John Phillips heralded Tarbell’s critique of the recent tariff-making process with a trenchant editorial: “The popular judgment of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Bill grows more severe with each passing month,” his piece began. “It is a bogus revision, and every man of sense knows that we will get no permanent settlement of this matter until a genuine, searching, informed revision has been made. He knows that by shirking this duty the Taft Administration has lost the country years of time. Here is the real basis of the anti-Taft sentiment—the good reason for insurgency.”
While united in their support of the insurgents, the magazine’s team differed in their opinion of William Howard Taft. John Phillips had been ambivalent about the new president from the beginning. “I thought that Taft might stand still,” the editor remarked in September 1909. “I didn’t think he’d go backwards.” Five months later, Phillips observed that disappointment with Taft had kindled a newfound respect for Roosevelt, even among those who had “opposed him.” The fact that the former president had never even tried to revise the tariff nor spoken out once against Cannon’s regime “mattered little to the insurgents.” His “crusading spirit” trumped any details of his actual policy. Tarbell had been more hopeful about Taft at the start, but turned against him with a vengeance when he signed the flawed Payne bill and then compounded his mistake by proclaiming it the best tariff ever passed. “Taft is done for, I fully believe,” she told White. “Not a man of discernment, but what shakes his head over him.”
William Allen White was slower than his colleagues to abandon faith in the president, still hoping in the spring of 1910 that Taft would succeed in getting his legislative agenda through Congress. White reminded Taft that the insurgents had been his allies in the fight for regulatory reform and postal savings banks. “But they will not work with Senator Aldrich and Mr. Cannon,” he warned. “So an unhappy situation has arisen. The people have begun to confuse you with the leadership.” Taft responded to White as he did to previous suggestions that he break with the Republican leadership. The idea that he could make enemies of the men with power over the fate of his legislative program made no sense. “I have confidence in the second judgment of the people based on what is done rather than what is proclaimed or what is suspected from appearances,” he asserted, “and if I can make good in legislation, I shall rely on fair discussion to vindicate me.”
On May 21, 1910, three weeks before Theodore Roosevelt’s scheduled return from his African adventure, President Taft invited William Allen White to lunch. News of the invitation sparked hope among insurgents, who felt Taft had “foolishly and needlessly linked his fortunes” with men and influences at odds with the need for action. If the president truly listened to White, he would realize that the best chance of securing his legislative program lay with the growing band of insurgents, not the regulars.
“I could not have asked more courtesy, more consideration, more cordial hospitality,” White reported after the meeting. For the first time in months, Taft told White, Nellie “had come to the table at the White House.” The first lady had listened with attention, although it seemed to White that she suffered from “a curious amnesia.” The reporter repeatedly tried “to steer the conversation” toward the insurgency, but Taft refused to take the bait. The two men talked of art and architecture, of movements in Europe and “everything under the sun but politics.” They moved to a sunny porch after lunch and continued to talk. “We had a most amiable time,” White reported, but he departed with the dispiriting conviction that he had come on “a fool’s errand.”
Of all the journalists at that time, Ray Baker had the most profound understanding of Taft’s character and personal style. In January 1910, as the Ballinger hearings were getting under way, he began research for a lengthy assessment of the embattled president. “I trust you are gathering some gorgeous material on Taft,” Phillips wrote. “The time is getting ripe. Everybody comes in with the same story”—they sense that the White House is occupied by “a jelly fish” incapable of real leadership. “The material is rich, and is getting richer. Somebody is going to make a bomb out of it one of these days,” the editor predicted; “we want to be the fellows in charge of the fireworks.” Refusing to succumb to pressure, Baker in “The Measure of Taft” produced a remarkably balanced piece, which revealed the president’s considerable strengths along with his troubling weaknesses.
He began by noting that despite the progressives’ disenchantment, the people by and large regarded the president with warmth. “There is one thing of which no popular criticism of a public man can wholly rob us,” Baker maintained, “and that is our own vivid personal impression of him. We like him, personally, or we don’t like him.” And the public liked Taft. They appreciated the simple pleasure he took in walking about town, stopping in stores to chat with proprietors, visiting friends in their homes and hotels. They applauded his decision to hold receptions for visiting schoolchildren. While congressmen complained that he was wasting too much time shaking hands with the never-ending groups that deluged Washington during Easter break, Taft was adamant: “If these young visitors want to see the President, it is virtually their right.” People everywhere were taken with his humble and accessible manner. “A mighty cheer swept across the crowd” at the Nationals’ ballpark when the president, “with his good, trusty right arm,” threw out the first ball for the first time in history and then chose to sit with ordinary fans instead of heading for the presidential box. “All his life long, Mr. Taft has been thus impressing the men he met with the charm of his personality,” Baker noted. “Men have liked him instinctively, and they have not only liked him, but they have admired and respected his high ideals.”
