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Taking on Theodore Roosevelt: How One Senator Defied the President on Brownsville and Shook American Politics
In August 1906, black soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas, were accused of going on a lawless rampage in which shots were fired, one man was killed, and another wounded. Because the perpetrators could never be positively identified, President Theodore Roosevelt took the highly unusual step of discharging without honor all one hundred sixty-seven members of the black battalion on duty the night of the shooting.This book investigates the controversial action of an otherwise much-lauded president, the challenge to his decision from a senator of his own party, and the way in which Roosevelt's uncompromising stance affected African American support of the party of Lincoln.Using primary sources to reconstruct the events, attorney Harry Lembeck begins at the end when Senator Joseph Foraker is honored by the black community in Washington, DC, for his efforts to reverse Roosevelt's decision. Lembeck highlights Foraker's courageous resistance to his own president. In addition, he examines the larger context of racism in the era of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, pointing out that Roosevelt treated discrimination against the Japanese in the West much differently. He also notes often-ignored evidence concerning the role of Roosevelt's illegitimate cousin in the president's decision, the possibility that Foraker and Roosevelt had discussed a compromise, and other hitherto overlooked facts about the case.Sixty-seven years after the event, President Richard Nixon finally undid Roosevelt's action by honorably discharging the men of the Brownsville Battalion. But, as this thoroughly researched and engrossing narrative shows, the damage done to both Roosevelt's reputation and black support for the Republican Party lingers to this day.
560 pages, Hardcover
First published January 6, 2015
About the author
Harry Lembeck
1 book5 followersMr. Lembeck writes for the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal. An active member of the TRA, he has been its vice president and on its executive committee and board of trustees.
In January 2015, Prometheus Books published Mr. Lembeck’s Taking on Theodore Roosevelt: How One Senator Defied the President on Brownsville and Shook American Politics, a popular historical narrative of the Brownsville Incident in 1906. Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry posted at Fort Brown, Texas were accused of shooting up the town, killing one civilian and seriously wounding another. As commander-in-chief, President Roosevelt, without benefit of court-martial or other trial, discharged every black solider at Fort Brown on the night of the shooting. It is considered the worst thing Roosevelt did as President.
Mr. Lembeck has served on the boards of directors of the Marietta Museum of History, Theatre in the Square (the second largest theater in Georgia) and Bulloch Hall, the historic home in which Theodore Roosevelt’s mother, Martha “Mittie” Bulloch, grew up and where she and his father were married. He enjoys speaking before service clubs, e.g. Rotary and Kiwanis, and other civic organizations. People who have heard his presentations say he knows his subject very well, and he is spirited, informative, and entertaining. He was a Marine officer between 1967 and 1971 and served in the continental United States, on Okinawa, and in Vietnam. He is a native New Yorker and a double alumnus of The Ohio State University (B.A. and J.D.). His wife is Dr. Emily Lembeck, Superintendent of the Marietta (Georgia) City Schools and the 2012 Georgia School Superintendent of the Year. They have two sons and (for the moment) five grandchildren.
In January 2015, Prometheus Books published Mr. Lembeck’s Taking on Theodore Roosevelt: How One Senator Defied the President on Brownsville and Shook American Politics, a popular historical narrative of the Brownsville Incident in 1906. Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry posted at Fort Brown, Texas were accused of shooting up the town, killing one civilian and seriously wounding another. As commander-in-chief, President Roosevelt, without benefit of court-martial or other trial, discharged every black solider at Fort Brown on the night of the shooting. It is considered the worst thing Roosevelt did as President.
Mr. Lembeck has served on the boards of directors of the Marietta Museum of History, Theatre in the Square (the second largest theater in Georgia) and Bulloch Hall, the historic home in which Theodore Roosevelt’s mother, Martha “Mittie” Bulloch, grew up and where she and his father were married. He enjoys speaking before service clubs, e.g. Rotary and Kiwanis, and other civic organizations. People who have heard his presentations say he knows his subject very well, and he is spirited, informative, and entertaining. He was a Marine officer between 1967 and 1971 and served in the continental United States, on Okinawa, and in Vietnam. He is a native New Yorker and a double alumnus of The Ohio State University (B.A. and J.D.). His wife is Dr. Emily Lembeck, Superintendent of the Marietta (Georgia) City Schools and the 2012 Georgia School Superintendent of the Year. They have two sons and (for the moment) five grandchildren.
