Speaking for over an hour, Taft touted the bill’s merits and admitted its faults, particularly acknowledging its failure to reduce the wool schedule. Had he left the matter there, promising to revisit the tariff in the next congressional session, the speech would have stirred scant criticism. Instead, the president pressed on with a clumsy argument to vindicate the embattled Tawney. “What was the duty of a Member of Congress,” he asked, who favored more dramatic reform but realized the genuine benefits of compromise? Taft was “glad to speak” in support of Tawney’s decision to vote for the bill. In certain situations, party members had to “surrender their personal predilections” for the sake of unity. He would not criticize those Republican legislators who felt the divide between their desired course and the current bill “so extreme” that they “must in conscience abandon the party.” In the end, however, he concurred with Representative Tawney that party unity trumped specific reductions “in one or two schedules.” Party solidarity was essential to establishing the broader regulatory package that would “clinch the Roosevelt policies.” This lumbering argument was effectively a reprise of Taft’s earlier justification for his own decision against a veto. The real self-inflicted wound occurred in his twenty-four-word verdict on the bill itself: “On the whole,” he concluded, “I am bound to say that I think the Payne tariff bill is the best bill that the Republican party ever passed.”
This succinct, ill-considered statement made headlines across the country, obscuring the more nuanced argument presented in the president’s address. By stating “without hesitation” that the bill represented the Republicans’ signal legislative achievement, the New York Times charged, William Taft “has decided to abandon the cause of tariff reform.” A majority of editorials echoed this view. “Western Republicans have made up their minds that they are not going to be ruled by New England,” the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Tribune observed. “Instead of softening the antagonism between the two factions of his party, he has very clearly intensified it.” His blundering Winona speech, the Indianapolis Star declared, proved that the president was “out of touch with American public sentiment on the tariff question.” Even Horace Taft concurred with his brother’s critics. “I did not write to you about it,” he told Will, “because my secretary is a lady and no language that suited the speech could be dictated. I will swear at you about it when I see you.”
In Minnesota, Taft’s “commendation” of Tawney was widely interpreted as an effort to undermine insurgent members of the state delegation. This surge of public resentment rekindled a sharp nostalgia for Taft’s predecessor. “Theodore Roosevelt’s good fortune has not deserted him,” the New York Times observed. “The stars in their courses seem to fight for him. If he still cherishes an ambition to return to the White House, the path has been opened to him by President Taft, and no thoroughfare could be more inviting or easier to travel.” If Roosevelt were to return and proclaim the tariff a failure to honor his party’s pledge, the Times added, there would be no way of staying “the overwhelming demand” for his renomination in 1912. In actuality, Roosevelt fully endorsed the Payne-Aldrich tariff. “You have come out as well as we could hope on the tariff question,” he told Lodge in a private letter. Like Taft, he regarded the corporate tax as a critical achievement, for it permanently established “the principle of national supervision.” When Lodge lauded the critical role Nelson Aldrich had played in the passage of the bill, Roosevelt offered no objection. “I never appreciated his ability so fully before,” Lodge wrote, calling Aldrich “a man of real power and force.” Roosevelt replied that he was not “surprised” by Lodge’s admiration, noting that his own interchanges with Aldrich gave him “a steadily higher opinion of him.” Roosevelt remained, of course, 10,000 miles away in “the wilds of Africa.” None of these comments became public, and western insurgents continued to enshrine him as the exemplar of true reform, projecting their dissenting views of the tariff onto the former president.
Despite the onslaught of criticism, Taft trusted that the public would ultimately recognize his Winona speech as a “truthful statement.” Indeed, he insisted, compromise was “the only ground upon which the party [could] stand with anything like a united force and win victories.” He remained convinced that the insurgents would relent when Congress convened in December, and began work on his proposed reform package to strengthen control over corporate interests. In Iowa and California, he delivered rousing speeches designed to regain the confidence of the reformers. “Of course we want prosperity,” Taft assured them, “but we wish prosperity in such a way . . . so that everybody will get his share, and that it shall not be confined to a few who monopolize the means of production or the means of transportation, and thus prevent that equality of distribution which we all like to see.”
