As realization spread that the clerk was finished, one journalist reported, “statesmen almost fell out of their chairs.” The presidential message, expected to be “historic,” contained only 340 words. In truth, Taft had composed the entire text in fifteen minutes that morning. The address sounded “no clarion call to the people” and made “no allusion, direct or indirect, to the question of what kind of changes should be made.” He simply and straightforwardly called on Congress to “give immediate consideration” to the tariff. Having already discussed the principles upon which revision “should proceed,” Taft believed it unnecessary to reiterate his position. Without an inherent “flair for the dramatic” and hoping he might “avoid the bitter feuding with Congress that had marked Roosevelt’s last days in office,” he had chosen to launch his administration with “no loud noises, no explosions, no disturbances of the atmosphere.”
Taft understood, he later said, that it was vital for a president to communicate “the facts and reasons sustaining his policies.” Cultivating good relations with the press afforded “a great advantage” to a leader. Nevertheless, he confessed, from his first days in office he was “derelict” in his use of the bully pulpit. The weekly press conferences he had promised soon became a chore. “There was none of the give and take, the jokes, and the off-the-record comments” that had characterized Roosevelt’s interactions with the journalists. Before long, Taft discontinued the weekly sessions, attributing his discomfort with the press to his years on the bench, where he was unaccustomed to freely expanding upon his positions. “When the judgment of the court was announced,” he explained, “it was supposed that all parties in interest would inform themselves as to the reasons for the action taken.”
Many of the reporters were eager to help him, Taft later acknowledged, “but they properly complained that I did not help them to help me.” In the spring of 1909, William Allen White, Ray Baker, and Ida Tarbell all signaled their readiness to support and publicize tariff revision, postal savings, and the rest of the president’s progressive agenda. “If ever at any time I may serve you in any way,” White wrote after the inaugural, “kindly let me know.” Taft thanked him for his offer, and the two men exchanged a few letters, but the president never found a way to properly utilize the Kansas editor. “I am not constituted as Mr. Roosevelt is,” he explained to White, “in being able to keep the country advised every few days of the continuance of the state of mind in reference to reforms. It is a difference in temperament. He talked with correspondents a great deal. His heart was generally on his sleeve, and he must communicate his feelings. I find myself unable to do so. After I have made a definite statement, I have to let it go at that, until the time for action arises.”
Baker, too, hoped to assist the president’s endeavor to revise the tariff. “I knew what a hard fight he had ahead of him, and I wanted to help him, in my own small way, if I could, with my pen,” the journalist remembered. Baker had become increasingly disillusioned with Roosevelt’s failure to confront the issue. “Although the tariff storm was steadily rising,” he lamented, “Roosevelt said not so much as a single word on the subject. Though the issue was driving his party straight upon the reefs, he offered no counsel, suggested no remedy. He left the brunt of the storm for poor Mr. Taft to meet.” Now that the new president had made tariff reform his signature issue, Baker was anxious to meet with him and see how he might aid the cause.
An interview was arranged not long after the special legislative session had commenced. The Cabinet Room was filled with people waiting to see the president. Emerging from his private office, Taft asked that Baker “remain to the last,” so they would have an opportunity to talk. “I had liked him on previous occasions when I had met him,” Baker recalled. Now, watching “his frank, free, whole-hearted way of greeting his visitors,” his expansive manner of draping “one of his great arms over the shoulder of a congressman,” the journalist liked him “better than ever.” Entering the private office where he had previously met with Roosevelt, Baker was struck immediately by the contrast. The small room had formerly exuded “the air of a quiet study.” Books of history, works of fiction, and volumes of poetry had been strewn upon the table, “a riding crop and a tennis racket leaning in the corner.” Now, Taft had transformed the study into a staid law office: “On all sides of the room were cases filled with law-books, nothing but law books.” The shift in decor was “not without significance,” Baker concluded, revealing “the legal mind” of the new occupant, a temperament desiring “everything carried forward quietly; according to the rules of the court,” without “emotional appeals” to the public.