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May 11, 2019
This is a simply excellent book (with one caveat about its Afterward) about what is arguably the ugliest blot on Theodore Roosevelt's presidency: The discharge of the entire First Battalion of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, one of two black infantry regiments that along with two black cavalry units were and are often known as "Buffalo Soldiers," after a shooting rampage in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906. More can be read about the Brownsville Affair at Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Lembeck does a thorough job of retracing the initial investigation by both Brownsville/Cameron County officials on one side, and the white officers at Fort Brown on the other. He puts this in the context of how black troops had been stationed at Texas and elsewhere in the South before during post-Reconstruction times but Jim Crow pressure was ramping up to push them out.
Jumping ahead in the book ... Lembeck ultimately shows how Foraker's Senate investigation showed that both Mauser rifles (popular in bordering Mexico at that time) and Winchesters, sometimes straight up, sometimes with mild rechambering, could fire Springfield 1903 ammo and thus civilians could have fired the bullets found at the shooting area. In addition, soldiers on base were usually supplied with "guard" ammunition, not "live" ammunition, of lower firepower.
After that, Lembeck looks at Roosevelt's own investigation, presuppositions, and likely degrees of racism.
Just two months after the incident, Roosevelt was already resolved on discharging the entire battalion. He was operating, it seems, on two issues, one likely wrong and one surely so.
The issue that was likely wrong was that the soldiers did the shooting.
The issue that was surely wrong was a racism-based assumption that blacks in general practiced some code of omerta.
As for the likely wrong?
First, whites in Brownsville had reason to conduct ... well, a false flag. Specifically, a couple of bar-casino operations in town practiced Jim Crow and wouldn't sell to black soldiers. They wanted a white outfit back. There were other reasons besides this. One was the allegation by a married white woman that she had been accosted by a black man. (AFAIK, and Lembeck doesn't say otherwise, no charges were ever filed here.)
Now, TR? TR vs Joseph Foraker is the cornerstone of this book, and on TR's side, other elements of apparent racism, plus massive vindictiveness, paint a picture that's that of a sometimes ugly bully.
Teddy had made history a few years prior by being the first president to dine with an African American at the White House, when Booker T. Washington was invited. (Lincoln had received Frederick Douglass at the White House, but had not actually had dinner with him.)
The backlash from Democrats, and even worries from some Republicans, was huge. While TR remained in contact with Washington, he started distancing himself from the almost totally Republican still, at this time, black America in general.
This then became a bit of an issue in the 1904 general and 1906 midterm elections. (Eventually, even despite his Southern origins, many blacks explored voting for Wilson in 1912, and there was a modest shift his way — a shift soon disappointed.)
Anyway, TR had determined on discharge and nothing would change his mind — not Senator Foraker, not Secretary of War Taft and not Booker T. Washington. As a politician, he waited until after the 1906 midterms were in the bag to announce his decision, and he eventually modified it to say the discharged men could seek other federal employment, and eventually allowed some to apply to re-enlist without guarantees, but that was that.
They were given a "less than honorable" (not "dishonorable") discharge, but it still felt like punishment to Foraker and others.
As for TR's lack of give?
He was the "generalissimo of a banana republic junta," Lembeck says on page 240. That sounds about right.
Back to other details of TR's possible racism.
In his 1906 message to Congress — the older version of a State of the Union until Wilson — he said lynched blacks actually were rapists and other blacks were to blame for their lynching. At other times, he blamed other problems, but he never did explicitly blame lynchers. I've often wondered if he was, behind overcoming asthma and being a manly man to please dad, a bit of a momma's boy to his southern belle mom.
Back to Brownsville. When TR was pushed to do a follow-up investigation beyond the original city-county one, and beyond the Army one, and ignoring the Army one by officers of the unit, it was still to get the conclusion he'd already decided on.
All of this came to a fore with Foraker at the Gridiron Club dinner in 1907. (The club still exists, and for the unfamiliar, is kind of like the White House Correspondents' Association, and their annual dinners, and criticisms thereof, are also similar.)
Anyway, TR launched a roomful of spleen at Foraker at the dinner. Foraker, also present, responded with a glaze of civility covering returned invective in kind.