Indeed, it appeared the hostility might dissipate as the crowds grew in size and enthusiasm along the president’s route. Nearly 7,000 people cheered him at the Armory in Portland; in Phoenix, he spoke “practically to the entire town of 20,000 people”; at the Seattle Exposition grounds, 80,000 poured through the gates. “Winning Taft Smile Spreads Radiance,” the local paper in Albuquerque declared. “Taft’s personality again has stood him in good stead,” chimed the Chicago Tribune. “The distrust has faded.” It was clear to those inside his administration that the president’s desire to connect with the citizenry was unfeigned. He “really and sincerely likes people,” Archie Butt observed. “He likes different types and he enjoys studying them. Whereas most people in his position try to avoid handshaking,” the president “will stop a dozen times on his way in and out of a room to shake hands with anybody who calls to him.”
Scarcely absent from Taft’s side for the duration of the tour, Butt felt “more real affection” for the new chief than ever before. He noticed that Taft showed anger only on a few occasions when he had been savaged in newspaper editorials. Incensed, Taft gave instructions to stop sending him such clippings, particularly from the free trade New York Times. “They are prompted by such wild misconceptions and such a boyish desire to point the finger of scorn, that I don’t think their reading will do me any particular good,” he wrote, “and would only be provocative of that sort of anger and contemptuous feeling that does not do anybody any good.” He assured Nellie that he could not have misread the friendly support he encountered everywhere. “Whatever their judgment as to particular things I have done,” he told his wife, “I certainly up to this time have their good will, and that is a considerable asset.”
Near the end of his transcontinental journey, Taft remarked that he had “enjoyed every moment of the trip.” When people wondered how he endured the long days, filled with “266 speeches and 579 formal dinners, luncheons and breakfasts,” he said it was a matter “of temperament, one of taste, and possibly one of disposition.” For a person like him, who loved meeting with people and hearing about their lives, the trip was “as stimulating as champagne.” When his train pulled into Union Station on the evening of November 10, an enthusiastic crowd, including members of his cabinet, was there to welcome him home. “Well, I’m back again,” he announced with a broad smile, “feeling just as well as when I went away or even feeling better.”
Behind the ebullience and the cheerful faces that greeted Taft when he stepped off the train, however, tensions were brewing that would prove calamitous for the new president’s administration. Taft’s optimism was soon punctured by the realization that his inner circle was “full of despair and predicting all sorts of evil”—harboring personal and political wounds that Taft’s honorable nature had small hope of suturing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
St. George and the Dragon
This cartoon, “An Off Day in the Jungle,” imagines how Roosevelt, on safari in Africa, heard the news that Gifford Pinchot had been ousted from the Forest Bureau.
DURING TAFT’S FIFTY-SEVEN-DAY ABSENCE FROM Washington, a latent animosity between Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s closest ally in the conserva
tion crusade, and Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger, Taft’s choice to replace Garfield, flared into open discord. The conflict quickly escalated beyond the confines of “a mere personal squabble” into “a matter of state.” With Roosevelt’s allies falling in behind Pinchot, and Taft defending Ballinger, the controversy would pit the East of America versus the West, corporate interests against public rights, developers against conservationists—until all the divisive factions at play in the confrontation between Pinchot and Ballinger were framed as the opening volley in the battle for the 1912 presidential nomination. Noting the great dissatisfaction among progressives with the administration’s actions on both conservation and the tariff, the New York Times cited the comment that if Roosevelt toured the country upon his return from Africa, “there would be such a fire behind him by the time he got across the continent that nothing could stand in front of it.”
