04 Statehood and Its Rough Road--final

Statehood Era and the Federal Presence in New Mexico A Long, Rough Road The facts are not in dispute A statehood bill that was overwhelming approved by the House of Representatives in May 1902 died in the Senate upon adjournment of the 57th Congress on March 1903 Professor Lewis L Gould, the distinguished historian of American political life, explained in one-sentence the failed attempt to secure statehood in 1902-3 No finer, succinct account exists: “Led by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats, an attempt to obtain the admission of the territories of Arizona and New Mexico ran into the determined opposition of Senator [Nelson] Aldrich and the Republican leadership.” But why did such a political impasse arise and doom the statehood bill in the Senate? Professor Gould’s summary is correct: a bipartisan move to pass the bill encountered overwhelming opposition from key Republicans, led by Senator Aldrich (R-RI) But what was so objectionable about statehood? The answer lies in delineating several broad trends in American political life, particularly within the Republican Party, at the beginning of the twentieth century The search for what held up statehood begins in Washington, D.C There federal officials, vested with the authority to grant it by Article Four of the Constitution, rode rough shod over the aspirations of New Mexicans Events at each end of the two-mile stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue connecting the White House and Congress on Capitol Hill loomed especially large in both shaping and responding to petitions for statehood The key to understanding the delay lies in understanding how statehood came to be seen as a threat to the existing political order What made statehood so subversive to power in the eyes of Senator Aldrich? While today Senator Nelson Aldrich is likely best remembered in the namesake of his grandson, the forty-first vice president of the United States, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1974-77), during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), Senator Aldrich controlled the Senate Elected to his fourth Senate term in 1898, he settled in as the new chair of the Senate Finance Committee He also controlled all committee assignments, which permitted him to act as gatekeeper of legislation wending its way through hearings and onto the Senate’s floor for final deliberation The reasons that motivated Aldrich’s opposition to statehood are entangled in his bitter memory of his loss of power during Democratic President Grover Cleveland’s second administration (1893-97), when the Democrats held a majority in Congress The new states admitted in 1889-90 had gone overwhelming for Cleveland, and as Aldrich’s biographer noted, “He had burnt his fingers once admitting States that proved a danger to his party, and he did not propose to it again.” So pervasive was Aldrich’s opposition to statehood for the Territories that he maneuvered to kill the Omnibus Bill of 1902 when it actually had sufficient votes to pass Aldrich did so by manipulating the Senate’s handling of the Omnibus Statehood bill pressed by the House of Representatives His chief agent of obstruction was his obsequious protégé Senator Albert J Beveridge, who had Aldrich’s backing to employ all means necessary to block a vote on separate statehood for New Mexico and Arizona so that the Omnibus Statehood bill would expire when the 57th Congress adjourned on March 1903 A historically favorable disposition toward statehood prevailed in the House of Representatives Representative William S Knox (R-MA) chaired the House Committee on Territories and introduced a statehood bill to his committee on 14 March 1902 It received overwhelming committee support and moved to the full House on April 1902 as H.R 12543 Knox’s accompanying report demanded quick action: “There is neither justice nor reason in longer denying statehood to the Territories which are here through their representatives petitioning as they have again and again in the past.” Anticipating arguments over the so-called fitness issue, Knox pointedly reminded his colleagues of Territorial accomplishments: Of what manner of men this population is made up let their works speak Cities and towns, with all that modern civilization demands, homes of culture and refinement, schools and higher institutions of learning, public and private charitable institutions, everywhere the free church and free press These are not the monuments of the Indian nor the Mexican, the idle nor the vicious Knox concluded his appeal by endorsing New Mexicans as “a patriotic people,” vowed that they were worthy of “enjoying the benefits of American citizenship,” and brushed aside all remaining objections by averring, “If education, integrity, and devotion to American institutions make the bulwark that insures recognition, then Congress, in our judgment, should by legal enactment admit her to the sisterhood of States.” Knox’s unqualified endorsement of New Mexico’s loyalty to “American institutions” was purposeful rhetoric It explicitly addressed and affirmed completion of the goals and values to be inculcated while a Territory His report satisfied most of his colleagues, and the Omnibus Statehood Bill passed the House with overwhelming support on May 1902 Next it went to the Senate’s Committee on Territories, where its reception by Chairman Albert J Beveridge (R-IN) proved hostile No one did more to obstruct New Mexico’s statehood than Senator Beveridge, so his opposition needs to be fully explored It is