Eventually, Foraker's senate investigation couldn't find any bugabears, as it was dependent on TR and Taft to supply information and it never subpoeaned anybody. This all, in turn was due to the chair of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Charles Warren of Wyoming, owing TR a favor after he quashed an investigation into Warren allegedly illegally fencing off public land, followed by TR then "accepting the resignation" of his Interior Secretary.
This alone would be worth a mini-book, as it points out that TR was Just.Another.Politician in many ways and could be a hypocrite on environmental issues, too.
==
That said, there is that caveat about the Afterward.
Lembeck relates a story about James Amos, whose father was a black policeman in DC and who eventually became TR's valet while he was in the White House. Supposedly, Amos one night overheard TR talking with Roosevelt's bastard cousin, Granville Fortescue, who had been an Army lieutenant. Supposedly Fortescue got some of the troopers to visit the White House clandestinely and admit their guilt.
I find this much harder to believe than does Lembeck.
First, given that troops and officers had already investigated and found that soldiers didn't do it, why would they now say they did? Lembeck claims TR didn't go public because of a "gentleman's word." Well, given what he said about black omerta, would he offer such an agreement, or honor it in a pinch if he did? Second, that claim still ignores the base issue.
Third, it ignores the issue of motive on the part of Amos, who didn't tell the story for public consumption (it seems) until his memoirs. Amos worked in Customs and the Interior Department, then the Burns Detective Agency, then the FBI. TR was dead when he applied to join the FBI, but Taft and other leading characters were not. Amos went on to be an FBI special agent for 32 years, one of the very, very few blacks in the agency. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/new...
Showing the unevenness of Wikipedia, he has no Wiki page.
==
One final note.
Some people may think TR had still advanced beyond other GOP presidents since the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction. Lembeck indicates it's the other way around. Sorry, TR fans.
Lembeck does a thorough job of retracing the initial investigation by both Brownsville/Cameron County officials on one side, and the white officers at Fort Brown on the other. He puts this in the context of how black troops had been stationed at Texas and elsewhere in the South before during post-Reconstruction times but Jim Crow pressure was ramping up to push them out.
Jumping ahead in the book ... Lembeck ultimately shows how Foraker's Senate investigation showed that both Mauser rifles (popular in bordering Mexico at that time) and Winchesters, sometimes straight up, sometimes with mild rechambering, could fire Springfield 1903 ammo and thus civilians could have fired the bullets found at the shooting area. In addition, soldiers on base were usually supplied with "guard" ammunition, not "live" ammunition, of lower firepower.
After that, Lembeck looks at Roosevelt's own investigation, presuppositions, and likely degrees of racism.
Just two months after the incident, Roosevelt was already resolved on discharging the entire battalion. He was operating, it seems, on two issues, one likely wrong and one surely so.
The issue that was likely wrong was that the soldiers did the shooting.
The issue that was surely wrong was a racism-based assumption that blacks in general practiced some code of omerta.
As for the likely wrong?
First, whites in Brownsville had reason to conduct ... well, a false flag. Specifically, a couple of bar-casino operations in town practiced Jim Crow and wouldn't sell to black soldiers. They wanted a white outfit back. There were other reasons besides this. One was the allegation by a married white woman that she had been accosted by a black man. (AFAIK, and Lembeck doesn't say otherwise, no charges were ever filed here.)
Now, TR? TR vs Joseph Foraker is the cornerstone of this book, and on TR's side, other elements of apparent racism, plus massive vindictiveness, paint a picture that's that of a sometimes ugly bully.
Teddy had made history a few years prior by being the first president to dine with an African American at the White House, when Booker T. Washington was invited. (Lincoln had received Frederick Douglass at the White House, but had not actually had dinner with him.)
The backlash from Democrats, and even worries from some Republicans, was huge. While TR remained in contact with Washington, he started distancing himself from the almost totally Republican still, at this time, black America in general.
This then became a bit of an issue in the 1904 general and 1906 midterm elections. (Eventually, even despite his Southern origins, many blacks explored voting for Wilson in 1912, and there was a modest shift his way — a shift soon disappointed.)
