The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  With Nellie and the family happily situated at the palace, Taft envisioned a tenure of at least two years, time in which he could construct the foundation for Filipinos to elect their own assembly and achieve a greater degree of sovereignty. But another letter from the president on March 27 soon disrupted this prospect. “You will think I am a variety of the horse leech’s daughter,” Roosevelt began, alluding to the biblical parable in which a blacksmith’s perpetually dissatisfied daughter demands ever more of him. Twice before, Roosevelt had asked Taft to return home; twice he had reluctantly acquiesced to Taft’s resolve to remain in the islands. This third request was an imperative.

  “The worst calamity that could happen to me (personally and) officially is impending,” Roosevelt informed Taft, “because Root tells me that he will have to leave me next fall.” The secretary of war had originally joined McKinley’s cabinet, remaining on the understanding that he would return to his legal practice once new governments had been established in Cuba and the Philippines. The time to depart, Root insisted, had now come. For Roosevelt, the alarming prospect of losing “the wisest, the most surefooted, the most far-seeing” member of his administration could be remedied only by recalling Taft to take his place. “I wish to heaven that I did not feel as strongly as I do about two or three men in the public service, notably Root and you,” the president told his friend. “But as I do, I want to ask you whether if I can persuade Root to stay until a year hence, you cannot come back and take his place.”

  Recognizing the depth of Taft’s nation-building commitment, Roosevelt assured his friend that he would not have to abandon his cause. “As Secretary of War you would still have the ultimate control of the Philippine situation,” he insisted, “and whatever was done would be under your immediate supervision.” Beyond this enticement, Roosevelt felt he had arrived at the point in his presidency where Taft’s judicious guidance was indispensable. “Remember too the aid and comfort you would be to me,” he urged, “as my counsellor and adviser in all the great questions that come up.” While he respected Taft’s repeatedly expressed desire to complete his work in the Philippines, he needed him at home. “If only there were three of you!” Roosevelt concluded. “Then I would have one of you on the Supreme Court . . . one of you in Root’s place as Secretary of War . . . and one of you permanently Governor of the Philippines. No one can quite take your place as Governor; but no one of whom I can now think save only you can at all take Root’s place as Secretary.”

  This time, although he reiterated his concerns, Taft realized that the president’s summons left no room to maneuver. “In view of your desire that I shall be in Washington expressed thus three times, I should feel reluctant to decline again,” he replied, “but the change you propose is full of difficulties for me.” He endeavored to explain the problem of extricating himself from his Filipino colleagues, particularly after his recent pledge to remain with them. While continued supervision of Philippine policy as secretary of war made the prospect of departure more palatable, Taft maintained that he had “no knowledge of army matters and no taste for or experience in politics.” Moreover, the weight of Roosevelt’s expectations left him uneasy: “I cannot but be conscious that were I to come to Washington, you would find me wanting in many of the respects in which you are good enough now to think I might aid you.” Taft hoped the president would grant him several weeks to talk things over with Nellie and consult his brothers before supplying “a definite answer.”

  Much as Nellie enjoyed her life in the Philippines, she counseled Will to accept. She had argued strongly against the Supreme Court appointment but had long envisioned an active role for her husband at the highest level of government. The proffered cabinet post, she reflected, fell precisely “in line with the kind of work I wanted my husband to do, the kind of career I wanted for him.” Further, Taft’s health had become an increasing priority for Nellie; he had already endured two serious illnesses and was currently suffering from amoebic dysentery, a plague throughout the tropics. At the same time, the children were reaching ages when their education had to be given serious consideration. Thirteen-year-old Robert was scheduled to leave for Horace’s boarding school in Watertown, Connecticut, later that summer. In three years, he would be prepared to enter the Yale Class of 1910, as his father had proudly “prophesied on the day of his birth.” For Nellie and Will, the separation of 8,000 miles from their eldest son was painful to consider.

  In a letter to his brothers, Taft acknowledged the difficulty of refusing the president but expressed serious reservations. “If I were to go, I should have to be in the midst of a presidential campaign, which would be most distasteful to me, for I have no love of American politics,” he explained. “In addition, I do not see how I could possibly live in Washington on the salary of a Cabinet officer.” Cabinet members were expected to entertain lavishly, but their $8,000 salary was far below his compensation as governor general. “My life insurance policy amounts to nearly $2000 a year,” he protested, “and I should very much hate to go there and live in a boarding house.” On the other hand, if his dysentery did not improve, doctors were likely to recommend his departure from the Philippines in any case.

  Taft’s mother, intensely anxious about her son’s physical condition, urged his return. Indeed, given these growing health concerns, the family was unanimous in advising that Will accept the post. “I should prefer really not to have you get into politics here,” Charles admitted, “but under the circumstances I do not see how you can decline the offer.” Horace regretted that his brother would have to give up so “great a work” but feared that remaining in the islands would permanently damage Will’s health. If acceptance of the secretaryship seemed inconsistent so soon after declining the Court appointment, Harry reasoned, the control he would retain over Philippine policy considerably mitigated this concern. Reassured by the support of his family, Taft wrote a long letter to Roosevelt indicating acceptance. Yet the letter was so circuitous that his intentions remained somewhat inscrutable. Conceding that the president’s “earnest desire ought to be controlling,” he nevertheless continued to stress his “great reluctance” to desert the Filipino people.