Initially fearful that the new president’s “dislike for publicity” would prevent him from mobilizing public opinion to pressure Congress, Baker was “impressed” by “the perfect freedom” with which Taft discussed the tariff. “He outlined his position with a degree of frankness and earnestness that left in my mind no doubt of his essential sincerity,” Baker remarked, noting that the president evinced an “easy optimism” that admitted no doubt about the eventual outcome. “I went away from the White House that day fully convinced that Mr. Taft not only would do what he said he would, regarding the tariff, but that he could do it.” In the wake of this encouraging visit, however, Taft never called on Baker as the battle dragged on and the prospects for significant revision diminished.
No journalist fathomed the history of corporate efforts to evade downward tariff revision better than Ida Tarbell. As the special session was getting under way, she published a revealing article called “Juggling with the Tariff” that used the example of the wool schedule to illustrate the arcane tariff-making process. “Fifty years ago wool was disposed of in perhaps fifty words, which anybody could understand,” she wrote; “to-day it takes some three thousand, and as for intelligibility, nobody but an expert versed in the different grades of wools, of yarns, and of woolen articles could tell what the duty really is.” If Congress actually relied on such “disinterested experts,” the process might nevertheless produce a decent tariff; instead, Tarbell explained, “Congress consults the wool-growers, the top-maker, the spinner and the weaver, and these gentlemen, being particularly human, each asks for an amount which will give him the advantage in the business—and he who is cleverest gets it.” Not surprisingly, those who secured the desired duties also happened to be the largest campaign contributors to the congressmen and senators on the relevant committees. “Mr. Taft is right,” she declared, laying out a blueprint of necessary proceedings for reform: “What is wanted in making the present bill is evidence—evidence of the cost of production here and abroad, gathered not by the interested, but by the disinterested, not by clerks, but by experts. When provision has been made for obtaining that, the first step toward putting an end to the present tariff juggling will have been taken.”
Throughout the spring, Tarbell remained hopeful that the new president’s leadership would help secure the first genuine revision. She considered William Howard Taft “one of the most kindly, modest, humorous, philosophical of human beings.” At a cabinet dinner shortly after the election, she found herself seated next to him. “There was something very lovable about the way the President talked of his election—not at all of any pride or pleasure he had taking the place,” but rather of the deep pleasure it had afforded his family. With her warm feelings toward Taft and passion for tariff reform, Tarbell would undoubtedly have supported the president in much the same way Baker had helped Roosevelt during the battle for railroad regulation—sharing extensive research, providing advance copies of upcoming articles, and collaborating through subsequent conversations. Yet there is no record that the president ever followed up their dinner meeting with correspondence or an invitation to the White House.
THE LEGISLATIVE BATTLE PLAYED OUT in three acts. Deliberations began in the House and moved on to the Senate, culminating in a conference committee to reconcile the bills produced by each chamber. Early on, Cannon and Aldrich advised Taft to
wait until the final conference committee stage to exert his influence. Trusting that the two men would honor the party’s pledge to revise the tariff downward, Taft agreed “to keep his distance” from the congressional deliberations. If adjustments were necessary, he could make a personal appeal afterward, persuading each side to do what was best for both party and country.
“I have got to regard the Republican party as the instrumentality through which to try to accomplish something,” he explained to William Allen White, when cautioned that public sentiment in the West had turned against the traditional party leadership. Indeed, the resentment against Cannon and Aldrich was so strong, another friend warned, that “no matter what tariff bill passes, or what you do, you are bound to be soundly abused.” Taft remained imperturbable in the face of such admonitions. “I am here to get legislation through,” he countered, “not to satisfy particular parts of the country.”
