No sooner had McClure’s publicly declared that “they would welcome the suit,” claiming to possess a wealth of additional information relating to the boss and his machine, than Platt decided not to go forward. But the incident took a heavy toll on White. He suffered “a kind of nervous collapse,” and though he felt “perfectly well physically,” he could no longer bear to write, or even to read the papers. “My nerves are gone,” he told the editors at McClure’s, explaining his failure to submit another article that was overdue, admitting that “to as much as dictate this letter throws me in a perspiration.” His doctor recommended a protracted rest: “I must leave the state and go to the mountains . . . I am very sorry that I have thrown you all out so.” The staff of McClure’s supported him during the five-month recuperation; equally steadfast during this nadir of White’s career was Theodore Roosevelt. White would not forget either.
“PROBABLY NO ADMINISTRATION HAS EVER taken such a curious hold upon the people as that of Theodore Roosevelt,” remarked the longtime White House usher Irwin (Ike) Hoover. “While he is in the neighborhood,” one critic grudgingly conceded, “the public can no more look the other way than the small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade followed by a steam calliope.”
Indeed, Roosevelt’s initial months as chief executive were less remarkable for significant political accomplishments than for his impact on the public consciousness. “The infectiousness of his exuberant vitality made the country realize there was a new man in the White House,” observed Mark Sullivan, “indeed, a new kind of man. His high spirits, his enormous capacity for work, his tirelessness, his forthrightness, his many striking qualities, gave a lift of the spirits to millions of average men.” Among admirers and opponents alike, the president’s outsized personality compelled attention.
Newspapers invariably contrasted the vigorous young president with his staid predecessor, a Civil War veteran from a previous generation. “Where Mr. McKinley was patient, cautious, tactful, a very good listener, mindful of the little things which go to put a visitor at ease,” observed Walter Wellman of the Chicago Record-Herald, “Roosevelt is impetuous, impatient and wholly lacking in tact.” When dealing with public officials, Wellman noted, Roosevelt “is so full of energy that he simply runs over. He has no patience with long speeches or extended explanations. He cuts people off in the middle of sentences, tells them he knows all about it, and very often announces his decision before the caller has more than fairly started with his little say. . . . He wants action, action all the time. But he rarely gives offense, and never means to do so.” Fortunately, the new president had always tolerated, and even relished, humor at his own expense. It was said that he had “a right good laugh” when told of an epigram circulating widely in Washington: “President McKinley listened to a great many people and talked to but few. President Roosevelt talks to a great many men and listens to nobody.”
Roosevelt’s frenetic yet disciplined schedule mesmerized the press corps. In a piece for McClure’s, Lincoln Steffens described a breathless day begun when the president “darts into the breakfast-room with a cheerful hail to those already there,” then rushes to his office before the official workday starts to tackle his voluminous correspondence, dictating “one letter after another” to his secretary, “his voice and face reflecting vividly the various emotions which guided his words.” From 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., except on cabinet days, the second-floor reception room was crowded with senators, congressmen, Army and Navy officials. “The room is a large one, chairs and sofas are set all about it; but they are filled,” Steffens noted, “and many persons are standing.”
At noon, the doors opened to ordinary citizens, “an overflowing stream” of people eager to see the most colorful president in their memory. For an hour, Roosevelt moved speedily around the room, giving each person a dazzling smile and a warm handshake. The press of visitors, a New York Times reporter observed, never seemed “to try the President’s strength or impair his good temper.”
At one o’clock, Roosevelt generally excused himself from the crowd for his midday shave. During the “barber’s hour,” reporters were allowed audience, permitted to question—or more likely listen—as the president expounded upon any number of subjects while the barber desperately tried to ply his trade. “A more skillful barber never existed,” newspaperman Louis Brown-low observed, describing how “the President would wave both arms, jump up, speak excitedly, and then drop again into the chair and grin at the barber, who would begin all over.” Only “when the barber bent over the presidential head and began to shave the lower lip,” Steffens noted, “did he quiet down, giving reporters a few moments to pose their questions.”
Lunchtime was always a lively affair, featuring all manner of guests rarely seen in the White House—“Western bullwackers, city prize fighters, explorers, rich men, poor men, an occasional black man, editors, writers.” If an article or book piqued Roosevelt’s interest, the author received an invitation to lunch. “Whether the subject of the moment was political economy, the Greek drama, tropical fauna or flora, the Irish sagas, protective coloration in nature, metaphysics, the technique of football, or postfuturist painting,” the British statesman Viscount Lee remarked, Roosevelt “was equally at home.”
Late afternoon was devoted to exercise—a horseback ride or boxing match, a raucous game of tennis or a strenuous hike along the cliffs in Rock Creek Park. Dragging visitors and friends through the wooded sections of the park, Roosevelt had one simple rule: You had to move forward “point to point,” never circumventing any obstacle. “If a creek got in the way, you forded it. If there was a river, you swam it. If there was a rock, you scaled it, and if you came to a precipice you let yourself down over it.” Journalists delighted in portraying these late afternoon rambles. Jacob Riis described a route that could be traced by the “finger-marks” on “gripped fences, telegraph-poles and trees,” where Roosevelt’s exhausted companions struggled to follow. Stories multiplied about “this or that general or ambassador or cabinet officer who had dropped out and fallen by the way.”