Contention over the regulation of waterpower had initially set Ballinger and Pinchot at odds. Near the end of his term, President Roosevelt had delivered a dramatic message to Congress on the future of hydroelectric power: America, he pronounced, was on the verge of a momentous development—the electrical transmission of waterpower over large distances. Although supplies of oil, gas, and coal would eventually be exhausted, hydroelectric power offered a source of renewable energy. The industry was “still in its infancy,” yet Roosevelt warned that an “astonishing consolidation” had already occurred. Thirteen large corporations, led by General Electric and Westinghouse, controlled more than one third of the waterpower then in use. Unless potential power sites still owned by the government were leased to developers on terms consistent with “the public interest,” the hydroelectric industry would follow the path of the oil industry: a great monopoly would develop, eradicating competition and dictating the price citizens paid for electricity in their homes and businesses. “I esteem it my duty,” Roosevelt had concluded, “to use every endeavor to prevent this growing monopoly, the most threatening which has ever appeared, from being fastened upon the people of this nation.”
With time running out on his administration, Roosevelt, together with Garfield and Pinchot, had come up with a plan. Acting without congressional authorization, Garfield issued executive orders to withdraw from private development more than 1.5 million acres of land situated along sixteen rivers in half a dozen western states. These protected lands included hundreds of thousands of acres with little connection to waterpower sites, but “there was no time,” Pinchot explained, “to make detailed surveys.” Under the pressing circumstances, the blanket withdrawal assured safety for the actual power sites. Roosevelt later justified these withdrawals, along with other controversial executive actions, arguing that the president “is the steward of the people, and that the proper attitude for him to take is that he is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.”
Within three weeks of assuming his post as the new interior secretary, Richard Ballinger restored the vast majority of Garfield’s withdrawals to the public domain. A lawyer and former judge, Ballinger believed that the previous administration had acted illegally in making wholesale withdrawals without congressional authorization or even the requisite data to determine potential locations for hydroelectric development. Once the proper surveys were completed, he would ask Congress for legislation to protect the actual sites. Meanwhile, conservation efforts should not restrict legitimate development in the states of the Far West. Developers and businessmen in that region had long excoriated Roosevelt’s conservation policies as a socialistic threat to “traditional western individualism.” So many tracts of public land had been temporarily withdrawn from settlers and private developers, one critic sarcastically noted, “that a man could ride from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean and his horse need not once step a hoof outside government land.”
While Taft considered himself a Roosevelt conservationist and recognized the vital work of Garfield and Pinchot, he fundamentally agreed with Ballinger’s insistence that problems had to be resolved “on the basis of law.” He would never endorse the cavalier attitude that “the end justified the means.” In Taft’s estimation, the “sweeping declaration of executive authority” used to justify the withdrawals misconceived “the entire theory of the Federal Constitution” which delegated specific powers to each of the three branches. “It is,” he declared, “a very dangerous method of upholding reform to violate the law in so doing; even on the ground of high moral principle, or of saving the public.” The Constitution granted Congress “the power to dispose of lands, not the Executive.” Indeed, Taft believed that Roosevelt’s conservation reforms would have been “further along” had he “taken a different way.”
Ballinger’s restoration orders provoked indignation among progressives, who feared that monopolies would grab thousands of invaluable water sites before the completion of the surveys. “Stop Ballinger,” pleaded an editorial in the Des Moines Daily News. “Mr. Taft stop him! In the name of justice, if he is blind, see for him! If he is callous, feel for him! If he is without power to estimate the awfulness of this crime, think for him!” While more conservative commentators lauded the shift away from Roosevelt’s “cowboy methods,” progressives, educated by the former president to both the importance of conservation and the treachery of monopoly, reacted with outrage. “Attention! Land Thieves and Natural Resource Grabbers,” the Tacoma Times announced: “Game is Soft Again.” Under Roosevelt, the Tacoma Times declared, “any doubt about the power of the chief executive to make withdrawals of public land was resolved in favor of the people.” Taft’s administration had resolved the doubt “in favor of the predatory interests.”
