TR on Twitter (sometimes parody accounts can also be informative)

[Dennis Donovan]

Link to tweet

Theodore Roosevelt @ProgressiveTedR

Today is the first day of #BlackHistoryMonth . I am ashamed at how I handled the Brownsville case. I let my ego and prejudices get the better of me and ruined the careers and lives of over 160 Black American soldiers.

1:35 PM - Feb 1, 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville_affair

The Brownsville affair, or the Brownsville raid, was an incident of racial injustice that occurred in 1906 in the southwestern United States due to resentment by white residents of Brownsville, Texas, of the Buffalo Soldiers, black soldiers in a segregated unit stationed at nearby Fort Brown. When a white bartender was killed and a white police officer wounded by gunshots one night, townspeople accused the members of the African-American 25th Infantry Regiment. Although their commanders said the soldiers had been in the barracks all night, evidence was planted against the men.

As a result of a United States Army Inspector General's investigation, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the discharge without honor of 167 soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment, costing them pensions and preventing them from ever serving in federal civil service jobs. The case aroused national outrage in both black and white communities. After more investigation, several of the men were allowed to re-enlist.

Following publication of a history of the affair in the early 1970s, a renewed military investigation exonerated the discharged black troops. The government pardoned the men in 1972 and restored their records to show honorable discharges, but it did not provide retroactive compensation to them or their descendants. Only one man had survived to that time; Congress passed an act to provide him with a tax-free pension. The other soldiers who had been expelled all received posthumous honorable discharges.

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I'd like to think that TR would be more enlightened had he lived in a later era.

[Squinch]

1. I just rewatched an American Masters on Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer criticized the Panama

Canal, saying it was a boondoggle for corrupt businesses and he demanded to know who got 40 million dollars in missing construction costs.

TR created a nonsense phrase: "criminal libel" and sued Pulitzer because he didn't like the criticism. He demanded that Pulitzer be put in jail for this "criminal libel." It went all the way to the supreme court, but of course that was in the days when the Supreme Court upheld the rule of law and Pulitzer won on all arguments.

Probably wouldn't happen today.

TR was reckless and often horrifying. His work on trusts was good, but he was never in the middle of the road. Always either great or horrible.