayers from the grateful hearts of ten millions of people?” Taking notice of the loss of Foraker's Senate seat and blaming it on Brownsville, Grimké told his listeners how this could have been avoided if the senator from Ohio had “chosen to play the part of the defender of President Roosevelt's wanton abuse and usurpation of executive power.” “For he preferred to suffer affliction with the Black Battalion and to suffer defeat for the Senatorship rather than enjoy power and office as the price of desertion of the cause of these helpless men.”33

  Grimké, possibly remembering his own father's mixed feelings for his black sons, was sending mixed messages. Not once does he refer to Foraker as a friend. He used the word friend only twice, and both times in an unhappy context. Negroes are “without many friends.” President Roosevelt, who proved faithless and discharged the Black Battalion, was an “old friend.” This last use was a rebuke to Booker T. Washington, who regularly referred to Roosevelt as “our friend.”34 After Brownsville, when Washington refused to abandon his politically rewarding relationship with Roosevelt even while regretting Roosevelt's grievous blunder in Brownsville, he was fair game to a disgusted Grimké.