Anyway, TR had determined on discharge and nothing would change his mind — not Senator Foraker, not Secretary of War Taft and not Booker T. Washington. As a politician, he waited until after the 1906 midterms were in the bag to announce his decision, and he eventually modified it to say the discharged men could seek other federal employment, and eventually allowed some to apply to re-enlist without guarantees, but that was that.
They were given a "less than honorable" (not "dishonorable") discharge, but it still felt like punishment to Foraker and others.
As for TR's lack of give?
He was the "generalissimo of a banana republic junta," Lembeck says on page 240. That sounds about right.
Back to other details of TR's possible racism.
In his 1906 message to Congress — the older version of a State of the Union until Wilson — he said lynched blacks actually were rapists and other blacks were to blame for their lynching. At other times, he blamed other problems, but he never did explicitly blame lynchers. I've often wondered if he was, behind overcoming asthma and being a manly man to please dad, a bit of a momma's boy to his southern belle mom.
Back to Brownsville. When TR was pushed to do a follow-up investigation beyond the original city-county one, and beyond the Army one, and ignoring the Army one by officers of the unit, it was still to get the conclusion he'd already decided on.
All of this came to a fore with Foraker at the Gridiron Club dinner in 1907. (The club still exists, and for the unfamiliar, is kind of like the White House Correspondents' Association, and their annual dinners, and criticisms thereof, are also similar.)
Anyway, TR launched a roomful of spleen at Foraker at the dinner. Foraker, also present, responded with a glaze of civility covering returned invective in kind.
Eventually, Foraker's senate investigation couldn't find any bugabears, as it was dependent on TR and Taft to supply information and it never subpoeaned anybody. This all, in turn was due to the chair of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Charles Warren of Wyoming, owing TR a favor after he quashed an investigation into Warren allegedly illegally fencing off public land, followed by TR then "accepting the resignation" of his Interior Secretary.
This alone would be worth a mini-book, as it points out that TR was Just.Another.Politician in many ways and could be a hypocrite on environmental issues, too.
==
That said, there is that caveat about the Afterward.
Lembeck relates a story about James Amos, whose father was a black policeman in DC and who eventually became TR's valet while he was in the White House. Supposedly, Amos one night overheard TR talking with Roosevelt's bastard cousin, Granville Fortescue, who had been an Army lieutenant. Supposedly Fortescue got some of the troopers to visit the White House clandestinely and admit their guilt.
I find this much harder to believe than does Lembeck.
First, given that troops and officers had already investigated and found that soldiers didn't do it, why would they now say they did? Lembeck claims TR didn't go public because of a "gentleman's word." Well, given what he said about black omerta, would he offer such an agreement, or honor it in a pinch if he did? Second, that claim still ignores the base issue.
Third, it ignores the issue of motive on the part of Amos, who didn't tell the story for public consumption (it seems) until his memoirs. Amos worked in Customs and the Interior Department, then the Burns Detective Agency, then the FBI. TR was dead when he applied to join the FBI, but Taft and other leading characters were not. Amos went on to be an FBI special agent for 32 years, one of the very, very few blacks in the agency. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/new...
Showing the unevenness of Wikipedia, he has no Wiki page.
==
One final note.
Some people may think TR had still advanced beyond other GOP presidents since the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction. Lembeck indicates it's the other way around. Sorry, TR fans.
February 8, 2015
This book details the story of the 25 th army regiment stationed in Brownsville, Texas. The soldiers were accused of shooting up the town and killing one person and seriously wounding a deputy sheriff. President Theodore Roosevelt dismissed the whole baltallion and forbade them from any other government employment. The incident was never investigated fairly. Each investigation assumed the guilt of the Black soldiers.
Their case was taken up by senator Foraker of Ohio. He tried to get the soldiers reinstated into the army. In the process he alienated Roosevelt which eventually cost him his senate seat. The book also gives excellent insight into politics of the period as well as the growth of the fight for civil rights. The split among Blacks from the accommodation theory of Booker Washington to the more militant stance of W E B DuBois. Interesting read.
Their case was taken up by senator Foraker of Ohio. He tried to get the soldiers reinstated into the army. In the process he alienated Roosevelt which eventually cost him his senate seat. The book also gives excellent insight into politics of the period as well as the growth of the fight for civil rights. The split among Blacks from the accommodation theory of Booker Washington to the more militant stance of W E B DuBois. Interesting read.
