In their lengthy coverage of the historic day, the press corps brought to light scores of colorful anecdotes. The story they failed to get, however, was the story they wanted above all—Roosevelt’s response to the major political issue of the day: the growing disenchantment of progressive Republicans with the leadership of President Taft.
AS HIS SECOND TERM NEARED its end, Roosevelt had handpicked from his cabinet the trusted friend he desired to succeed him: William Howard Taft. The two men had first met in their early thirties, when Roosevelt headed the Civil Service Commission and Taft was U.S. Solicitor General. “We lived in the same part of Washington,” Taft recalled, “our wives knew each other well, and some of our children were born about the same time.” Over the years, this friendship had deepened, becoming what Taft described as “one of close and sweet intimacy.” During his first presidential term, Roosevelt had invited Taft, then governor general of the newly acquired Philippine Islands, to serve as his secretary of war. Initially reluctant to leave a post to which his talents were ideally suited, Taft had finally been persuaded to join his old friend’s administration as “the foremost member” of his cabinet, his daily “counsellor and adviser in all the great questions” that might confront them.
Roosevelt had thrown all his inexhaustible energy behind the drive to make Taft president. “I am quite as nervous about your campaign as I should be if it were my own,” he had told Taft. He had edited Taft’s speeches, relayed a constant stream of advice, and corralled his own immense bloc of supporters behind Taft’s candidacy. When Taft was elected, Roosevelt reveled in the victory, both delighted for a “beloved” friend and confident that America had chosen the man best suited to execute the progressive goals Roosevelt had championed—to distribute the nation’s wealth more equitably, regulate the giant corporations and railroads, strengthen the rights of labor, and protect the country’s natural resources from private exploitation.
At the start of Roosevelt’s presidency in 1901, big business had been in the driver’s seat. While the country prospered as never before, squalid conditions were rampant in immigrant slums, workers in factories and mines labored without safety regulations, and farmers fought with railroads over freight rates. Voices had been raised to protest the concentration of corporate wealth and the gap between rich and poor, yet the doctrine of laissez-faire precluded collective action to ameliorate social conditions. Under Roosevelt’s Square Deal, the country had awakened to the need for government action to allay problems caused by industrialization—an awakening spurred in part by the dramatic exposés of a talented group of investigative journalists he famously labeled “muckrakers.”
By the end of Roosevelt’s tenure, much had been accomplished. The moribund 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act had been revived, vast acres of lands had been protected from exploitation, and railroads had been prevented from continuing long-standing abuses. Congress had passed workmen’s compensation, a pure food and drug law, and a meat inspection act. Nevertheless, much remained to be done. Roosevelt’s legacy would depend upon the actions of his chosen successor—William Howard Taft. “Taft is as fine a fellow as ever sat in the President’s chair,” Roosevelt told a friend shortly after the election, “and I cannot express the measureless content that comes over me as I think that the work in which I have so much believed will be carried on by him.”
While he was abroad, however, Roosevelt had received numerous disturbing communications from his progressive friends. Word that his closest ally in the conservation movement, Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, had been removed by Taft, left Roosevelt dumbfounded: “I do not know any man in public life who has rendered quite the service you have rendered,” he wrote to Pinchot, “and it seems to be absolutely impossible that there can be any truth in this statement.” When the news was confirmed, he asked Pinchot to meet him in Europe in order to hear his firsthand account. Pinchot had arrived with a number of letters from fellow progressives, all expressing a belief that Taft had aligned himself with old-line conservatives on Capitol Hill and was gradually compromising Roosevelt’s hard-won advances.
Roosevelt found it difficult to believe he had so misjudged the character and convictions of his old friend. On his final day in Europe, he confided his puzzlement to Sir Edward Grey as the two outdoorsmen tramped through the New Forest in southern England in pursuit of the song or sight of several English birds Roosevelt had only read about. “Roosevelt’s spirit was much troubled by what was happening in his own country since he left office,” Grey recalled. “He spoke of Taft and of their work together with very live affection; he had wished Taft to succeed him, had supported him, made way for him. How could he now break with Taft and attack him?” Yet the concerted voice of his progressive friends was urging him to do precisely that.
All through the spring of 1910, as the date of his return approached, one question had dominated political discourse and speculation: “What will Mr. Roosevelt do?” Which side would he take in the intensifying struggle that was dividing the Republican Party between the old-line conservatives and a steadily growing number of “insurgents,” as the progressive faction was then known. Aware that anything he said would be construed as hurtful or helpful to one side or the other, Roosevelt determined to remain silent on all political matters until he could more fully absorb and analyze the situation. “There is one thing I want, and that is absolute privacy,” he told reporters as the day’s celebration came to an end. “I want to close up like a native oyster . . . I am glad to have you all here; but . . . I have nothing to say.”