The French ambassador Jules Jusserand left a celebrated account of his first walk with the president. After presenting himself at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue “in afternoon dress and silk hat, as if we were to stroll in the Tuileries Garden or in the Champs Elysées,” he soon found himself in the countryside, following Roosevelt “at breakneck pace” through fields and over rocks. When they approached a broad stream, he assumed the race had finally ended. “Judge of my horror when I saw the President unbutton his clothes and heard him say, ‘We had better strip, so as not to wet our things in the Creek.’ Then I too, for the honor of France, removed my apparel, except my lavender kid gloves.” To be without gloves, he insisted, “would be embarrassing if we should meet ladies.”
Reporters soon discovered that the hour when the president returned from these excursions and commenced the daily task of sorting his correspondence was “by far the best time to see him.” The New York Times reporter Oscar King Davis marveled at Roosevelt’s “amazing facility for carrying on a conversation while he was going over the mail. He would glance over a letter, make an addition or alteration with his pen, and sign his name at the same time that he was keeping up a steady fire of talk about whatever subject happened to be under discussion.”
Finally quitting his office and the company of his reporter friends, Roosevelt returned to the mansion, where he could relax and dress for dinner. There, in the family quarters, he was “allowed to become again husband, father and playmate.” He talked over the day’s events with his wife, read to the children or, more often, engaged them in physical games. “I play bear with the children almost every night,” he wrote, “and some child is invariably fearfully damaged in the play; but this does not seem to affect the ardor of their enjoyment.”
Under Edith’s guidance, a vital domesticity returned to the presidential residence. “It was the gloomiest house,” she recalled, “with the shadow of death still over
it, and a house in which an invalid [McKinley’s wife] had lived, why it didn’t seem as if the air from Heaven had blown through it.” She opened windows, rearranged rooms, brought in fresh flowers, had new carpet laid, and replaced the heavy canopied beds in the children’s rooms with their familiar white bedsteads from Oyster Bay.
Not since Willie and Tad Lincoln scampered through hallways and played hide-and-seek in closets had there been such a din in the old mansion. The children, ranging in age from three to seventeen, unabashedly made the White House their own. They dashed across its wooden floors on roller skates. They hid live reptiles in sofa cushions, walked upstairs on stilts, waded through the fountains on the landscaped grounds, and coaxed their pony to ride the elevator to the second-floor bedroom when seven-year-old Archie was sick. “Places that had not seen a human being for years were now made alive with the howls and laughter of these newcomers,” observed Ike Hoover. The Roosevelt family has “done more to brighten and cheer the White House than a whole army of decorators,” the Atlanta Constitution asserted, “and the merry prattle of children echoing through the corridors and apartments impart a homelike atmosphere which every caller is quick to notice and appreciate.”
WHILE THE REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT HARBORED misgivings about McKinley’s successor, William Howard Taft was certain that Roosevelt possessed every needful quality to be a good president from the outset. In letters home, he rebutted charges of Roosevelt’s “impulsiveness and lack of deliberation,” citing the fortitude, honesty, and intelligence that characterized his friend’s interactions with all manner of men over a wide-ranging career.
Saddened that McKinley had not lived to see “the consummation” of Taft’s own endeavors in the Philippines, he nevertheless trusted that Roosevelt would provide the same steadfast support. “In so far as the work in the Philippines was concerned,” Nellie noted, “my husband knew where the new President’s sympathies were and he had no fears on that score.” A week after McKinley’s death, Outlook magazine published an extraordinary article by Theodore Roosevelt entitled “Governor William H. Taft.” Written a month earlier by then Vice President Roosevelt, the extravagantly laudatory article prompted Horace to tease Will that “only a strenuous man like Teddie would put it so strongly in print, unless the subject of the article happened to be dead.”
“I dislike speaking in hyperbole,” Roosevelt began, “but I think that almost all men who have been brought in close contact, personally and officially, with Judge Taft are agreed that he combines . . . a standard of absolute unflinching rectitude on every point of public duty, and a literally dauntless courage and willingness to bear responsibility, with a knowledge of men, and a far-reaching tact and kindliness.” Indeed, Roosevelt observed of his old friend, “few more difficult tasks have devolved upon any man of our nationality during our century and a quarter of public life than the handling of the Philippine Islands just at this time; and it may be doubted whether among men now living another could be found as well fitted as Judge Taft to do this incredibly difficult work.”
Roosevelt’s support would prove essential for Taft in the weeks that followed as one crisis after another threatened the relative peace and prosperity of the Philippines. Although most of the insurrectionists had surrendered their arms, a brutal uprising in late September 1901 stunned the town of Balangiga on the island of Samar, where a small garrison of American soldiers had set up an outpost at the request of the local mayor. Unbeknownst to the Americans, this request had been a cunning ploy to isolate the troops where they would be vulnerable to a surprise assault.