April 6, 2015
Overall, I think this book to be a great accomplishment. There has not been a significant study of the Brownsville Affair since John Weaver revived the issue in the 1970s, which ultimately led to the revocation of the dishonorable discharge of the Brownsville soldiers.
Lembeck does a wonderful job at assessing the impact of the Brownsville hearings on Senator Joseph Foraker, who, Lembeck contends, took up the soldier's case, not out of his own future political ambitions, but for doing what he believed to be the right thing to do. The book is well researched and although Lembeck grasps at several issues seemingly unrelated, he does a good job at tying them together in relation to the Brownsville Affair.
Lembeck also makes, what is becoming an increasingly popular view, that the Brownsville Affair drastically reduced Booker Washington's influence as the "leader of the race", allowing for Washington's critics, most notably W.E.B. Du Bois, to surpass him and therefore reject accommodation and industrial education, and instead demand racial equality and promote the "talented tenth."
However, Lembeck misses a key component in this intra-racial struggle. He uses several quotes that note "manliness" or "manhood" but then completely ignores the role that ideologies of masculinity played in this struggle. It was not simply Brownsville, or the Atlanta Race Riot, or Roosevelt's 1906 State of the Union Address that resulted in the downfall of BTW. African Americans, or as Lembeck refers to as "Negroes", an outmoded term, saw in disfranchisement and lynchings for the accusation of rape, an attempt by white Americans to control them. Du Bois noted that racial equality could not be achieved without the ballot, but Lembeck completely overlooks the role that the new state constitutions, disfranchising African Americans, played in African Americans coming to question what TR had actually accomplished for them. African Americans came to see that BTW's accommodation theory was useless as whites, including TR, would never see blacks as equals. This also played a significant role in Du Bois' rise in African American leadership.
I also noticed that Lembeck, in his sources, did not consider any of the important scholarship done in the past generation on the events of 1906. He should have considered David Godshalk's "Veiled Visions" on the Atlanta Race Riot and how that event reshaped race relations in the US. He should have also considered Gail Bederman's "Manliness and Civilization" in which an entire chapter is dedicated to TR and how ideologies of manliness affected his views on race. Bederman's arguments may have also helped him to better understand why the people of Brownsville, and not the soldiers, were probably the ones to shoot up the town. It can be difficult at this point, considering the body of scholarship now existing on turn-of-the-century race relations in America, to take a work on race seriously that does not consider the motivations for concepts of racial superiority and inferiority; which are largely based around concepts of masculinity.
I share some of the same views Lembeck presents, including Brownsville cost BTW his leadership position among African Americans, and that Foraker faced an uphill and ultimately losing battle against TR and it cost him the Presidency as well as his Senate seat. But his work presents an incomplete characterization of the situation regarding race at the time.
Lembeck does a wonderful job at assessing the impact of the Brownsville hearings on Senator Joseph Foraker, who, Lembeck contends, took up the soldier's case, not out of his own future political ambitions, but for doing what he believed to be the right thing to do. The book is well researched and although Lembeck grasps at several issues seemingly unrelated, he does a good job at tying them together in relation to the Brownsville Affair.
Lembeck also makes, what is becoming an increasingly popular view, that the Brownsville Affair drastically reduced Booker Washington's influence as the "leader of the race", allowing for Washington's critics, most notably W.E.B. Du Bois, to surpass him and therefore reject accommodation and industrial education, and instead demand racial equality and promote the "talented tenth."
However, Lembeck misses a key component in this intra-racial struggle. He uses several quotes that note "manliness" or "manhood" but then completely ignores the role that ideologies of masculinity played in this struggle. It was not simply Brownsville, or the Atlanta Race Riot, or Roosevelt's 1906 State of the Union Address that resulted in the downfall of BTW. African Americans, or as Lembeck refers to as "Negroes", an outmoded term, saw in disfranchisement and lynchings for the accusation of rape, an attempt by white Americans to control them. Du Bois noted that racial equality could not be achieved without the ballot, but Lembeck completely overlooks the role that the new state constitutions, disfranchising African Americans, played in African Americans coming to question what TR had actually accomplished for them. African Americans came to see that BTW's accommodation theory was useless as whites, including TR, would never see blacks as equals. This also played a significant role in Du Bois' rise in African American leadership.
