Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [279]
“HE WOULD HAVE LOST HIS SEAT, AND VERY LIKELY HIS WIFE.”
Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, ca. 1906 (photo credit 27.2)
Root’s statement had pulverized the Democratic campaign, not to mention Hearst’s chances of running for President in 1908. Roosevelt could not wait to get to a voting booth to add to the rout. He had no interest in belaboring Brownsville any further. “You can not have any information to give me privately to which I could pay heed, my dear Mr. Washington,” he wrote, “because the information on which I act came out of the investigation itself.”
With that, he left for Oyster Bay by overnight train. His discharge order, dated 5 November 1906, was not released for another thirty-six hours, until after Republicans had gone to the polls to elect Hughes Governor of New York, and re-elect Congressman Nicholas Longworth in Cincinnati. Had just half of Nick’s three-thousand-odd black constituents voted against him, he would have lost his seat, and possibly his wife.
Across the nation, Roosevelt’s popularity helped contain the Democratic surge. The GOP lost twenty-eight seats in the House, but retained its working majority, and gained four seats in the Senate. It won Massachusetts and Ohio, and Roosevelt was pleased to see Frank R. Gooding, Idaho’s antiradical Governor, re-elected in a rebuff to the Western Federation of Miners. Representative James Wadsworth was punished for opposing last spring’s Meat Bill, and sent back to the farm to inspect his own beeves at leisure. Sales of The Jungle notwithstanding, socialist candidates suffered everywhere.
“Well, we have certainly smitten Ammon hip and thigh,” Roosevelt wrote to Alice.
Meanwhile, blacks fresh from the polls pondered his Special Order number 266, as transmitted by the War Department:
By direction of the President, the following-named enlisted men [in] Companies B, C, and D, Twenty-fifth Infantry, certain members of which organizations participated in the riotous disturbance which occurred in Brownsville, Tex., on the night of August 13, 1906, will be discharged without honor from the Army by their respective commanding officers and forever debarred from reenlisting in the Army or Navy of the United States, as well as from employment in any civil capacity under the Government.
There followed 167 names, including that of First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, who had fought in Cuba in ’98, and remembered dividing rations of hardtack and bacon with Colonel Roosevelt after the Battle of Las Guasimas; Corporals Solomon P. O’Neil, Temple Thornton, and Winter Washington; Cooks Leroy Horn and Solomon Johnson; Musicians Joseph Jones, Henry Odom, and Hoytt Robinson; and Privates Battier Bailey, Carolina De Saussure, Ernest English, Thomas Jefferson, Willie Lemons, Joseph Shanks, John Slow, Zacharia Sparks, William Van Hook, and Dorsie Willis.
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON was not surprised by the swiftness and unanimity of black reaction. For the last five years, he sadly noted, Theodore Roosevelt had been the idol of America’s ten million Negroes. Now, within days—“I might almost say hours”—the President had become a pariah.
Telegrams of protest began to flow into the White House, not all from blacks. Roosevelt replied to one with an arrogance of tone and language that increasingly reflected his attitude to criticism: “The order in question will in no way be rescinded or modified. The action was precisely such as I would have taken had the soldiers guilty of the misconduct been white men.… I can only say that I feel the most profound indifference to any possible attack which can be made on me in this matter.”
On 16 November, the first dishonorable-discharge papers were served on men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry. Roosevelt’s name was mentioned at a black convention that day, and was received in complete silence. But by then the President was in Panama,