But the same “personal charm” that had propelled Taft to the presidency ultimately proved “dangerous” to him, Baker concluded. For far too long, his amiable nature had kept him from the rough-and-tumble of politics, from the need to fight for himself and his convictions. Had he come into the White House when McKinley first arrived, “when the Republican party stood like the Rock of Gibraltar,” he might have sailed through his term “with smiling serenity”; instead, he found himself embroiled in a war within his party that threatened to rupture friendships and divide families. “In a war,” Baker proclaimed, “the chief thing is to fight.” The temperate Taft was ill-equipped to take up arms.
The most alarming trait Baker discerned in the president was his inability to accept honest criticism. Taft acknowledged that twelve years on the bench, the one place relatively “free from severe criticism by the press,” had done little to prepare him for the onslaught from newspapers and magazines. Rather than accept that “criticism may spring from an honest difference in principles,” the president sought to discredit the publications, implying that their critiques sprang from self-interest or malice. They were angry at him, he insisted, for proposing to increase second-class postal rates and for failing to lower the tariff on wood pulp, both measures that would hurt their bottom line.
Taft’s loyal supporters further amplified this defensive, even paranoid stance toward the press. One proponent argued that the magazine writers had been “arrayed against” the administration “from the first,” disseminating poison with their insidious literary tricks. This diatribe drew a powerful response from Sam McClure. Though McClure’s empire was merely a “skeleton” of what it had once been, his words still carried weight. “In the first place,” McClure argued, “the administration did not have the magazines against it from the start.” On the contrary, the press was “eager to support him.” Indeed, McClure’s had sent George Kibbe Turner, one of its best writers, to the White House to conduct a wide-ranging interview with the president. The resulting piece, which attracted a large readership, was presented entirely in Taft’s words, affording him an open platform to explain his views on every contentious subject. “I have trained most of the successful writers, on public questions, for the magazines in this country, and I know their methods and their quality as probably no
other man living,” McClure justifiably stated; no journalists could be found who “write with greater sincerity or who are more eager to get the truth.” Taft’s troubles, McClure concluded, stemmed from his own actions: first, the tariff and the Winona speech had spread across the landscape “like a frost”; then “the Alaska business” had begotten the president’s relentless defense of Ballinger, “an unnecessary struggle against the people’s wishes.”
Roosevelt had learned little of Taft’s troubles while he was in Africa. He had received an earful from Gifford Pinchot, however, when the latter came to see him on the Italian Riviera in mid-April. Pinchot arrived at Roosevelt’s villa in the early morning, remained for lunch, and then accompanied the former president on a long trek over the Maritime Alps. Months earlier, Pinchot had enumerated Taft’s failings in a letter, condemning the new president’s decision to surround himself with corporate lawyers, his alliance to Cannon and Aldrich, his surrender of executive powers to Congress, and, most damningly, his appointment of Richard Ballinger. “We have fallen back down the hill you led us up,” Pinchot had written, “and there is a general belief that the special interests are once more substantially in full control of both Congress and the Administration.”
Pinchot carried with him a half-dozen letters from fellow progressives, all confirming his own estimate of Taft. Senator Dolliver spoke with sadness of his “disappointment” that the president had “lost the opportunity and wasted the prestige” Roosevelt had bequeathed him, warning that the corporate tyranny would triumph “unless a way could be found to overthrow the present management in Congress which is now the guardian of the President’s opinions.” Albert Beveridge provided a devastating narrative of Taft’s first year as president. “The people at first received the President with good expectations,” he informed Roosevelt, “then with tolerance, then with faint distrust, then with silent opposition and now with open and settled hostility.” More telling than such general criticisms, however, was Pinchot’s personal story of his acrimonious struggle with Ballinger. “We had one of the finest talks we have ever had,” Pinchot eagerly relayed to Jim Garfield. Reporters, noting Pinchot’s smile when he returned to his hotel, declared that “no event in Roosevelt’s entire trip” held more political significance than this day-long conference.
In a grim letter to Henry Cabot Lodge that same day, Roosevelt expressed his first open disappointment in the course of his successor’s presidency: “You do not need to be told that Taft was nominated solely on my assurance to the Western people especially, but almost as much to the people of the East, that he would carry out my work unbroken; not (as he has done) merely working for the same objects in a totally different spirit, and with . . . a totally different sense from that in which both I and the men who acted under my word understood it.” Many now believed, Roosevelt lamented, that he had “deceived them.” Still, “a good chance” remained that Taft could recover. “Everybody believes him to be honest, and most believe him to be doing the best he knows how.” But for the moment at least, the former president would follow the course Lodge had prescribed and “keep absolutely still about home politics.”
In preparation for Roosevelt’s mid-June homecoming, Ray Baker wrote an ominous speculative piece entitled “The Impending Roosevelt.” “As the fight deepens both sides are seen listening sharply for the first clashing sounds of the returning warrior,” Baker noted. “He is more popular now than he was when he sailed for Africa.” Despite his absence from the political scene for over a year, Theodore Roosevelt remained “the most interesting, amusing, thrilling figure in America.” Would he endorse the Taft administration? Would he join the insurgent rebellion? “One thing may be set down as absolutely certain,” Baker concluded. “Roosevelt will act. Roosevelt always acts. . . . And when he acts no stage smaller than that of the nation will serve him; he is of continental size.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“The Parting of the Ways”
This “Bronco Buster” cartoon illustrates the jolt Roosevelt received when Democrats made huge gains in the 1910 midterm elections.
THE PROSPECT OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S return to American soil on June 18, 1910, left William Howard Taft fraught with anxiety. He was perplexed, he confided to Archie Butt, why Roosevelt had never once written to him during his travels. The letter Butt had hand-delivered as the former president left for Africa in March 1909 more than a year earlier remained unanswered. Roosevelt had never acknowledged the farewell gift that accompanied the letter. Butt, who had helped Taft choose the present—a gold ruler extendable to eight inches at one end, with a pencil affixed to the other—was bewildered. “There is no doubt that he received it?” Taft asked. “None whatever,” Butt assured him. “I gave it to him, and he held it up for the press men to see and sent his thanks by me and said he would answer it on his way over.”
Unaccountably, a copy of a telegram from Roosevelt to Taft, written aboard the SS Hamburg on the day he sailed, remains in Roosevelt’s own papers. “Am deeply touched by your gift and even more by your letter,” Roosevelt had written. “Everything will surely turn out all right, old man.” Perhaps, Butt speculated, “Roosevelt did write and gave the letter to someone to mail,” who then kept it “as a souvenir.” Perhaps Taft, expecting a letter, had forgotten receipt of the telegram. Either way, Taft waited stubbornly for the Colonel to reciprocate the correspondence and was deeply hurt when no letter came.
The lack of communication between the two men became public when Taft was forced to deny a newspaper report that Roosevelt had sent him a letter strongly endorsing the accomplishments of his administration. Upon further questioning, Taft had to admit that, in fact, he had “received no letters” from Roosevelt over the past year and a quarter. This was particularly striking, the Indianapolis Star noted, since “the colonel has kept up a pretty steady correspondence with many other persons.” Indeed, all social connection between the two families seemed to have cooled. Taft found it hard to understand why Edith Roosevelt had remained “singularly silent during all the time of his wife’s illness.”
Taft was not the only party harboring hurt feelings. Roosevelt was angered by reports from home suggesting that family members had not been accorded proper treatment from the White House under Mrs. Taft. Edith complained that although eighteen-year-old Ethel had been invited to a garden party during a visit to Washington, the first lady apparently had not done enough to recognize her. Alice and Nick Longworth had received a number of dinner invitations, but Alice felt slighted, believing she should have been asked to greet the guests at the head of the receiving line. The haughty young woman interpreted such minor omissions as a deliberate intent on the first lady’s part “to let the setting sun know its place.” The Roosevelt children, Butt observed, were convinced that Taft occupied the presidency “solely as a result of their father’s predetermination to put him there,” placing the new president and his first lady under a special obligation to the entire Roosevelt family. Taft fully appreciated the central role Roosevelt had played in his election, but felt that he had done all he could, given Nellie’s serious illness, to accommodate the family. “Everything which is done by either side is misconstrued,” Archie Butt told his sister-in-law; the fact that such “petty personal jealousies” could tarnish the long-standing friendship between Roosevelt and Taft seemed to him inexplicable. Further aggravating matters, Roosevelt could not fathom why no “word of welcome” from the White House awaited him when he came out of the jungle and met with scores of correspondents and friends in Khartoum.
When Taft finally decided at the end of May to swallow his pride and write once more to Roosevelt, he described the painful calamity of Nellie’s collapse openly. Her inability to speak, he confided, had been “nearly complete” for a prolonged period, requiring that everyone be “as careful as possible to prevent another attack.” While she had slowly recovered her physical strength, Taft explained, a year later Nellie still could only “speak a formula of greeting” a
t large receptions. Dinners and social events that called for conversation had to be circumvented. On the political front, he acknowledged that “the Garfield Pinchot Ballinger controversy” had brought him “a great deal of personal pain and suffering,” but he preferred not to “say a word” about the complex dispute. “You will have to look into that wholly for yourself,” he told Roosevelt, “without influence by the parties if you would find the truth.” Despite these personal and political difficulties, Taft hoped that his old friend would soon find time for an extended visit to the White House.
Concerned that his letter might not reach Roosevelt before he sailed from Europe, Taft made the decision to send Archie Butt to meet the Kaiserin in New York, where he might deliver a duplicate copy, along with a shorter note of welcome. To placate any wounded egos, Butt suggested to the president that Nellie also write her own note to Edith. That accomplished, Butt ventured, “you and Mrs. Taft have left nothing undone.” If Edith, “not understanding Mrs. Taft’s condition,” did not feel that enough consideration had been given to her children, then this kindly explanatory note would straighten out the perceived neglect. To Butt’s delight, Nellie agreed, though he privately worried that “when women get at cross purposes it is hard to get them straightened out again.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 91