critical to examine the intellectual and political ambience which focused Beveridge’s objections to statehood An editorial in a southern newspaper cogently explained the reason statehood failed in 1902-3: “Nothing but jealously of the growing power of the west is responsible for the opposition to statehood in the United States senate Plenty of pretexts are urged— for example, the Mormon and ‘greaser’ pretexts—but no reasons.” Statehood unleashed genuine anxiety among many Republican senators that new, western senators would usher in a debilitating shift in power—away from the East and Midwest, away from their party, and away from Republican’s almost four-decade dominance of the White House and Congress Fear led to delay, which preserved the political status quo, and accordingly obstructionist tactics orchestrated by Senators Aldrich and Beveride abounded in the statehood debates between 1900 and 1910 An actual conspiracy existed to keep New Mexico out of the Union for as long as possible, and it originated in a friendship Beveridge had with an influential New York editor and public intellectual, Albert Shaw Within weeks of being selected Indiana’s U.S Senator, Albert J Beveridge wrote Albert Shaw He sent him copies of recent speeches, including “March of the Flag,” and a friendship quickly blossomed Each man cultivated the other for his own ends Beveridge craved publicity, and Shaw had a national forum in his political magazine Review of Reviews For his part, Shaw sought access to power and, when Beveridge took over as chair of the Senate’s Committee on Territories in December 1901, Shaw immediately pushed his opposition to New Mexico’s statehood Shaw set the agenda for their discussions in a letter to Beveridge in early January 1902: I have been wondering what position you would take on the admission of territories, in view of your new committee assignment The union of Oklahoma and the Indian Territory might give us a promising State which could be admitted in the course of the next year or two I not at all believe that New Mexico or Arizona ought to be admitted The territorial system gives them all the home rule they need for local purposes I am not asking you to take a radical position against the territories at once, but only that you will consider the question in its large national bearings Too often the admission of new States has turned upon immediate party exigencies Shaw’s primary objection revolved around politics He believed it time to stop “packing the Senate from unpopulated regions which were admitted to the Union fifteen or twenty years too soon.” In his view, the Senate had expanded too quickly, going from 76 members in 1888 to 90 in 1896 (an 18.4 percent increase) Shaw viewed with alarm the dilution of Republican power stemming from the addition of seven new western states (ND, SD, MT, WY, ID, WA, UT) in less than ten years The sectional loyalty of the seven recently admitted states galled Shaw In the presidential elections of 1896, six of the seven voted for the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan in his loss to William McKinley Although only two of the new states went for Bryan when he again ran (and lost) to McKinley in 1900, a disturbing trend became apparent in the Senate Among the Senators from these seven states in the 56th U.S Senate (1899-1901) were two populists (ID and SD), two Democrats (UT and MT), and a Silver-Republican (WA) In the 57th U.S Senate (1901-1903) the opposition made a net gain of one seat: a second Silver-Republican (WA) The Silver-Republicans proved especially repugnant because they illustrated what Shaw, and Beveridge, most resented These senators gave primary allegiance to narrow regional interests (read: farmers) to the detriment of the entire nation Shaw only saw more sectional partisanship in new states from the Southwest, and such a prospect hardened his opposition Beveridge replied promptly to Shaw and concurred that statehood posed a threat to Republican majorities: I tell you in the strictest confidence: my present tendency is in favor of Oklahoma and Indian Territory as a single state and the rejection of the application of New Mexico and Arizona My reasons for this are along the lines indicated by you The whole subject will require a careful and not a hurried study by me I hope to my work well Beveridge’s pledge “to my work well” aligned perfectly with his temperament As a newspaper had remarked in 1899, “he is not content with an investigation of a subject unless it is exhaustive.” Throughout 1902 Beveridge applied this characteristic thoroughness in learning about New Mexico He drew on four sources in mapping the territory’s political and social landscape: confirmation hearings to reappoint Miguel Otero as the Territory’s governor held before his committee in January 1901; testimony before his Committee on Territories in late June 1902; data from the 1900 census (published in 1901); and unprecedented “on-site” hearings conducted by himself and three members of his Committee on Territories in mid-November 1902 From the information gathered, Beveridge carefully built his case against New Mexico and Arizona’s statehood During the same week in January 1902 that Beveridge and Shaw discussed tactics on delaying statehood, Beveridge also opened and chaired hearings on President Theodore Roosevelt’s reappointment of Miguel A Otero as Territorial governor The reappointment process began the previous summer when the Interior Department and the White House reviewed, discussed, and secured Otero’s written replies to allegations of malfeasance But the resulting dossier was put aside when President McKinley died from an assassin’s bullet on 14 September 1901 President Theodore Roosevelt turned aside concerted attempts to have Otero removed in the fall of 1901 Instead, he recommended reappointment for another four-year term—pending consent by the Senate’s Committee on Territories Senator Beveridge listened attentively while the two titans of the territory’s Republican Party—Governor Otero and Thomas B Catron—laid out vituperative charges and countercharges in formal testimony between and 16 January 1902 The hearings provided abundant evidence of New Mexico politics being akin to ‘scorpions in a bottle.’ Catron submitted a list of thirty-one grievances to Senator Beveridge (and also to President Roosevelt), to support his allegation that Otero’s administration “has been extravagant, impure, oppressive, tyrannical, partial, and has been run by rings and cliques.” Otero rebutted with the assertion that Catron’s complaints were “1 per cent truth and 99 per cent political chicanery.” And so it went, back and forth, for more than a week Finally Otero prevailed and secured the Committee and the Senate’s overwhelming approval Between June and December 1902, Beveridge skillfully exploited his position as chair of the Committee on Territories to undermine support for statehood In doing so, he initially cut against the grain in both the Republican and Democratic parties, each of which had included calls for statehood in their party platforms of 1896 and 1900 He also turned back a nearly unanimous House of Representatives, which had overwhelming approved an Omnibus Statehood Bill (House Bill 12543) in May 1902 calling for “the people of Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico to form constitutions and state governments and be admitted into the Union.” Beveridge began applying the brakes to the political momentum for statehood during his June hearings on House Bill 12543 The New Mexicans testifying unwittingly contributed evidence that allowed Beveridge to bolster his case against statehood New Mexicans boasted of the recent arrival to the territory of William H “Bull” Andrews, a former national Republican party official and Pennsylvania state representative The New Mexicans naively assumed that such name-dropping might impress fellow Republicans Nothing could have been more ill-conceived since Andrews and Beveridge represented opposite and competing political traditions Andrews was a crony of Pennsylvania’s Republican U.S Senator Matthew S Quay, a political boss from Philadelphia who had a long history of questionable dealings, particularly among railroad interests Only three years earlier he had “beaten” a corruption indictment and regained his Senate seat Nothing riled Beveridge more than money-making schemes of railroads, and yet the New Mexicans testifying repeatedly praised Andrews’ role in an important new railroad expansion in their Territory According to Beveridge’s biographer, such revelations alarmed the senator more than he let on publicly He saw “Bull” Andrews as aligned with Otero’s political machine (already denounced in the January hearings) More ominously, Beveridge saw his arch political foe, Senator Quay, moving in the shadows to carry out his financial and political schemes in New Mexico Beveridge and Aldrich’s opposition to Senator Quay’s quest for statehood, though, came at a price to the Republican Party It precipitated a bitter intra-party feud Shortly before Beveridge headed to New Mexico, he cautioned Aldrich about likely Republican defections on a statehood vote He was especially worried about Senators “Quay, Penrose, Wellington, and the Nevada Senators.” He went on to lament, “It does seem too bad to have all the work we have done in the last decade to build up our domestic and foreign policies jeopardized by Senators from states admitted of selfish considerations.” The reference to “selfish considerations” can be read two ways As applied to the two Republican senators from Nevada, it acknowledged that regional loyalty trumped party unity Or it could apply to Pennsylvania Senators Boies Penrose and Matthew S Quay, each of whom fostered large-scale business interests in Arizona and New Mexico, respectively The Pennsylvania senators presented a vexing problem Nearly as powerful as Aldrich, their staunch pro-statehood position would impede any action backed by Aldrich or Beveridge To hamper Quay and Penrose’s business prospects, Beveridge pledged to Aldrich that on his upcoming trip to New Mexico he expected to uncover facts that “will make an unfavorable impression on the people and investors, which will set the territories back for many years.” In the view of many contemporary observers, Senators Quay and Penrose promoted statehood solely for economic gain A major Chicago newspaper claimed that “a squad of Pennsylvania capitalists,” made up of “close friends of the two senators, to say the least, have been behind the statehood movement for Arizona and New Mexico.” Even the New Mexico and Arizona delegates to congress acknowledged investors and their corporate backers “wanted statehood for the express purpose of securing a decided advantage in the stock market.” Statehood held the promise of attracting more capital because greater financial security attached itself to statehood Senator Beveridge claimed just before leaving for New Mexico in November 1902 that “if the territories are admitted the bond of the [rail]road can be sold for several points higher.” When he returned from his tour, he made even more pointed criticisms