Taft considered the Payne bill, passed by the House on the evening of April 9, “a genuine effort in the right direction,” though reductions were “not as great” as he anticipated. The bill put hides, oil, coal, tea, and coffee on the free list and reduced the duties on lumber, scrap iron, and a host of other items. To Taft’s disappointment, the controversial wool schedule was not changed. The combination of “the Western wool growers and the Eastern wool manufacturers,” he lamented, rendered it “impossible” to get lower duties “through either the Committee or the House.” The bill also made what the president considered “inappropriate” increases in food, spices, mustard, gloves, and hosiery. Despite these shortcomings, the free trade Evening Post judged the Payne bill “a more enlightened and promising measure than any tariff ever fathered by the Republican party.” For the first time, the Post acknowledged, “the forgotten consumer is given a thought.”
If the Senate retained all the reductions in the House bill and struck out the higher rates on food, hosiery, and gloves, Taft told the New York Times, the final product “would be satisfactory to him.” He would not engage in a struggle with Congress “at this early stage.” The measure had passed the House with an almost straight party-line vote of 217 to 161, a good omen for Republican unity. Now it was “up to the Senate”—or, as many believed, to a single senator. “The House makes the tariff,” the New York Press quipped. “Senator Aldrich, pretty much single-handed, remakes it.”
Taft had reason to be skeptical of Nelson Aldrich. He had witnessed the Senate leader’s machinations during Roosevelt’s fight to regulate the railroads and blamed Aldrich for the repeated failure to reduce the tariff on imports from the Philippines. Initial reports from the Finance Committee indicated that the senator had crafted hundreds of amendments to the House bill, the great majority cleverly constructed to raise, not lower, duties. “I fear Aldrich is ready to sacrifice the party, and I will not permit it,” Taft told his secretary, George Meyer. Even more troubling, Aldrich soon openly revealed his antagonism to the president’s agenda. On April 22, a scant two weeks after the Senate had taken up the Payne bill, Aldrich stood on the Senate floor and asked, “Where did we ever make the statement that we would revise the tariff downward?” This was the time when Taft should have summoned the press and upbraided Aldrich and his reactionary allies. But whereas Roosevelt spoiled for dramatic fights, public confrontation was not in the new president’s disposition. “There is no use trying to be William Howard Taft with Roosevelt’s ways,” he conceded.
While Taft hesitated to challenge Aldrich openly, La Follette, Beveridge, Nelson, and a small group of progressive Republicans mobilized for a major intraparty battle against the Senate leader. Aware that Aldrich had abundant experience in devising obscure classifications for each of the 4,000 duties in the tariff schedule, they agreed to concentrate on a few major products. For efficiency, they divided the daunting research: Dolliver chose cotton, La Follette selected wool, A. B. Cummins focused on metal and glass, and Joseph Bristow tackled lead and sugar. Time was short, for Aldrich was determined to move the bill through the upper chamber as quickly as possible. “It has been tariff, tariff, all the time, literally morning, noon and night,” Lodge reported to Roosevelt, complaining, “I have never been so worked in my life.” It was often past midnight when the insurgents left their offices, only to continue sifting through hundreds of pages of material at home until the small hours of the morning. On weekends, they gathered in Albert Beveridge’s apartment, sharing information and discussing strategy.
In private meetings, Taft encouraged the insurgents to “go ahead, criticize the bill, amend it, cut down the duties—go after it hard,” promising, “I will keep track of your amendments. I will read every word of the speeches you make, and when they lay that bill before me, unless it complies with the platform, I will veto it.” Had the president truly followed the devastating critique presented in the insurgents’ extended speeches, he would have been far better equipped to influence the final shape of the bill. At the close of a harried day, however, Taft wanted nothing more than to provide Nellie with comfort and companionship, patiently working to help her regain her speech. By June, he confessed to a group of woolen manufacturers that he was “bewildered by the intricacies of the tariff measure” and would have more confidence if he possessed “more technical knowledge.”
The Senate debate dragged on, becoming increasingly bitter and unprofitable. The insurgents blasted Aldrich and his lieutenants as “reactionary tools of the trusts and eastern corporations”; the Senate leader, in turn, accused the insurgents of treachery to the Republican Party. During one savage indictment of the cotton schedule, Aldrich attempted to bolt from the chamber. “The Senator will not turn his back upon what I have to say here without taking the moral consequences,” Dolliver shouted at him. Taft worried that the insurgents were becoming “irresponsible,” exposing the party’s rift to the nation, and making compromise impossible.
