Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [278]
Ignoring him, Roosevelt commandeered Taft and Root for five days of tense consultations about the Supreme Court matter. Three sitting Justices and four Senators helped him decide that William H. Moody would be his third appointee to the Bench. The official announcement was delayed, for propriety, until after the elections, but Moody’s name was leaked on 24 October, to the great satisfaction of voters from Massachusetts.
General Garlington’s Brownsville report reached the War Department around the same time. It was remarkable for a lack of evidence so total as to inculpate him for word-spinning. He stated that during exhaustive interviews with the main suspects in San Antonio, he had encountered nothing but “a wooden, stolid look” as each soldier, in turn, “positively denied any knowledge” of the affair. This, to an investigating officer brought up in Greenville, South Carolina, could mean only the opposite. He had called them all back in groups and made sure they understood the President’s ultimatum: if no man confessed or informed, all would be adjudged guilty. They remained silent.
Garlington had then proceeded to Fort Reno and interviewed the troops held in quarantine. Again, he was frustrated by the conspiratorial caginess he took to be typical of black men: “The secretive nature of the race, where crimes to members of their color are charged, is well known.” He concluded “that the firing into the houses of the citizens of Brownsville … was done by enlisted men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry,” and recommended that every man in the battalion be held responsible for the crimes of the few. As the President had stipulated, they should be dishonorably discharged.
On 30 October, Roosevelt summoned Booker T. Washington to the White House, in a clear indication that he was worried about how Negro voters might react. Election Day was just one week away, and the political situation nationwide was volatile. The Democratic Party had recovered from its debacle under Alton B. Parker two years before, and—as Senator Foraker gloomily observed—stood to gain from progressive/conservative infighting among Republicans. Race and labor were key issues, with the Industrial Workers of the World fanning radical discontent among Western miners, and Southern whites wildly agitated by the Atlanta riots. (In Tennessee, rumors circulated of “Negro companies drilling by night.”) William Randolph Hearst was showing alarming strength as the Democratic nominee for Governor of New York, against Roosevelt’s personal candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, a coldly brilliant Republican lawyer.
Washington listened with misgivings as the President told him that he was about to dismiss 167 Negro soldiers, without honor and without trial. He had just been in Atlanta, and sensed that Roosevelt was making a terrible mistake. American blacks would have trouble understanding why “our friend” (as Washington always called him) should rush to judgment at such a time, without giving a single man of the Twenty-fifth Infantry a chance to testify in court. Even more distressing was the likelihood that redneck racists everywhere would applaud Roosevelt’s willingness to act on what passed for evidence in lynch country: unsubstantiated charges of rape, instant identifications of black men last seen in darkness, the “wooden, stolid look” of Negro terror, and a few dozen shell casings ejected from clean rifles.
WASHINGTON’S DISTRESS GREW after leaving the Executive Office. On 3 November, he wrote begging Roosevelt not to do anything precipitous about Brownsville until they could meet again. “There is some information which I must put before you before you take final action.” But his letter arrived at the wrong psychological moment. Roosevelt’s blood was up, after two days of hunting wild turkey at Pine Knot. It was Election Eve, and he