In the days preceding the ambush, throngs of what appeared to be local mothers and grandmothers in black mourning clothes had assembled at the local church, bearing small caskets said to hold the bodies of their dead children claimed by a recent cholera outbreak. Instead, the coffins held machetelike weapons, and the black-clad figures proved to be guerrilla fighters. Shortly after the church bells rang at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, September 27, hundreds of insurrectionists suddenly charged into the mess hall and fell upon the unarmed soldiers. One sergeant was decapitated as he sat gripping his breakfast spoon; a private was immersed in the vat of boiling water used to clean utensils. Most of the others were hacked to death. Of seventy-four members of the unit, only twenty escaped with their lives.
“It was a disaster so ghastly in its details,” Nellie recalled, “so undreamed of under the conditions of almost universal peace which had been established, that it created absolute panic.” As a result, she remembered, attitudes toward the islanders shifted: “Men began to go about their everyday occupations in Manila carrying pistols conspicuously displayed, and half the people one met could talk of nothing else but their conviction that the whole archipelago was a smouldering volcano and that we were all liable to be murdered in our beds any night.”
Army officials were quick to place blame for the massacre on Taft’s “silly talk of benevolence and civilian rule [and] the soft mollycoddling of treacherous natives.” General Jacob W. Smith ordered four companies into Samar with the directive to take “no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms.” When requested to provide a minimum age under which residents of Balangiga might be spared, the general stated clearly: “Ten years.” This reprehensible order would eventually lead to Smith’s court-martial.
The Samar massacre made headlines in the States: “Disastrous Fight,” cried the New York Tribune; “Slaughtered by Filipinos,” accused the Houston Daily Post. The news of “the first severe reverse” in many months prompted a delegation of congressmen to visit the Philippines. Taft called for calm, stressing that the Samar tragedy did not characterize and should not reflect upon the entire Filipino people. “One of the Republicans has made an ass of himself by denouncing the Filipinos as savages and utterly unfit for anything good,” Taft told his brother Charles. Contrary to the fearmongering circulated by the military, Taft maintained, “in all other parts of the Islands there is entire peace.” If violence escalated, he argued, the military, having roused the native population “to such a pitch of enmity,” would bear the blame. At each of the five hundred military posts strung throughout the islands, Taft lamented, they imposed themselves with a dangerous disregard for local communities. “Officers take the good houses in the town and the soldiers live in the church, the ‘convento’ (which is the priest’s house), the schoolhouse or the provincial building,” he reported, adding that property owners “are paid an arbitrarily fixed rent and are very fortunate if they get their rent.”
The troubles that beset the Philippines were compounded when a highly contagious viral disease called rinderpest laid waste to three quarters of the island’s draft cattle. Without these sturdy animals to plow the fields, “a dreadful depression in agriculture” resulted. With the spread of hunger, roving outlaw bands—in a phenomenon known as “ladronism”—preyed on their neighbors. And making matters worse, rats carrying the plague continued to multiply despite an extensive eradication campaign by the new Board of Health. “Altogether,” the usually optimistic Taft understated, “we have not passed through the happiest months of our lives out here.”
On October 1, Nellie and two of the commissioners’ wives departed for a trip to China. That very afternoon, Taft fell seriously ill with what doctors mistakenly diagnosed as dengue fever. He remained bedridden for ten days, and when he returned to work, severe rectal pain prevented him from sitting. At the same time, a fungal infection developed in his groin. “While I have none of Job’s comforters,” Taft told Horace with grim humor, “I have many of his troubles.” On October 25, doctors finally discovered a large perineal abscess, most likely caused by the invasion of bacteria into his system. With gangrene spreading, an immediate operation was necessary. As Taft was carried from the palace on a stretcher, his terrified ten-year-old daughter Helen burst into tears. Taft dispatched a telegram to Nellie: “Come dear am
sick.” When the ether was administered, he later joked, he deliriously wished that he could “hire a hall and make a speech.” A large incision drained the cavity and removed the infected flesh. His doctors worried that the gangrenous tendency and blood poisoning had not been stopped in time, but they became more optimistic as the wound began to heal. The next day, Taft telegraphed Nellie again: “Much better don’t shorten trip.”
Confined to bed for several weeks, Taft secured an order from Washington appointing commission member Luke Wright as vice governor. This step provided him “peace of mind,” assuring that his duties would not be neglected while he convalesced. No sooner had he resumed work than he immediately fell ill again, requiring a second operation. Roosevelt and Root decided that Taft should return to the United States until he was thoroughly recovered and rested. The Filipinos feared they would never see their friend and trusted advocate again. As Taft made ready to depart, he spoke to the large native crowd that surrounded the governor’s palace to bid him anxious farewell, promising them he would return as soon as he was well.
WHILE TAFT ENDURED THE MOST discouraging period in his experience as viceroy, Roosevelt worked busily to draft his State of the Union address. Scheduled for early December when the legislature convened, his message would provide the first indication of his position on the most critical issue of the day—how best to address the massive trusts that were rapidly swallowing up competitors in one field after another. The period following McKinley’s first election has been labeled “the high summer of corporate influence.” Hundreds of small railroads, steamship companies, tobacco firms, copper industries, and collieries consolidated into single corporations that controlled as much as three quarters of the production in their particular fields.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 42