Aldrich himself, the shrewdest and most discerning political animal in the Senate, knew precisely where to yield and where to hold fast. He bartered reductions on some schedules for increases in others, confident that in the end, the bill would emerge essentially his own. William Howard Taft was the only real obstacle that Aldrich faced. The president possessed the power to mobilize public opposition, use patronage as a club, and ultimately to withhold his signature from a bill. Accordingly, Aldrich set to work on the good-natured Taft. He spent relaxing mealtime hours repeatedly assuring him that the final tariff bill would be worthy of his support. On a number of items, Aldrich acknowledged, the Senate had restored duties cut by the House. When the bill reached the joint committee, however, he promised to “confer” with the president, assuring him that his suggestions would carry “great influence.” Knowing Taft’s enduring allegiance to the Philippines, he guaranteed that the islands would finally see the reductions Taft had long advocated. Moreover, he claimed to accept the president’s plan for a tariff commission composed of experts who would furnish objective information during future debates. Most importantly, the senator pledged that once the tariff was settled, he and his lieutenants would cooperate to move forward the rest of the legislative program outlined in Taft’s inaugural address relating to trusts, interstate commerce, postal savings, and conservation—all considered vital to the “general carrying out of the Roosevelt policies.”
By early summer, as the futility of the insurgents’ struggle on the Senate floor grew increasingly apparent, newspapers called on the president to intervene. “Mr. Taft is not proving a courageous captain,” the New York American charged, extending the metaphor to suggest a purloined presidency: “His course was clearly charted and the prospect at the outset was for a quick and fair voyage. But he has surrendered the command to Senator Aldrich, and the latter, as was to be expected, is steering the vessel into pirate-infested seas.” The president’s sympathizers argued that it was premature “to form definite conclusions until results begin to show,” suggesting that Taft’s benign temperament and beaming smile might well “cloak a determinat
ion as unrelenting as Mr. Roosevelt’s own.”
In mid-June, Taft finally abandoned his “hands off” approach to the legislature, sending a special message to Congress on an issue intimately connected to tariff reduction. To balance the projected loss of federal revenue resulting from overall reductions, some additional form of taxation would be necessary. The House had proposed an inheritance tax, but the Senate roundly objected “on the ground that the States—some thirty-six of them—had already adopted inheritance taxes, and this would be a double tax.” Hoping to resolve this contentious standoff, Taft called on Congress to pass both a tax on corporations and a constitutional amendment establishing an income tax. In principle, the president supported the progressives’ preference for a bill to impose an immediate federal income tax. But in practice, he feared that the conservative Supreme Court, which had ruled the measure unconstitutional just a decade earlier, would refuse to “reverse itself,” exposing the Court to severe criticism at a time when its reputation was “already at a low ebb.” A constitutional amendment granting Congress power to levy an income tax would settle the question for good.
As he pursued his tax agenda with Aldrich, Taft engaged in “some pretty shrewd politics.” He met individually with members of the Finance Committee and “committed them separately” to both tax propositions before dispatching his message to Congress. The corporate tax, he persuasively argued, would simultaneously provide needed revenue and empower the federal government to oversee the transactions of a wide range of corporations. It would “go a great way” toward securing the protection from “illegitimate schemes” and anti-trust violations that Roosevelt had long hoped to provide. During their previous conversations, Aldrich had reluctantly accepted the corporation tax, thinking that Taft had been persuaded to drop the income tax amendment. But with the president’s support, Congress passed both measures. “Just when they thought they had him sleeping,” Archie Butt observed, “he showed them he was never so alive in his life.” Later that summer, the states began ratification of what would eventually become the sixteenth constitutional amendment; the process was completed before Taft’s term came to an end.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 85