Today I chose to address a quote from the story "Wade in the Water":
This fall, his son, Teddy, Junior, beat up a Boston cop with his little Harvard friends. None of them talked to the judge. And the President said that was the ‘honor of gentlemen.’ But when I stayed quiet about something I didn’t do and didn’t know anything about? Oh, that’s a ‘conspiracy of silence!’
This refers to an actual incident. The Harvard sophomore class was rioting on Boston Common. A policeman was injured and, while they arrested Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., they failed to catch the student who was suspected of hurting the cop. Young Roosevelt refused to divulge the name of the boy they were looking for, but his indictment was dropped at the request of Massachusetts Republican power Henry Cabot Lodge.
The irony is that, at the same time, the army was investigating the so-called "Brownsville Raid." This was a highly-publicized incident in Brownsville, Texas regarding the white citizens of the town and the African-American 25th Infantry at the nearby fort. The white people accused the soldiers of shooting up the town. Military investigators questioned the soldiers about who had been in town that night, and who had done the shooting. The soldiers, to a person, denied knowing anything about it. (As did their white officers.) They were dishonorably discharged for a "conspiracy of silence." It wasn't until the Nixon administration, sixty-six years later, that the case was reopened and the soldiers exonerated… all but one posthumously.
In preparing a Facebook posting on this I started to look for where I got that quote about "the honor of gentlemen. I did not find it in the New York Times article archive which I remember searching five years ago when I first started writing this book. I couldn't find it anywhere else either.
That doesn't definitely mean I made up TR's response about his son. But it might mean that. And if I did, for literary effect, shouldn't I remember it?
In an earlier story, which I chose to exclude from the book, for African American men sit talking in an uptown kitchen while their white employers (one of them Theodore Roosevelt) are chatting in the adjacent trophy room. The following exchange with Charles Lee, the president's driver, is a part of their conversation:
“Lee!” he barked, “Didn’t the president’s son get arrested for beating up a cop in Boston?”
Lee had been ignoring the turn of the conversation, but he looked up sharply at this. “He did no such thing! They brought him in for questioning because somebody tripped a cop and the man broke his nose. The judge wanted Teddy Junior to give up the boy’s name.”
Davis smiled. “Did he give him up?”
“Hell, no! “ answered Lee angrily. “His daddy would beat his behind if he peached on a friend.”
“There you go.” said Davis with an even broader smile. “But his daddy gave dishonorable discharges to 167 colored soldiers for refusing to ‘peach’ on their friends.”
“It’s not the same!’ protested Charles Lee, but the other men just laughed.
So there is no fancy quote here about the "honor of gentlemen," but there is definitely the germ of the idea that Roosevelt would have endorsed his son't silence.
In our personal stories the line between what happened and what we remember can blur very easily. In historical fiction we have to make things up if only to create dialogue and narrative. But I am obviously going to have to work to distinguish between my history and my fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment