Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [288]
By the time the Senate Committee on Military Affairs began its investigation of Brownsville on 4 February, Foraker was about as welcome at the White House as Benjamin Tillman had been in 1902. He and his wife began to notice signs of social pariahdom. Friends stopped visiting their house by daylight. James Garfield, a regular dinner giver, sent no invitations, complaining that Foraker was “trouble.” A “journalist” of strange ubiquity was seen making notes whenever the Forakers went out. Most ominously, Foraker discovered—in an experience, again, not new to Tillman—that his mail was being opened and read.
Roosevelt showed no outward concern about the committee hearings, which promised to last, on and off, for at least a year. He had the assurance of Foraker’s colleagues that, whatever new evidence might come to light, he was entitled, as Commander-in-Chief, to uphold his own discharges.
A VISITOR TO THE White House on 13 February found the President discussing race relations of a far more complex sort with Root and Taft. For the last four months, “Yellow Peril” agitation had been violently resurgent in California, precipitated by the San Francisco Board of Education’s decision to segregate Japanese schoolchildren. The order made no distinction between the children of long-term, Americanized Japanese residents and those of immigrant laborers fresh off the boat—currently disembarking, or swimming ashore, at the rate of one thousand per month. Any child with sloe eyes on the West Coast would now learn what it was like to be a black child in Alabama.
Roosevelt sat on the front edge of his chair, talking vehemently, as usual, while Taft lounged, twiddling his thumbs. Root stretched out his legs and gazed, for perhaps the thousandth time in his life, at Theodore over steepled forefingers. The visitor, State Senator Everett Colby of New Jersey, was struck by the quizzical expression on each Secretary’s face. Roosevelt was giving his views on immigration, and veering, in a way Root knew only too well, toward a monologue on the “splendid qualities” of Nipponese culture and customs.
Since the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan had been justifiably proud of its accession to first-power status. Any declaration of prejudice by a Pacific Rim nation (which was how California was viewed through Eastern eyes) was an insult too painful to be borne. In the words of William Sturgis Bigelow, one of the President’s principal advisers on Far Eastern affairs, “They don’t care—broadly speaking—what is done to them as long as it does not seem to be done to them as Japanese.”
Roosevelt had tried, and failed, to make the Golden State observe the Golden Rule. Some of the most passionate language in his last Message to Congress had been devoted to a plea for respect for Japan as “one of the greatest of civilized nations.” He noted that San Franciscans had been happy to accept one hundred thousand dollars in earthquake-emergency aid from the Japanese in 1906, before shutting their relatives out of the city school system and abusing them in other ways, simply “because of their efficiency as workers.” This last remark had hit home with local labor unions, who were the real agitators in San Francisco, desperate to repatriate every “coolie” in the city. When Roosevelt followed up with a request for a new immigration act, “specifically providing for the naturalization of Japanese who come here intending to become American citizens,” the San Francisco Chronicle had called him unpatriotic, and the Californian congressional delegation began to act like ambassadors from a besieged country.
Senator Tillman, meanwhile, was seized by an apocalyptic vision of the Administration integrating “Mongolian” schoolchildren with white ones in the West, then doing the same with black schoolchildren in the South. He shouted himself so hoarse on the subject of race that London’s St. James Gazette seriously questioned his sanity.
Roosevelt