Gifford Pinchot was on an extended speaking tour in the West when Ballinger reversed Garfield’s withdrawals. Returning to Washington in April 1909, he discovered “what was going on” and immediately called on President Taft. Largely uninvolved with conservation efforts during his years in the cabinet, Taft regarded Pinchot as an exemplary public servant but possessed of a fanatical strain, all too ready to attribute evil motives to anyone who opposed his ideas. Furthermore, Taft believed that Pinchot’s intimacy with Roosevelt had endowed him with power far beyond his official responsibilities as the head of a single bureau in the Department of Agriculture. For two days running, Taft listened closely as Pinchot “protested as vigorously as [he] knew how against Ballinger’s action,” explaining why the restorations threatened public interest. “To his honor,” Pinchot later said, Taft called in Ballinger and directed him to halt any further restorations and again re-withdraw any such “lands as were actually valuable for water-power purposes.” Greatly relieved, Garfield maintained that Pinchot’s intervention had forestalled disaster.
But Ballinger’s concessions under pressure from the president did little to allay Pinchot’s suspicions or satisfy the progressive press. “Everything is not yet altogether serene,” the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican reported. It remained to be seen whether the waterpower trust had capitalized on the “golden opportunities” provided by Ballinger’s original restoration orders. In the absence of facts, rumors abounded. In May, the Philadelphia Press reported that “five million acres of publicly owned land” were being turned over to corporate interests. The continuing antagonism between Ballinger and Pinchot provided fodder for drastic speculation: some papers predicted that Ballinger would have to resign, others that Pinchot was on his way out. The future seemed equally murky to the protagonists themselves: “Was Conservation really in danger?” Had the president “gone over to the Old Guard?”
In early August, the controversy came to a head at the National Irrigation Conference in Spokane, Washington. As thousands of delegates from across the country poured into the Armory to discuss and debate reclamation, forests, waterways, and conservation, journalists predicted an open clash between Pinchot and Ballinger, both of whom were among the speakers. On August 9
, the day before Pinchot was set to speak, the staff correspondent for the United Press released a sensational attack on Ballinger, claiming the secretary had used “one excuse or another” to delay Taft’s re-withdrawal order, enabling General Electric, Guggenheim, and Amalgamated Copper to grab a total of 15,868 acres in Montana, including power sites worth millions upon millions of dollars. “This is a true story,” the reporter contended, “of how the birth right of a great state” was lost to monopoly. “Richard Achilles Ballinger, stand up!” demanded the Spokane Press the next day. “You are accused of grave misadministration of your high office.” Through Ballinger’s actions, the state of Montana has been “eternally delivered into the hands of the power trust,” the indictment continued. “President Taft cannot do anything about it now.”
These spectacular charges set the stage for Gifford Pinchot’s speech, which was widely construed as a direct attack on the embattled secretary. “The purpose of the Conservation movement,” Pinchot declared at the outset, “is to make our country a permanent and prosperous home for ourselves and for our children and for our children’s children.” Pinchot “threw down the gauntlet” before Ballinger, stating “unequivocally” that a great waterpower trust was “in process of formation,” aided by “strict construction” of the law, which inevitably championed “the great interests as against the people.” The struggle over waterpower, he contended, was simply another chapter in “the everlasting conflict” between “the few” and “the many.” This statement unleashed “a storm of applause,” as did Pinchot’s testimonial to Theodore Roosevelt. “I stand for the Roosevelt policies because they set the common good of all of us above the private gain of some of us,” he reiterated, “because they recognize the livelihood of the small man as more important to the nation than the profit of the big man. . . . And I propose to stand for them while I have the strength to stand for anything.” When he finished, the 1,200 delegates “cheered him for fully five minutes,” clapping their hands and stomping the floor in “the wildest reception” accorded to any of the conference speakers. Later that day, Pinchot wrote to inform Taft of the “deplorable fact” he had just discovered, that monopolies had seized valuable waterpower sites in Montana “after the restoration and before the second withdrawal.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 87