  While Taft’s indecision over the cabinet appointment may have been difficult to decipher, there was no equivocation over his personal devotion to Theodore Roosevelt. Taft’s letter cited recent “intimations that the trust people, and possibly some of the machine politicians, are looking about for someone to center upon in opposition to your nomination” and noted that his own name had been bandied forth. “This is absurd,” he declared, because “my loyalty and friendship for you and my appreciation of the manner in which you have stood behind me . . . are such that it would involve the basest ingratitude and treachery for me to permit the use of my name in any way to embarrass your candidacy.” Upon receipt of this puzzling letter, Roosevelt dispatched a telegram to Harry Taft, who assured the president that it should be treated as an acceptance. Roosevelt was thrilled, sending Taft a forthright reply: “You don’t know what a weight you have taken off my mind.”

  The president also worked to ease his friend’s qualms over maintaining a proper Washington lifestyle. “It would really add immensely to my pleasure as an American to have you, who will be the foremost member of my Cabinet in the public eye, live the simplest kind of life,” he wrote. “I hope you will live just exactly as you and I did when you were Solicitor General and I Civil Service Commissioner.” Charley Taft, anxious that his brother should face no hardship in his removal to Washington, provided more tangible support. He gave Will 1,000 shares of Cleveland Gas Company stock worth $200,000 and proffered an additional $10,000 a year so that Taft “should feel independent of everybody and able to do as [he] pleased politically or in any other way.” The proposal, Will gratefully replied, “struck me all in a heap: The love you manifest, the possibilities you open and the burdens you take away fill my heart with a joy moderated only by a feeling that I do not deserve it and that I cannot sufficiently
requite it.”

  With the matter settled at last, only the timing and details of Taft’s return to America remained. “The President is very much gratified,” Harry relayed to Will; “he told me that he expected that you would be the strong man of the Cabinet and he should lean upon your counsel and advice.” Root was impatient to depart but had agreed to stay until year’s end. “Now that it is decided that you are to go,” Harry continued, “we think that you might as well take the step at once.” But Taft held his ground, promising to return in early January 1904. Despite his lifelong resolve to “keep out of politics,” it seemed he would now be thrust in headlong, in the midst of a presidential campaign. Nonetheless, he admitted, the task ahead excited him.

  And Roosevelt was unabashedly thrilled to finally have Taft on board, exclaiming, “Thank Heaven you are to be with me!”

  “I have an additional and selfish reason for wanting you here,” he confessed, as he looked toward the upcoming presidential campaign. “I shall have to rely very much upon you—upon your judgment and upon your making an occasional speech in which you put my position before the people. I should like you to be thoroughly familiar with this position in all its relations; and such familiarity you can only gain by close association with me for some length of time—in other words, by being in the Cabinet.” The mood of the country had changed in Taft’s absence, he explained. “When you come back I shall have much to tell you.”

  WHEN WILLIAM TAFT FINALLY REACHED Washington at 4 p.m. on January 27, 1904, exhausted from a four-week journey by ocean liner and transcontinental train, he was astonished to discover that President Roosevelt had sent the 15th Cavalry to meet him. Escorted to a waiting carriage by a dozen officers in full uniform, Taft was “too amazed for words” when a bugler sounded the call for a hundred cavalry horses to begin their march to the War Department. As the station crowd cheered, journalists marveled that the elaborate ceremony—befitting a tribute to “a sacred potentate” from some faraway land—was unprecedented for an American citizen not yet even sworn in as secretary of war.

  The rumpled traveler had barely settled into his rooms at the Arlington Hotel before having to depart for a reception honoring Elihu Root. The evening “was most enjoyable,” Taft reported to Nellie, who was still in California with the two younger children. All the members of the Supreme Court and the cabinet were in attendance, and the president stayed for hours to celebrate both his outgoing and incoming war secretaries.

  Journalists gleefully contrasted the easygoing new cabinet member, affectionately known as “Big Bill,” with his staid predecessor, whom few would dare address by his first name, if indeed they could correctly pronounce it. “Two men were never born who are more unlike,” the Washington Times observed. “One is the reserved, dignified, scholarly type, admitted by all persons who know him. The other is the hail-fellow well met, with unlimited brain power and the fortunate gift of being able to make a friend of every man who comes near him.”

  Roosevelt was sad to see Root go, he told his eldest son, but “Taft is a splendid fellow and will be an aid and comfort in every way.” Edith worried that Taft was “too much like” her husband to deliver the same detached advice that Root had always provided. Roosevelt did not share his wife’s reservations. “As the people loved Taft, so did Roosevelt,” Mark Sullivan observed, recalling that “whenever Roosevelt mentioned Taft’s name, it was with an expression of pleasure on his own countenance.” Moreover, he instinctively perceived in Taft’s steady composure “a needed and valuable corrective to his own impetuosity.”