THE WEEKS PRECEDING ROOSEVELT’S HOMECOMING had been especially difficult for President Taft. “He looks haggard and careworn,” Captain Butt told his sister-in-law, Clara. His characteristic ruddy complexion had faded to a sickly pale, his weight had ballooned to 320 pounds, and his jovial temperament had turned mournful. “It is hard on any man to see the eyes of everyone turn to another person as the eyes of the entire country are turning to Roosevelt,” Butt speculated. Nonetheless, Butt acknowledged that Taft’s low spirits had little to do with jealousy. Never once had he heard Taft “murmur against the fate” that kept him, “a man of tremendous personality himself . . . in the shadow” of his predecessor. “He is so broad as to show no resentment” of his “secondary role,” Butt marveled. Rather, Taft’s anxiety stemmed, he thought, from the fact that “he loves Theodore Roosevelt,” and the specter of a potential rupture in their friendship was causing great emotional distress.
No shadow of such troubles was in evidence when Taft’s presidency began. “He is going to be greatly beloved as President,” Roosevelt had predicted. “He has the most lovable personality I have ever come in contact with.” A big man with a big heart, clear blue eyes, and a thoughtful nature, Taft was portrayed as “America incarnate—sham-hating, hardworking, crackling with jokes upon himself, lacking in pomp but never in dignity . . . a great, boyish, wholesome, dauntless, shrewd, sincere, kindly gentleman.”
The time had come, even Roosevelt’s most ardent admirers agreed, for a different kind of leader—a quieter, less controversial figure. Roosevelt, with his fiery temperament, inexhaustible supply of arresting quips, and demagogic appeals, had given powerful voice to the Progressive movement. Now, Roosevelt’s journalist friend William Allen White argued, the country needed a man who could “finish the things” Roosevelt had begun, who could work with Congress to consolidate the imperfect statutes and executive orders generated in the tumultuous previous years. Although Taft would “say little,” White acknowledged, he would “do much.” His mind would not, like Roosevelt’s, move “by flashes or whims or sudden impulses,” another journalist wrote, but rather with steady efficiency, “in straight lines and by long, logical habit.”
Taft agreed with this assessment of the situation he faced. He likened Roosevelt’s administration to “a great crusade” that had aroused the people to the need for greater federal regulation of the economy. Now it was the work of his administration to make these expanded p
owers “permanent in the form of law.” In contrast to Roosevelt, a career politician whose “intense desire to reach practical results” had led him occasionally to chafe under “the restraint of legal methods,” Taft had trained as a lawyer and a judge, disciplines that had instilled “the necessity for legal method.” Roosevelt had ended his presidency “in an ugly fight” with a Congress he had sought to bypass through a direct appeal to the public. With a very different yet complementary temperament, Taft insisted that he must work “with the tools and the men . . . at hand.” It was his misfortune to take office at a time marked by a bitter rift within the Republican Party, when progressives viewed compromise with conservatives as treachery.
Taft had not openly sought the presidency. Since his appointment as a superior court judge at the age of twenty-nine, he had aspired to one day become chief justice of the United States. He had moved swiftly up the judicial ladder, becoming U.S. Solicitor General at age thirty-two and a federal circuit judge at thirty-four. When President McKinley asked him to go to the Philippines, it was with the implied promise that he would return to a Supreme Court appointment. When Roosevelt became president, he honored his predecessor’s promise, twice offering Taft a position on the Supreme Court. With great reluctance, Taft had declined both opportunities; in the first instance, he felt he could not leave his work in the Philippines unfinished; in the second, his wife and closest adviser, Nellie, persuaded him not to bury himself on the Court at the very moment when, as secretary of war, he was being touted throughout the country as Roosevelt’s most likely successor. Indeed, were it not for his wife’s White House dreams, Taft would likely never have agreed to a presidential run.
Taft had found little joy in campaigning for the presidency in 1908. He had “great misgivings” about every speech he was forced to make. For months, the thought of his acceptance speech loomed over him “like a nightmare.” He feared that his efforts to forge a middle ground on issues would “make many people mad.” Unlike Roosevelt, who regularly perused articles about himself and found pleasure in responding to critics, Taft acknowledged that negative press left him “very, very discouraged.” After a while, despite Nellie’s urgings, he refused to read unfavorable articles altogether. His speeches, Nellie warned, tended to be much too long. “But I am made this way and ‘I can do no other,’ ” he told her. “That is the kind of an old slow coach you married.” In the end, with his “campaign manager” (as he called Nellie) by his side to edit his speeches and offer advice, comfort, and encouragement, he won a magnificent victory over William Jennings Bryan.
