Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [276]
In his last official act before returning to Washington from Oyster Bay, Roosevelt sent Taft six thousand additional troops. “I congratulate you most heartily upon the admirable way you have handled the whole matter,” he cabled, adding that he had instructed the State Department to continue Cuban foreign relations “as if no change had occurred.” It was crucial that all islanders understood that he had intervened only because the government had collapsed. “I am most anxious that there should be no bloodshed between Americans and Cubans.”
Back in the White House on 1 October, he chafed at not having Taft at hand to help him decide finally between Moody and Lurton for the Supreme Court. He did not trust his own judgment on matters of Constitutional import, and in this case could hardly ask the Attorney General for an opinion.
Even more critical was the ugly matter of Brownsville. Ideally, Taft should be in charge of it, as Secretary of War. But until a provisional governor could be installed, somewhere around midmonth, Roosevelt would have to supervise the Army’s ongoing investigation. It was fraught with political risk. Color had become an issue in the congressional campaign, after the recent outbreak, in Atlanta, of some of the worst race violence on record. Twenty black men had been killed and hundreds wounded at the hands of a mob crazed by reports of “an unusual number” of Negro assaults on white women. Roosevelt remained silent on the massacre. He did not even mention race relations in his “platform” address of the season, a somewhat repetitive-sounding denunciation of corporate greed, delivered on 4 October in Harrisburg.
Only those with ears attuned to the clang of Rooseveltian clichés detected a new overtone of impatience with executive restraints. He paid homage, for the gratification of his audience, to the Pennsylvanian jurist and Founding Father James Wilson (1742–1798), and cited Wilson’s belief that “one uniform and comprehensive system of government and laws” arose in response to frequently conflicting decisions of state and federal judges. That super-jurisdiction was, in effect, the will of “the sovereign people” who, in 1906, were determined “to assert their sovereignty over the great corporations of the day.”
To Henry Cabot Lodge, knowing Roosevelt’s tendency to use the word sovereign as if it were a personal pronoun, such statements sounded more like Nietzsche than Wilson. But the Senator worried only that his old friend was bearing down too hard on businessmen as opposed to radical agitators. Had Lodge a deeper knowledge of Wilson’s philosophy, he might have come across a ruminative passage that was practically pure Theodore: “If I am asked … how do you know that you ought to do that, of which your conscience enjoins the performance? I can only say, I feel that such is my duty. Here investigation must stop; reasoning can go no farther.”
Propelled by just such a sense of moral certainty, hearing answers rather than questions and inviting no argument, Roosevelt decided it was time to bring the Brownsville affair to a conclusion. He ordered his new Inspector General, Ernest A. Garlington, to proceed to Oklahoma and Texas and interview the quarantined members of the Twenty-fifth Infantry personally. “If the guilty parties cannot be discovered, the President approves the recommendation [by Major Blocksom] that the whole three companies implicated in this atrocious outrage should be dismissed and the men forever debarred from reenlisting in the Army or Navy of the United States.”
WHILE AWAITING GENERAL Garlington’s report, the President played host to Arthur Lee. His old friend arrived from England on 12