  On February 1, Taft was sworn in as secretary of war, the position once held by his father. His brothers Harry and Charley stood by his side, along with Annie Taft. “It was good for sore eyes to see them,” Will told his wife. Horace had fallen ill that week and “felt like crying” when he realized he could not join his brothers for the ceremony. After their father’s death, the devotion and support among the Taft brothers had only strengthened.

  It was quickly evident that Taft’s innate diplomacy and administrative acumen would bring a jovial, effective leadership to the department. If his spirit of camaraderie, “democratic manner,” and “breezy informality” occasionally irritated Army officers, they, too, eventually succumbed to his authentic affability. “I’m mighty glad to see you,” he exclaimed as he grasped officers by the shoulders, determined to overcome barriers in Washington as he had done in Manila. As Taft traversed the halls of the War Department, one reporter noted, “he found time to extend a hearty welcome to colored messengers he had known for years.” At 320 pounds, his large frame invariably commanded attention. “He looks like an American Bison, a gentle, kind one,” the newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane observed of Taft’s benign, substantial presence.

  Having arrived in Washington at the height of the social season, Taft was bombarded by dinner invitations. A brilliant stag affair at Root’s house was followed by the Gridiron Dinner, a Yale Club reception in his honor, a Judiciary Dinner, a cabinet dinner at the new Willard, a formal military banquet, and a White House reception. “I went down behind the Pres. & Mrs. R with Mrs. Shaw [wife of the treasury secretary] and we cut a wide swath,” he told Nellie. “Mrs. Shaw is about as big as I am.”

  Hardly a day passed that Taft did not lunch at the White House, join the Roosevelt family for dinner, or consult privately with the president in the early morning or late evening. “The President seems really to take much comfort that I am in his cabinet,” he informed Nellie. “He tells me so and then he tells people so who tell me. He is a very sweet natured man and very trusting man when he believes in one.” Aware that Nellie still reserved judgment, he was careful to add: “I hope you will agree with me when you have fuller opportunities of observation.”

  Despite his hectic schedule, Taft managed to compose long letters to Nellie, detailing choice anecdotes about Washington’s social drama: he gossiped over Mrs. Root’s disdain when the first lady invited the “coarse and brazen” divorced wife of ex-Senator Wolcott to the White House; explained that Senator Hale of Maine had been dubbed “the Chief of the Pawnees because he has a pleasant habit of putting his hand on the knees of ladies whom he affects, under the dining table”; and recounted the various exploits of nineteen-year-old Alice Roosevelt—her late night partying, unchaperoned motor rides, brazen public smoking and betting on racehorses. She was known to keep a pet snake in her purse, hide small flasks of whiskey in her long gloves, and play poker with men. Will told Nellie that he had consulted Mrs. Lodge, who had also heard “a great deal of criticism of Alice Roosevelt’s manners and rather rapid life,” and was “much troubled” about it.

  “Isn’t there anything you can do to control Alice?” a friend asked Roosevelt. “I can do one of two things,” he famously replied. “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both!”

  When Nellie elected to spend several months in the California sun before traveling east, Taft was bereft. “I do not feel that I am living at all in your absence,” he repeatedly lamented; “all that happens to me, all the work I do, every speech I make are all by the way. They are not permanent steps of progress. I am just marking time till you shall come on and real life shall begin again.”

  He had little time to brood. Roosevelt “loaded tons of work” on his newly appointed secretary and it seemed “the harder he was pushed the better work he did.” William Taft became the “veritable pack horse for the Administration,” a “trouble-shooter” with duties that extended beyond military matters and the Philippines. The president chose him to supervise the Isthmian Canal Commission, charged with constructing the Panama Canal, and consulted him regularly on labor and capital issues. And, as he had promised, Roosevelt would rely upon Taft heavily for speeches and advice during the presidential campaign. As one reporter observed: “Wherever a tension needed the solvent of good-will, or friction the oil of benevolence; wherever suspicion needed the antidote of frankness, or wounded pride the di
sinfectant of a hearty laugh—there Taft was sent.”

  Taft was “extremely popular both in the senate and the house,” one Iowa newspaper reported. “He spends more time at the capital than all the other members of the cabinet,” the journalist remarked, noting that he had become “an intermediary between the executive and congress, familiar with both ends of Pa. Ave, and as well liked at one end as the other.”

  Not surprisingly, Taft remained deeply engaged in the progress of the Philippines. Throughout his tenure as war secretary, he maintained close contact with Luke Wright, his successor as governor general, and with dozens of former colleagues in the islands. “Things have quieted down very much since your departure,” one friend told him, “and we are all taking a much-needed rest, including the old-fashioned clock that stood in your office, which stopped on the day of your departure and has refused persistently, though much coaxed, to tick.”

  Taft spent a great deal of his time in February and March on the Hill, testifying and lobbying for a bill to subsidize the construction of a much-needed railroad system in the Philippines. Consultation with railway leaders in New York and a study of Britain’s experience with colonial railroads had convinced Taft that capitalists were loath to invest “so far from home,” especially where a tropical climate’s long rainy season and dense vegetation complicated their prospects. If the Philippine government were authorized to guarantee 5 percent interest on bonds issued for construction, however, he was confident that vital infrastructure projects would be undertaken.