Behind closed doors, Bonaparte recommended at a cabinet meeting to cut Grace loose. Roosevelt listened behind his small, round glasses and said no. They should send her to testify in Florida on another case, the president insisted. On November 20, 1907, the attorney general announced that all the charges levied against Grace had been disproved and dismissed.
At his desk in the White House, Teddy Roosevelt read Percy’s telegram again and weighed it against the scathing report he had read from Grace about the plantation. In his letter, Percy defended the dream of Sunny Side. He wanted Grace recalled from the South because of her meddling, which was interfering with his workers. Percy also had some strong wishes for the fate of her massive report. “I have no desire whatever to have her report suppressed,” Percy wrote to Roosevelt. “I only ask that no publication be made of it and no action taken under it until it has been verified.” Roosevelt was impressed by Grace’s investigation into the various sins of Sunny Side, but he was also worried about her methods. Still, the president knew that enslavement of a race—of any form—could not be tolerated in the United States. Even in Arkansas.
But then President Roosevelt remembered the time, many years earlier, when he had gone bear hunting in the Delta woods. There, in the deep woods, Teddy had hit it off with a young, enterprising businessman whose name was staring up at him from a letter on his desk. His old friend, LeRoy Percy.
Roosevelt sent another friend, the historian Albert Bushnell Hart, to objectively investigate Sunny Side. After he read Hart’s report, Roosevelt wrote back to him:
I have been very uneasy about Mrs. Quackenbos. She comes in the large class of people who to a genuine desire to eradicate wrong add an unsoundness of judgment which is both hysterical and sentimental.… The fact is that on those southern plantations we are faced with a condition of things that is very puzzling. Infamous outrages are perpetrated—outrages that would warrant radical action if they took place in Oyster Bay or Cambridge; but where they actually do occur, the surroundings, the habits of life, the sentiments of the people, are so absolutely different that we are in reality living in a different age, and we simply have to take this into account in endeavoring to enforce laws which can not be enforced save by juries.… It is like trying to enforce a prohibition law in New York City.
After her report on Sunny Side was put away on a shelf, Grace did not stay too long in the South. The papers reported on this lady of “prodigious fortune” who used her legal skills toward philanthropy. “Her light has been hid much beneath the bushel,” they said.
*
A hush fell over the chamber as the woman in black walked into the marbled room to testify before Congress. It was March 31, 1910, and Grace had been absent from Washington—and from America altogether—for over a year. After leaving the South, Grace had embarked on a long trip abroad. The long details of her trip were sketchy, though there was gossip that she had simply had enough after her troubles in the South.
But Grace was not in Washington for idle gossip or talk about a much-needed vacation. She was there, finally, to give her full report on peonage and immigration. In early 1908, Representative Edgar D. Crumpacker of Indiana, a lawyer, motioned for the House Committee on Labor to take up the issue of southern peonage. By March, he wanted Grace’s suppressed report released to the committee. By the time hearings were scheduled, it was March 1910. Grace, who had worked on peonage cases for three years, had, for the last year, been traveling through Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece.
In her absence, Crittenden had somehow escaped indictment. For the most part, southern newspapers had dismissed the stories of Sunny Side as Grace’s own failed attempt at notoriety. Percy himself wrote an article claiming that Grace had been “malicious and garbled” in her treatment of Sunny Side and that she had “no experience.” But as the time got closer to her testimony, Representative Clark from Florida again came out swinging against Grace. He called Attorney General Bonaparte a “transplanted bud of alleged French nobility” who employed “a lady bearing the euphonious name of Mrs. Mary Grace Quackenbos, whose field of labor previous” was limited to her own “dear Manhattan Isle.”
Assistant Attorney General Russell testified first. He spoke for a half hour. Grace went next. She spoke for two and a half. She talked about her three years as a U.S. attorney, Sunny Side, her travels, and how immigration needed drastic and speedy reform. She told how employment agents hoodwinked young men into forced labor through false pretenses. She showed how “expert masons were sent to a cotton plantation; boys promised work in a licorice factory were sent to a turpentine camp; a tailor to a mine.”
Grace was dressed in her customary shadows, which contrasted her armfuls of letters, reports, photographs, and books. During her testimony about Sunny Side, John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, who was a member of the committee, listened carefully. He looked at the photographs with great interest. When it came time for questions, Williams commented that though Sunny Side was surely not an ideal place, it did pay wages and did not have some of the physically cruel practices that some of the other southern sites had. Grace thought a moment and responded by reading a list of camp conditions. Mr. Williams felt vindicated; those were the conditions at Robinsonville, he said, a notoriously bad peonage site. When Grace revealed that she had just read conditions from Sunny Side, most everyone in the room laughed.
Grace explained to Mr. Williams that the Department of Justice was not there to make men laugh but “to compel employers to treat laborers fairly.” Their purpose was “not to prevent European labor going to the South, but just the contrary”—to make it work.
After Roosevelt pulled her out of Sunny Side, Grace had not gone overseas just for an extended vacation. She had also gone to uncover the very source of the injustice she had witnessed. She visited every country she could in order to root out these sources of immigration evil. As she listed the ports of call she was received in, some wondered if she had done so under orders. Grace compiled her findings, which she presented to the Senate committee members. Her plan, titled “The Answer to the Immigration Problem,” asked for government regulation and registration of immigrants to move them away from the crowded cities and into jobs in less-developed areas: the part of the Sunny Side idea that was good, but with regulation and a moral foundation.
Grace was frank. She said that “Uncle Sam has been negligent of his new wards” and that the “dark days of the slave trade” had arisen again in the form of the “human vampires” who were preying on their very own countrymen.