Taft took office in 1909 with commingled exhilaration and trepidation. “I pinch myself every little while to make myself realize that it is all true,” he told a friend. “If I were now presiding in the Supreme Court of the United States as Chief Justice, I should feel entirely at home, but with the troubles of selecting a cabinet and the difficulties in respect to the revision of the tariff, I feel just a bit like a fish out of water.” More than a year later, such misgivings had not subsided. When asked if he liked being president, he replied that he “would rather be Chief Justice,” for the “quieter life” on the Court would prove “more in keeping with my temperament.” However, he reflected, “when taken into consideration that I go into history as a President, and my children and my children’s children are the better placed on account of that fact, I am inclined to think that to be President well compensates one for all the trials and criticisms he has to bear and undergo.”
Taft well knew how fortunate he was to have a natural politician in his devoted and intelligent wife, one whose superb judgment and political acumen could help him “overcome the obstacles that just at present seem formidable.” They had been partners from the earliest days of their married life in Cincinnati. Like Edith and Theodore, Nellie and Will had grown up together in the same city. Their sisters had been “schoolmates,” and their fathers, Nellie wrote, had “practiced law at the same bar for more than forty years.” Nellie and Will had been friends for six years when their relationship began to deepen into love.
Young Nellie was an unconventional woman. From early adolescence, she craved a more expansive life. She liked to smoke, drink beer, and play cards for money. She was an avid reader with a passion for classical music, a talented writer, and a dedicated teacher. In her early twenties, she had organized a weekly salon, with Will and his brother Horace among the regular participants. Every Saturday night their circle of six or seven friends presented essays and discussed literature and national politics “with such high feeling and enthusiasm,” Nellie recalled, that the history of the salon “became the history of our lives during that period.” The more time he spent with Nellie, Will told his father, “the deeper grew my respect for her, the warmer my friendship until it unconsciously ripened into a feeling that she was indispensable to my happiness. . . . Her eagerness for knowledge of all kinds puts me to shame. Her capacity for work is wonderful.”
For her part, Nellie found in Will a husband who adored her and highly valued her intelligence. Their union provided a channel for her to pursue her intense ambition to accomplish something vital in life. Will also proved a loving father for their three children, Robert, Helen, and Charlie, who were eighteen, sixteen, and eleven when Taft became president. Throughout their marriage, Taft looked to Nellie as a “merciless but loving critic,” depending on her advice at every crucial juncture. They labored together over his speeches and discussed political strategy in a manner, one observer recalled, much like “two men who are intimate chums.” Their partnership gave Taft confidence that he would learn to navigate the uncharted waters of the presidency.
The New York Times predicted that with Nellie Taft as first lady, “the Taft Administration will be brilliant beyond any similar period in America’s social history.” Over the years, she had established a sterling reputation as a democratic hostess, opening her doors to people from all backgrounds. In the Philippines, she had stunned the conservative military establishment by rejecting their strict segregation of whites and native Filipinos, instead insisting “upon complete racial equality” at the governor’s palace. As first lady, she brought the same egalitarian ethos to her position. She spoke out against the unhealthy working conditions of government employees and embarked upon several civic projects. She helped design a beautiful public park along the Tidal Basin where concerts could be held every week during the summer months, and made arrangements to bring the same flowering cherry trees she had admired in Japan to the nation’s capital.
Nellie Taft was swiftly becoming one of the most respected and powerful first ladies in history. Then, only ten weeks after the inauguration, terrible misfortune shattered these auspicious beginnings. On board the presidential yacht with her husband and some guests, Nellie suffered a devastating stroke that left her temporarily paralyzed and unable to speak. At the sight of his half-conscious wife, only forty-seven years old, Taft turned “deathly pale.” Taft’s “great soul,” Archie Butt empathized, was “wrapped in darkness.” Although Nellie gradually recovered the ability to walk, she would continue to struggle with her speech the rest of her life.
A year after Nellie’s stroke, shortly before Roosevelt was due to return to America, Taft sent him a plaintive handwritten letter weighing his accomplishments and failures as president. “I have had a hard time,” he confided. “I do not know that I have had harder luck than other presidents but I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than have others. I have been conscientiously trying to carry out your policies but my method of doing so has not worked smoothly.” In closing, he told his old friend, “it would give me a great deal of pleasure if after you get settled at Oyster Bay, you could come over to Washington and spend a few days at the White House.”
Taft had been tempted to go to New York and personally welcome Roosevelt home. According to one report in the Indianapolis Star, his advisers had suggested that “this demonstration of amity would be appreciated by Col. Roosevelt and would
do more than anything else to drive away the suspicion that seems to have gained ground that the relations between the chief executive and his predecessor are strained.” Upon reflection, however, Taft concluded that it would diminish the status of the presidential office “if he were to ‘race down to the gangplank,’ to be the first to shake hands with the former President.” He explained to his military aide that he was “charged with the dignity of the Executive” and was determined to “say nothing that will put a momentary slight even on that great office.” No matter how much he would rather be Will, welcoming his friend Theodore, he was now President Taft. “I think, moreover, that [Roosevelt] will appreciate this feeling in me,” he concluded, “and would be the first one to resent the slightest subordination of the office of President to any man.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 3