Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [271]
Some damaging hard evidence, however, indicated that the allegations were not altogether fanciful. Major Penrose reported that he had been presented with seventy or more Army-rifle shell casings that matched those clean rifles. Exhibit B was a dropped soldier’s cap. Regretfully but unanimously, Penrose and his four white junior officers concluded that men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry must be guilty.
Roosevelt waited no longer than 20 August before deciding, on the basis of a second appeal from the Brownsville citizens’ committee, that Fort Brown should be “temporarily abandoned.” He ordered the battalion to march to nearby Fort Ringgold, pending a full investigation by the Capitol Army Chief of Staff. No sooner had he done so than a preliminary report from the Assistant Inspector General of the Southwestern Division persuaded him to move them much farther, beyond posse range. Major Augustus P. Blocksom confirmed most of Major Penrose’s findings, and unequivocally described the rioters as “soldiers.” Blocksom allowed that no positive identifications had been made, but, in words not calculated to delay the President’s action, warned of possible “mob violence” if the soldiers were not moved soon.
Roosevelt then sent the bulk of the battalion to quarantine in Fort Reno, Oklahoma. Twelve suspects fingered by another Army inspector were to be held in the guardhouse at San Antonio, while he awaited further evidence of their guilt from Major Blocksom.
It came on 29 August, and was unequivocal. “That the raiders were soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry cannot be doubted,” Blocksom wrote. Their commanding officers were not responsible for permitting the violence, since at first sound of gunfire downtown they had imagined the fort was being attacked, and issued a defensive call to arms. Only when the mayor of Brownsville showed them the casings the next morning had they realized their misapprehension. Major Penrose was now conscientiously trying to identify the perpetrators himself, but could not get a single black interviewee to name names. It was clear to Blocksom that the men, veterans and juniors alike, were engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. If they did not break ranks soon, they should all “be discharged from the service and debarred from reenlistment in the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.”
Blocksom added a personal observation that “the colored soldier is much more aggressive in his attitude on the social equality question than he used to be.”
THE SAME COULD BE said of Theodore Roosevelt. Over the last year and a half, his Negro policy had noticeably hardened. He remained incapable of the race hatred of Benjamin R. Tillman, or even the patrician disdain of Owen Wister. Yet he had no quarrel with those whites in Brownsville who believed that blacks were “inferior socially.” Nor, with another round of congressional elections looming, did he want to jeopardize his new popularity in the South. That region’s white voters had welcomed him extravagantly last fall, in part because he had atoned for his early radicalism. His one outburst against “lynch law” was forgiven, if only because it had been provoked by the Governor of Arkansas.
More ominously, he had begun to sound a theme that played well in Brownsville: “The colored man who fails to condemn crime in another colored man … is the worst enemy of his own people, as well as an enemy to all the people.”
THE PRESIDENT’S SANGUIS was again in evidence on 3 September, when a fighting fleet three miles long saluted him in Long Island Sound. “By George! Doesn’t the sight of those big warships make one’s blood tingle?”
It was the greatest naval display of his presidency so far. Three out of every four of these white leviathans had been built since the war with Spain. During his first term alone, Congress had authorized thirty-one new vessels, including ten battleships. Two new all-big-gun battleships were due to begin construction in the fall. The United States Navy, fifth in the world when he took office, was now third. Admittedly,