THE BROWNSVILLE AFFAIR

BY

EDWARD W. CARMACK

Edward Ward Carmack served with distinction as United States Senator from Tennessee. At the expiration of his service as senator he became editor of a newspaper in Nashville and was shot down on the street as a result of a political quarrel. The following is part of a speech called out by criticism of President Roosevelt in stationing colored troops in Brownsville, Texas.

I think it proper to say, Mr. President, that any report any Senator may have heard to the effect that I have been personally solicited to come to the President's rescue in the Brownsville difficulty, that the President has personally urged me to forgive and forget certain energetic personal remarks and to throw myself between him and the ferocious assault of the Senator from Ohio, is a gross exaggeration. I will not say that it is an infamous falsehood, because such language belongs to the vocabulary of Presidential controversy rather than to Senatorial debate. Nor is it true, as Senators may have heard, that I have been moved to come to the President's defense out of an infatuated devotion for the man. I have a great admiration for that strong and brave and large-minded man, the Secretary of War. My admiration for the President is more temperate and subduedin the language of Hamlet, "It waits upon the judg

ment."

Mr. President, I think it exceedingly unfortunate from every point of view that this agitation should have been begun. I cast no imputations upon the good faith of the Senator from Ohio, and certainly none upon the Senator from South Carolina. But it seems to me, Sir, that there is something else behind these uncalled for attacks upon the President than a passion for justice and law. Whence comes this new-found zeal for law and constitution, this jealousy of executive encroachment upon the powers of Congress and the rights of citizens? This particular act of the President is simply the occasion, but it is not the cause of the violent and concerted attack upon the administration. The President has done enough, in all conscience, to alarm every real friend of the Constitution and of the Republic. Through all of it he has had the united, enthusiastic support of the Senators upon the other side of the chamber. We have seen him issue an executive order embodying the very terms of a pension bill which the Congress of the United States had refused to pass, and give it the force and effect of law. We have seen him in the Panama adventure, riding rough-shod over treaty and statute and international and constitutional law, and doing it with the unanimous approval of the Senators upon the other side of the chamber. We have seen him make a treaty with a foreign country and put it into force without the advice and consent of the Senate. We have observed his action in the matter of the Indianola Post Office. There was a case, Mr. President, where the Senator from Ohio might truly have said that the President acted upon the flimsiest evidence and without the warrant of law. There was a case in which the Post

master General officially declared that only a very few people were even suspected of intending to do something wrong and the vast majority of the people had no sympathy with their conduct and no part in their act, and yet the President abolished that Post Office and compelled all the people of that community, a great majority of them innocent, and only a few supposed to be guilty, to go thirty miles to get their mail. Why was not the voice of the Senator from Ohio then uplifted? Where, oh, where, was Roderick then? Why did he not come to the defense of the white people of Mississippi who were subjected to great wrong and outrage and violation of law upon the flimsiest and most contemptible evidence?

Mr. President, there have been numberless infractions of the Constitution and the law by the President, and they have never stirred a ripple on the placid waters of Republican harmony. It is by the most honorable acts of his administration that the President has aroused so deadly an antagonism within his own party. He might have continued to trample upon the law until the end of time; he might have multiplied his infidelities to the Constitution until they were as numberless as the stars of the heavens, or the sands of the sea, and if he had not otherwise offended, no voice would have been uplifted to a protest against the great outrage upon the negro troops at Brownsville.

The President has made the mistake of compelling the party to violate all its traditions, to break with its old time friends, and turn its guns upon the allies of a hundred battles. He has brought the great railways and trusts and corporations of the country to recog

nize that there are such things as law and government in this country. Helpless under the compelling force of public opinion that he has arrayed behind him, his party leaders have yielded, snarling and reluctant, but biding their time and opportunity to strike, just as the dog that is compelled to fight will "snatch at the master that doth tarre him on."

This is but a beginning of a fight, Mr. President, to break the only power of the only leader of the Republican party who ever arrayed it against the enemy of the people. It is an effort to put the party back into its old position, to renew its old-time alliances, to make peace with its old friends, and to establish again its covenant with the plunderers and oppressors of the American people.

And, Mr. President, it will succeed. The resources of the gentleman in the White House cannot stay the inevitable hour. He has attempted the impossible task of re-creating the Republican party. Mr. President, you may whitewash the Ethiopian and you may unspot the leopard, but you cannot make one a Caucasian or the other a lamb. There is a force as compelling and persistent as the law of gravitation that will draw the Republican party back to the position from which, by main strength and awkwardness, the President of the United States has lifted it up. The Republican party has never felt comfortable in the strange company it has been compelled to keep. It has tried to appear at ease in the stolen garb of Democracy and comfort itself with the proverb that "Every true man's garments fits your thief"; but it has never been able to conceal its yearning for the old suit of stripes which it

has worn so long and which fitted it so becomingly and well. Mr. President, the Republican party must go back to its old associations, even as the dog returneth to its vomit, and the sow that has washed to her wallowing in the mire. It will in a little while look back on its brief masquerade as a friend of the people as to a hideous dream.

Mr. President, the issue has been forced. President Roosevelt must fight the course, and I say to the Senators upon the other side of the chamber, you must take your alternative, you must either renominate Theodore Roosevelt or you must give us back our platform. You have got to do it. It was never yours. In your hearts you are longing for the time to come when you can cast off this Rooseveltian incubus. The Republican party, for the first time in years, will look natural when in sits for its photograph in the next campaign. But, Mr. President, in the meanwhile the sentiment which President Roosevelt has created, which he has helped to arouse against plutocracy, will turn millions of voters to the Democratic party, and if President Roosevelt chooses to come he will find ample opportunity to render great service to the American people and to learn some respect for the Constitution and the law.