I also noticed that Lembeck, in his sources, did not consider any of the important scholarship done in the past generation on the events of 1906. He should have considered David Godshalk's "Veiled Visions" on the Atlanta Race Riot and how that event reshaped race relations in the US. He should have also considered Gail Bederman's "Manliness and Civilization" in which an entire chapter is dedicated to TR and how ideologies of manliness affected his views on race. Bederman's arguments may have also helped him to better understand why the people of Brownsville, and not the soldiers, were probably the ones to shoot up the town. It can be difficult at this point, considering the body of scholarship now existing on turn-of-the-century race relations in America, to take a work on race seriously that does not consider the motivations for concepts of racial superiority and inferiority; which are largely based around concepts of masculinity.
I share some of the same views Lembeck presents, including Brownsville cost BTW his leadership position among African Americans, and that Foraker faced an uphill and ultimately losing battle against TR and it cost him the Presidency as well as his Senate seat. But his work presents an incomplete characterization of the situation regarding race at the time.
June 16, 2015
One of the most enlightening, well written, interesting, well, one of the best books I've read in a long time
This history recounts the shootings at Brownsville, the scanty evidence as to the identity of the shooters and the quick rush to judgment that some of the Black soldiers were responsible for the shootings and since none of the Black soldiers stationed in Brownsville would identify the shooters, all the Black soldiers had to be discharged. As President, Theodore Roosevelt usurped the normal military justice system and ordered the dismissals. Roosevelt took any questioning of his decision as a personal attack
The hero in the story is Senator Joseph Foraker who battled on the Senate floor to have an investigation and then in Senate committee cross examined witnesses and introduced evidence to show, if not the actual innocence of the soldiers, at least that there was not credible evidence to sustain the discharges. Roosevelt used all his political power and joined with Southern Democrats to oppose Foraker's efforts. Not satisfied with that victory, Roosevelt worked to defeat Foraker's re-election.
There are other storylines; Booker Washington was the "leader" of Black America in the early 1900s thanks in large part to support from Roosevelt. Washington disagreed with Roosevelt's decision but did not have the courage to publicly oppose it while his rival, W E DuBois did. Lembeck shows how this helped transition the true leadership from Washington to DuBois.
Taft was secretary of war; he initially sought to vacate or mitigate Roosevelt's orders as the process offended Taft's sense of due process. However, when Roosevelt made it personal and threatened Taft's ambitions, Taft backed down. A telling epilogue is that after Taft became President, he hired one of the leading Brownsville soldiers into the federal government much to Roosevelt's chagrin.
This story even undercuts some of Roosevelt's status as hero of the conversation movement. His secretary of interior, Hitchcock, had been appointed by McKinley and he learned of violations of public land by the senator from Wyoming who was also a large landowner. He took steps to restore and protect the public, federal land in Wyoming. However, Roosevelt fired him and allowed Warren to continue his plundering so that the Wyoming senator would support him in the Brownsville investigation
A great chapter was on the Gridron dinner when Roosevelt lost his temper and lashed out at Foraker with Foraker calmly and logically responding as to why he was pursuing the investigation and why the soldiers had not received due process.
A highlight of the book was that it starts and finishes with a banquet thrown by Black Americans to honor Senator Foraker after he was defeated for re-election due to his efforts to give the Black soldiers due process. Lembeck had earlier told the stories of the leading Black Americans of the day so his description of the banquet was all the more touching
An absolute great book!!
This history recounts the shootings at Brownsville, the scanty evidence as to the identity of the shooters and the quick rush to judgment that some of the Black soldiers were responsible for the shootings and since none of the Black soldiers stationed in Brownsville would identify the shooters, all the Black soldiers had to be discharged. As President, Theodore Roosevelt usurped the normal military justice system and ordered the dismissals. Roosevelt took any questioning of his decision as a personal attack
The hero in the story is Senator Joseph Foraker who battled on the Senate floor to have an investigation and then in Senate committee cross examined witnesses and introduced evidence to show, if not the actual innocence of the soldiers, at least that there was not credible evidence to sustain the discharges. Roosevelt used all his political power and joined with Southern Democrats to oppose Foraker's efforts. Not satisfied with that victory, Roosevelt worked to defeat Foraker's re-election.
