Senator Foraker Closes his Able Defense

Senator Foraker discusses how President Roosevelt and Secretary Taft handle the Brownsville affair, and the belief that is challenged only to “‘embarrass’ the government administration.”

“As to the Brownsville affair, Mr. Taft says, speaking of me, ‘He has seized upon and magnified an important but incidental matter to embarrass the administration, using in this without scruple, a blind race prejudice to accomplish his main purpose.’ “I have no way of proving what was in my mind except by referring to the record. Any one who read that will fail to find a sentence or a word to justify any such statement as Mr. Taft makes. In view of Judge Taft’s statement, I trust I may be allowed to repeat what I have said a number of times, that in this whole matter I had no revenges to seek, or personal ends to serve, but was anxious to see that common justice was done to the representatives of a noble and loyal race, every one of whom is by nature a Republican. The colored voters are known to be more or less displeased with the action of the Republican Party in not passing some relief measure for these soldiers, and many of them have signified a purpose to vote against Judge Taft, because of his official relation to the matter. Much work has been done to overcome this trouble and to induce the colored Republican voters of the country to stand by the party with which they have always affiliated. And now comes the President and publishes Judge Taft’s letter containing his unfortunate reference to this unfortunate case. What does he mean? Does anybody imagine that the President is unable to see that he is rubbing a sore, when he should have brought a plaster? Does he imagine, or can anybody suppose, that the Republican colored voters of this country can be brought to the support of Judge Taft by parading in these closing days of the campaign, Judge Taft’s belittling of their chief grievance by mentioning it as an ‘incidental matter’ which has been ‘seized upon and magnified, using in thi without scruple a blind race prejudice,’ and then adding the charge that all this is done only to ‘embarrass’ the administration of President Roosevelt. “Can it be possible that the President wants to defeat Judge Taft? That cannot be, and yet he could hardly do any other one thing better calculated to lose him votes, for no self-respecting Negro reading what Judge Taft says in this letter and adding it to all that has gone before, can vote for him without feeling that he is making a greater sacrifice than most men, white or black, are willing to make. In any event, the President’s action and comments are a wrong toward the Republican Party, for they amount to charge against the party at a critical hour of the campaign of an unworthy purpose in connection with a matter that every colored man who has any pride of race holds of highest value and in deepest appreciation. What Judge Taft says in his letter is the equivalent of any assertion that the colored people of the country who have been gratified because of what was done in the Brownsville matter have simply been hoodwinked by the designing selfishness. This is bad enough, but the President makes it worse when he says: The entire agitation over Brownsville was in large part not a genuine agitation on behalf of the colored men at all but merely one phase of the effort by the representatives of certain law-defying corporations to bring discredit upon the administration because it was seeking to cut out the evils connected not only with the corrupt use of wealth, but especially with the corrupt alliance between certain business men of large fortunes and certain politicians of great office. In other words, the Brownsville proceeding was not only all Judge Taft said it was, but in addition to being designing and selfish, it was prompted by the ‘representatives of law defying corporations to bring discredit upon the administration of its policy with respect to them...

“Senator Foraker Closes his Able Defense,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed January 18, 2026, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/733.