about politics and personal gain intertwined in the statehood question He alleged that statehood was a ploy to get William H “Bull” Andrews “a seat in the United States Senate and also to help him to sell his bonds for his new railroad down there.” Proponents and opponents of statehood held completely incompatible views of New Mexico Men such as Quay and Penrose looked upon the territories as an economic tabula rasa onto which they expected to write a bright future Money could be made there and they expected statehood to maximize their gain But Aldrich and Beveridge represented a different vision of New Mexico, one in which transformation through Americanization held the only promise for statehood New Mexicans also undercut their own cause by complaining bitterly in their June testimony—and without corroborating evidence—about mistakes in the official census of 1900 Territorial Delegate to Congress Bernard S Rodey went so far as to denounce the census as “absolutely wrong and worthless.” He sought to rebut the “general impression [held] all over the country that New Mexico is somewhat of a crude place.” He ticked off the errors: illiteracy was much lower than the 40 percent reported; “about three-fifths of our population are people from the States, who have come in since [1848] and their descendents;” the total population is closer to 300,000 than the 195,000 reported in the census; and “a very large majority of the [Nuevomexicanos] speak English as well as Spanish.” Rodey’s assertions about census errors played directly into Beveridge’s plans to expose publicly what he regarded as the Territory’s flaws It gave him a charge to investigate—possible errors in the federal census He also identified a group of vulnerable witnesses, census enumerators, as well as educators and public servants Beveridge’s subcommittee settled on its findings before they had ever heard a witness The a priori process began in the summer of 1902 when Beveridge turned to his colleague on the Committee on Territories, Minnesota Senator Knute Nelson, to offer advice on how to derail the Omnibus Statehood Bill when the Senate resumed deliberations in early December They agreed “that Oklahoma and Indian Territory ought to be admitted as one state,” but they would oppose statehood for New Mexico and Arizona because “neither are fit to become states, and our investigation should be largely confined to those two territories.” The mindset that Albert Beveridge brought to New Mexico is glimpsed in one of his stump speeches delivered during September 1902 in Indiana In it, he characterized the nation’s responsibility to “Americanize” colonial areas in these condescending terms: American soldiers, American teachers, Amercan administrators all are instruments of the Nation in discharging the Nation’s high duty to the ancient and yet infant people which circumstance has placed in our keeping And just so, our Nation can not escape the larger duties to senile and infant peoples Beveridge and Aldrich embraced Americanization as the best guarantee of “fitness for statehood,” by which they meant ensuring the Territories were safely conservative and Republican Only then would they reconsider their staunch opposition A tenet of their Americanization held that white Northern Europeans ranked much higher in human worthiness than Southern Europeans or Latin Americans In this view, the best hope for the Southwest rested with newly arriving settlers As Senator Beveridge once explained his plan for improving New Mexico and Arizona, “You have the so-called Mexican population overwhelmed by the American population, ideally located for the purpose of Americanizing within a few years the last vestige of the blood of Spain.” Beveridge headed a four-member Senate subcommittee that traveled to New Mexico in mid-November 1902 There he probed whether three key agents of “Americanization” in the Southwest—public schools, courts, and public servants—were succeeding The three Republicans and one Democrat on the subcommittee spent most of their time in New Mexico They grilled 85 witnesses and collected 120 pages of testimony during stops at Las Vegas (12 November), Santa Fe (13th), Albuquerque (14th15th), Las Cruces(20th), El Paso (20th), and Carlsbad (21st) In New Mexico, Beveridge’s subcommittee heard some people again sing the praises of “Bull” Andrews and plead for more help for railroads in the Territory But most of the time the subcommittee asked questions that put people on the defensive They relentlessly extracted statements that proved damaging to statehood A school principal in Las Vegas spoke English haltingly, and when Beveridge asked the superintendent of schools in Bernalillo County to identify Christopher Columbus, he replied, “I no know him.” A court official in Santa Fe had scant familiarity with the U.S Constitution and had only read an excerpt in Spanish Virtually all of the census enumerators admitted that they had not counted everyone in their assigned areas Only one witness—sixty-four-year-old Martinez Amador from Las Cruces—volunteered to testify, and he willingly abetted the subcommittee He said his generation of Mexicans were “ignorant,” and “we are not ready to support statehood yet for about ten years, until our children grow up” and are educated in American schools By the time the Beveridge subcommittee left the Southwest, a chorus of protests had arisen Poems lampooned the senators’ arrogance and bias, and the ex-governor of Arizona charged that their trip “assaulted in a most vicious and untruthful manner the people and resources of two very prosperous and progressive Territories.” This public dissent failed to penetrate the Committee’s closed minds In late November 1902 Senator Beveridge returned to Washington, pleased with the incriminating evidence he had gathered His subcommittee had taken their measure of the Territory of New Mexico and found it insufficiently “Americanized” to be considered for statehood He enthused over his forthcoming jeremiad when he checked in with Senator Aldrich to apprise him of his subcommittee’s work Beveridge also looked forward to an update from Albert Shaw on a planned stealth opposition—recruiting prominent people to denounce New Mexico’s fitness for statehood before his Committee on Territories when the Senate reconvened in early December 1902 Calling this latter effort a “matter of patriotic duty,” Beveridge enlisted Shaw to find experts to tell “the truth [emphasis in original] concerning the soil, its aridity, the impossibility of further population till irrigation shall have done its work and the character of the present population.” He also entreated Shaw to recruit “any authors like Owen Wooster [sic], Fred Remington and that crowd [who] can help me in this seriously important work.” Shaw, in turn, enlisted his close friend Nicholas Murray Butler to assist him with both tasks Butler, the nation’s foremost authority on contemporary education, had headed Columbia’s Teacher’s College prior to being named president of Columbia University earlier in 1902 (a position he held until 1945) Butler adamantly opposed statehood for New Mexico largely because of the deficiencies in its schools In an essay written in 1900 he summed up turn-of-the-century educational beliefs: “The future of democracy is bound up with the future of education.” But illiteracy posed a major obstacle to such accomplishments, and in his essay he lamented that among all states and Territories west of the Mississippi only in “New Mexico was the percentage of illiteracy” as scandalously high as the rate found among blacks in the American South (approaching 60 percent) He approvingly quoted Daniel Webster’s famous endorsement, made in 1820, about public schooling as an agent of socialization and stability, goals achieved by “inspiring a salutary and conservative principle of virtue and of knowledge in an early age.” But New Mexico’s schools—with their high illiteracy and reliance on Spanish—had not yet imparted the requisite “good and virtuous sentiments” essential to granting full citizenship Beveridge, just back from New Mexico, fully confirmed all of Butler’s points about the territory’s educational deficiencies, and he even claimed “New Mexico is in much worse condition educationally” than they had suspected Butler willingly lent his expertise to Beveridge, but he failed to enlist anyone else to testify in opposition to statehood He made a special effort to recruit artist Frederick Remington, who had spent much of 1900 in northern New Mexico But Remington begged off, and the illness and imminent death of Butler’s wife likely ruled out vigorous pursuit of any other contacts Beveridge also went to work on President Roosevelt to convince him that neither New Mexico nor Arizona qualified for statehood Beveridge had gained the president’s trust and admiration through friendship with two of the president’s oldest advisors from his days as governor of New York—Albert Shaw and Nicholas Murray Butler Together the four men met at least monthly at the White House Beveridge made public his views on New Mexico shortly after he returned to Washington, D.C He had already shared his reservations with the president, and now he did so publically in a Henry James-like sentence running to 118 words He proclaimed in his report to the Senate, On the whole the committee feels that in the course of time, when education, now only practically beginning, shall have accomplished its work; when the mass of the people, or even a majority of them, shall, in the usages and employment of their daily life, have become identical in language and customs with the great body of the American people; when the immigration of Englishspeaking people who have been citizens of other states does its modifying work with the ‘Mexican’ element—when all these things have come to pass, the committee hopes and believes that this mass of people, unlike us in race, language, and social customs, will finally come to form a creditable portion of American citizenship President Roosevelt, it has been observed, “was an intelligent and forceful person, well able to form his own conclusions or at least to select the politically realistic alternatives from the abundance of advice he was offered.” Why did he yield to Beveridge’s argument against New Mexico’s suitability to become a state—or was his response merely a ‘politically realistic alternative’? We will turn to an examination of Theodore Roosevelt’s position on statehood in the next two essays © 2008 by David V Holtby All rights reserved ... let their works speak Cities and towns, with all that modern civilization demands, homes of culture and refinement, schools and higher institutions of learning, public and private charitable institutions,... case against New Mexico and Arizona’s statehood During the same week in January 1902 that Beveridge and Shaw discussed tactics on delaying statehood, Beveridge also opened and chaired hearings on... complaints were “1 per cent truth and 99 per cent political chicanery.” And so it went, back and forth, for more than a week Finally Otero prevailed and secured the Committee and the Senate’s overwhelming