There are other storylines; Booker Washington was the "leader" of Black America in the early 1900s thanks in large part to support from Roosevelt. Washington disagreed with Roosevelt's decision but did not have the courage to publicly oppose it while his rival, W E DuBois did. Lembeck shows how this helped transition the true leadership from Washington to DuBois.
Taft was secretary of war; he initially sought to vacate or mitigate Roosevelt's orders as the process offended Taft's sense of due process. However, when Roosevelt made it personal and threatened Taft's ambitions, Taft backed down. A telling epilogue is that after Taft became President, he hired one of the leading Brownsville soldiers into the federal government much to Roosevelt's chagrin.
This story even undercuts some of Roosevelt's status as hero of the conversation movement. His secretary of interior, Hitchcock, had been appointed by McKinley and he learned of violations of public land by the senator from Wyoming who was also a large landowner. He took steps to restore and protect the public, federal land in Wyoming. However, Roosevelt fired him and allowed Warren to continue his plundering so that the Wyoming senator would support him in the Brownsville investigation
A great chapter was on the Gridron dinner when Roosevelt lost his temper and lashed out at Foraker with Foraker calmly and logically responding as to why he was pursuing the investigation and why the soldiers had not received due process.
A highlight of the book was that it starts and finishes with a banquet thrown by Black Americans to honor Senator Foraker after he was defeated for re-election due to his efforts to give the Black soldiers due process. Lembeck had earlier told the stories of the leading Black Americans of the day so his description of the banquet was all the more touching
An absolute great book!!
August 28, 2022
I picked this book from my personal library for my annual Theodore Roosevelt read.
I'm giving it 3 stars as a blended rating - as a meticulously researched and documented account of the Brownsville Incident it's 4 stars - as a book that's enjoyable to read it's 2 stars.
I knew going in that this book would shine a harsh light on TR's beliefs/behaviors, decision making, and unapologetic actions taken regarding this time in his presidency. Like other well regarded presidents, TR was not faultless and it's important to read about those aspects too.
This book is definitely not for the casual reader. It's an extremely challenging read - not just for the heft but there are so many military and political players to follow across timelines. I'd certainly recommend other books to start with if you're interested in learning more about TR - the Edmund Morris trilogy and The River of Doubt by Candice Millard for starters. You really have to be invested in learning about Brownsville to have the interest and perseverance to finish this book.
One important side benefit of reading this book was that I did learn quite a bit more about Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
I'm giving it 3 stars as a blended rating - as a meticulously researched and documented account of the Brownsville Incident it's 4 stars - as a book that's enjoyable to read it's 2 stars.
I knew going in that this book would shine a harsh light on TR's beliefs/behaviors, decision making, and unapologetic actions taken regarding this time in his presidency. Like other well regarded presidents, TR was not faultless and it's important to read about those aspects too.
This book is definitely not for the casual reader. It's an extremely challenging read - not just for the heft but there are so many military and political players to follow across timelines. I'd certainly recommend other books to start with if you're interested in learning more about TR - the Edmund Morris trilogy and The River of Doubt by Candice Millard for starters. You really have to be invested in learning about Brownsville to have the interest and perseverance to finish this book.
One important side benefit of reading this book was that I did learn quite a bit more about Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
May 8, 2015
I learned so much! First of all, there is the Brownsville Incident where soldiers from a black battalion were suspected of shooting up Brownsville, TX. With no proof of guilt and no due process, Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharged the whole battalion, the biggest mistake of his presidency. However, I learned not just about T. Roosevelt, the Brownsville Incident, and Sen. Foraker (which was all VERY interesting) but also about the early 20th century in America. For instance, I never really understood the difference in philosophy between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, who vied to lead black citizens. They both helped the blacks who were dealing with the horrendous Jim Crow laws, but in very different ways. Washington, a friend to Roosevelt, was accommodating of the whites while Du Bois was impatient and aggressive. It's also extremely clear how politics has always been a game of deception, ego, and betrayal. It's amazing what lengths politicians and corporate America will go to. And I learned a bit about some international history, i.e. the U.S. relationship with Cuba and Japan and how that impacted the Brownsville Incident. Best of all, I learned about Senator Foraker, who sacrificed his political career in his struggle to obtain justice for the black soldiers and is proof that honest, moral, and loyal politicians do exist. http://www.takingontheodoreroosevelt.com
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews