Taft was not surprised by Roosevelt’s bellicose attitude. “I am afraid the old fellow has made a grave mistake in this,” he told Butt. “The fact of the matter is, Archie, the Colonel is not in favor of peace. He thinks that there are many worse things than wars, and he thinks war and a warlike spirit keeps up the virility of a people. He’s a fighter, and he doesn’t believe in peace.”
ON SEPTEMBER 15, AFTER CELEBRATING his fifty-fourth birthday with Nellie at the summer house in Beverly, President Taft boarded a special train to begin a two-month swing through the West. “The White House is once more on wheels,” the New York Tribune reported. “The official address of the nation’s head has again become ‘Pres. Taft, en route.’ ” The presidential train was equipped with “every comfort that modern transportation by rail affords,” including bathtubs, dining cars, drawing rooms, and “real beds” rather than conventional bunks. Though Taft likened delivering speeches to “taking medicine or standing a surgical operation,” he had worked hard to prepare a series of talks on the major issues of the day, including peace and arbitration, the Tariff Board, conservation, the trusts, and reciprocity.
The first week of the trip proceeded smoothly. At the state fair in Syracuse, New York, he was greeted with “bright skies and a holiday crowd.” At every stop in Pennsylvania and Michigan, people approached him with eager smiles. Even those “thought to be unfriendly” listened with respect to his speeches. “Go ahead, old man,” they seemed to say. “We’re going to see to it that you get a square deal.” It comforted Taft that his speeches were “reported in full” in the papers of every city, allowing him to put his “case before the people.”
As September 21 approached—the date on which the Canadian election would determine the fate of the reciprocity agreement—an anxious mood enveloped the train. “The bets seem to be so strongly in favor,” Horace told his brother, “but the election has been so extraordinary and seems to have roused the people so deeply that it is hard to feel sure of anything.” On the evening before the vote, Montreal was reportedly “ablaze with red fire and patriotism; alive with cheering thousands, and echoing with the oratory of the opposing hosts.”
At a banquet in Kalamazoo, Taft was handed a telegram with the dismal results: “Laurier government and reciprocity beaten.” By “an overwhelming majority,” Canadians had thrown the Liberal government out of office. Pundits were “dumbfounded”; analysts concluded that the verdict was against “the bogey of annexation” rather than an actual “unfriendliness to reciprocity.” The idea of “an Imperishable Canada” had won the day for the Conservative Party, leaving the prospect of free trade “dead as a ducat.” The result was difficult for Taft to absorb. “We were hit squarely between the eyes,” the president acknowledged. “I am very greatly disappointed.” The extra session was “for naught,” the National Tribune observed. After “toiling up the hill . . . we are back where we started, and possibly a little worse off.” The New York Evening Post judged the outcome “a terrible blow” for Taft, perhaps “a fatal hurt.” The Boston Traveler wryly observed that “it was very unkind of those Canadians to deprive President Taft of his best argument for reelection just when he needed it most.”
Taft remained disconsolate for days, though he gamely pushed on with his impossible schedule, eventually covering twenty-eight states, making two hundred stops, and delivering nearly four hundred speeches. In Archie Butt’s estimation, Taft’s peace and arbitration talks, designed to spur public demand for the Senate to pass the treaties, were “by all odds” his best and most successful. Yet, even as his passionate appeals reached audiences, the Senate was busily crafting amendments to render the treaties impotent.
The rest of Taft’s speeches, “dry and full of statistics,” were not well received. Crowds often drifted off before he finished. “As I see him sometimes laboring to interest an audience and failing to do so,” Butt lamented, “I feel so sorry for him I could almost cry.” Correspondents generally deemed the trip a failure. And while people came “to see him and hear his voice,” there was “no sign” that public opinion had shifted in his direction. “The Taft trip has proved,” William Allen White proclaimed, “that he cannot regain the people’s confidence, that he cannot know their language, and that he cannot hold their allegiance.”
During the dispiriting days on his tour, Taft found comfort in food; by the time he returned home, he weighed 332 pounds. Butt worried constantly about the state of the president’s health. His tendency to fall asleep during carriage rides or even in the midst of conversations had markedly increased. In church, where long sermons provoked drowsiness, Butt kept a watchful eye. If he saw the president’s head beginning to nod, Butt would fall into a coughing spell to wake him up. Such discretion was not always possible; on one occasion, Butt recorded, “I had not suspected that he was falling asleep until I heard an audible snore, and then I punched him, and he woke with such a start as to attract the attention of everybody around him.” After returning to the White House, Taft acknowledged to Aunt Delia that he was “too heavy,” and intended to begin a new diet. “You will see I am not very ambitious,” he confessed, “when I say that I shall be entirely satisfied if I can get down to three hundred pounds.”
ROOSEVELT DELIVERED A HARSH ASSESSMENT of the president’s tour. “I absolutely agree with everything you have written about poor Taft,” he told California’s progressive governor Hiram Johnson in late October. “When he started on this trip I still had some flickering hope that when he got out into the West, among the people who are heading the new movement . . . he would become infected with the spirit and would rise to a higher level than that on which he has carried on his presidency, but I am afraid it simply is not in him.” Taft’s problem, Roosevelt elaborated, was not that he had “gone wrong,” but that he had stayed put while the country was moving ahead. “He never thinks at all of the things that interest us most,” Roosevelt continued; “he does not appreciate or understand them.” While he had been an exemplary lieutenant, serving the public well as governor general of the Philippines and as secretary of war, he appeared oblivious to the monumental changes taking place in his own country. “As for my ever having any enthusiasm for Taft again, it is utterly impossible,” Roosevelt concluded. Nonetheless, “I shall support him if nominated because I do not believe that there is any ground for permanent hope in the Democratic Party.”
The train of events that altered Roosevelt’s perspective about the nomination began on October 27, his fifty-third birthday. Banner headlines across the country that day announced the Taft administration’s anti-trust suit against the U.S. Steel Corporation, its allied holdings, and its officials, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Judge Gary, George Perkins, and Henry Frick. Labeling U.S. Steel “a gigantic monopoly, acting illegally in restraint of trade, and attempting to stifle competition,” the Justice Department sought “the dissolution” of the corporation’s seventeen “constituent companies” and its twenty “subsidiaries.” Citing a history of illegal actions, the government focused particularly on the acquisition of Tennessee Coal and Iron Company—the transaction President Roosevelt had sanctioned during the Panic of 1907. If the president had understood the facts of the situation, the petition read, he would have understood “that a desire to stop the panic was not the sole moving cause, but that there was also the desire and purpose to acquire control of a company that had recently assumed a position of potential competition of great significance.”
This reference to the former president’s decision generated a series of unflattering bylines: “Roosevelt Was Deceived”; “Roosevelt Fooled”; “Ignorance as a Defense.” In essence, the Philadelphia Record observed, Roosevelt had “been named as a co-respondent in the Government’s suit to divorce the Steel Corporation and Tennessee Iron. He cannot be indicted and fined; he cannot be enjoined and dissolved. But all the same he is on the defensive and on trial, and he is smarting as he has seldom smarted before. . . . Mr. Taft has k
icked him on the shins and hustled him into the witness box for cross-examination.” For those convinced that Roosevelt had exceeded his authority and facilitated an illegal merger, the government’s brief promised vindication: “This is an official statement,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch rejoiced, “that, as president, Theodore Roosevelt was concerned in a lawless act.”
Roosevelt was livid. “What I did was right,” he truculently declared to a New York lawyer. “I would not only do it again under like conditions if I had the power, but I should esteem myself recreant to my duty if I failed to do it again.” At the time, the crisis had spread rapidly and was threatening to destabilize the entire economy. “It was not a question of saving any bank or trust company from failure,” he insisted; “the question was of saving the plain people, the common people, in all parts of the United States from dreadful misery and suffering; and this was what my action did.” Moreover, the government’s implication that he “was misled” by inaccurate facts was simply “not correct.” The steel men had told “the truth” when they explained that the acquisition of Tennessee Coal would not produce a monopoly. U.S. Steel was not a monopoly then, nor was it one now. Indeed, Roosevelt pointed out, the market share controlled by U.S. Steel in 1911 was less that it had been in 1907.
The Colonel was particularly infuriated by the perceived hypocrisy of his successor. “Taft was a member of my cabinet when I took that action,” he stressed. “We went over it in full and in detail, not only at one but at two or three meetings. He was enthusiastic in his praise of what was done.” Any objections “should have been made instantly, or else from every consideration of honorable obligation never under any circumstances afterwards.” While Taft might not have personally perused the final brief that cited Roosevelt’s action, the Colonel’s “own conception of the office of President is that he is responsible for every action of importance that his subordinates take.” Roosevelt told his sister Corinne he could “never forgive” Taft for allowing this injustice. That it had “been done without his knowledge” was “the worst feature of the case.”
Never content to remain in a defensive position, Roosevelt used the incident to launch a searing attack on the administration’s entire anti-trust policy. During his three years in office, Taft had actually instituted more anti-trust suits than his predecessor. The Steel Corporation was simply the latest in a long series of enterprises—including the Electrical Trust, the Bath-Tub Trust, and the Tobacco Trust—that had “felt the heavy hand of the Government laid upon them.” With Taft’s wholehearted support, Attorney General Wickersham had “embarked upon a regular program of prosecutions and dissolutions and reorganizations.” The Department of Justice had become a “juggernaut rolling over the trusts,” winning one case after another. Earlier that fall, Wickersham had predicted that “probably one hundred additional corporations would be called to account under the Sherman Act, that their guilty officials would go to jail.”
Though Roosevelt had gained great popularity as the nation’s “trust-buster,” Taft found himself the subject of constant criticism for pursuing the same objective. “The times have changed,” one newspaper observed. Public expectation had moved beyond “old fashioned” trust busting, preferring government regulation designed to prevent the formation of monopolies in the first place. Litigation after the fact took on an aura of mean-spirited persecution. Roosevelt’s indictment of Taft’s anti-trust policy was perfectly timed to catch the shifting current in public opinion.
During his first years in the White House, Roosevelt explained in his Outlook article, corporations had viewed the Anti-Trust Law and the Interstate Commerce laws as “dead letters.” He had instituted suits against Northern Securities and Standard Oil “because it was imperative to teach the masters of the biggest corporations” that they “would not be permitted to regard themselves as above the law.” And when these corporations were truly “guilty of misconduct,” these suits resulted in “a real and great good.” He had never proceeded against corporations simply because they were big, but on evidence of “unfair practices.” Moreover, he had expanded regulatory powers for the Bureau of Corporations as a better solution.
The Taft administration, by contrast, he argued, was apparently determined “to break up all combinations merely because they are large and successful.” An endless “succession of lawsuits” threatened “to put the business of the country back into the middle of the eighteenth century.” The “sharp practice” of corporate lawyers would inevitably delay decisions for years, ensuring insufficient punishment for the guilty and substantial harm to “the innocent.” The job of controlling monopolies belonged to the federal executive, not the courts.
Roosevelt’s first significant attack on the president made headlines: “Taft Wrong, Says Roosevelt”; “Colonel Finds Taft Policy Bad”; “Roosevelt Takes Issue with Taft.” The entire edition of The Outlook immediately sold out and the publisher reprinted “tens of thousands” of copies to meet the overwhelming demand. “Roosevelt’s broadside was the only topic of discussion today,” reported the Chicago Daily Tribune. Progressive Republicans were thrilled that Roosevelt had finally declared publicly against Taft. More conservative Republicans, frightened by the Osawatomie speech, found comfort in the Colonel’s carefully reasoned position on trusts. The New York Times reported “a striking revival of Roosevelt talk,” and the National Tribune told of “a thousand questions” raised concerning his availability as a candidate. Roosevelt himself later credited the trust article for “bringing [him] forward for the Presidential nomination.” The turbulence surrounding this piece, he believed, had lifted “a strong undercurrent of feeling” for him “to the surface.”
IN LATE NOVEMBER AND EARLY December 1911, public excitement for Roosevelt’s candidacy began to develop “in an almost astonishing fashion.” A poll taken by three leading Ohio papers revealed that of more than 16,000 Republican voters questioned, nearly three out of four supported Roosevelt, with the remaining votes scattered between Taft and La Follette. Nebraska Republicans announced that Roosevelt’s name would be included on their presidential primary ballot. “Events in all parts of the country,” a Pennsylvania paper observed, “point to a growing and irresistible demand on the part of his countrymen that Colonel Roosevelt again enter public life.”
Though Roosevelt coyly continued to disclaim any intention of candidacy, his refusal to issue “a flat-footed denial” kept his name everywhere in contention. His sudden resurgence produced “anxious days” for La Follette, whose campaign was finally gathering steam. Earlier that fall, The American Magazine had begun publishing a ten-part series by the Wisconsin senator entitled “The Autobiography of an Insurgent.” Written with the assistance of Ray Baker, the series proved immensely popular, generating support for both progressivism and its most notable champion. In mid-October, a Progressive Conference in Chicago had given La Follette its “almost unanimous” endorsement for president. At an Insurgents’ Club dinner that fall, Gifford Pinchot had enthusiastically come out for La Follette, labeling him “the logical successor to Roosevelt.” The mere mention of the senator’s name had provoked “loud and prolonged applause.” Yet, so long as Roosevelt’s candidacy remained a possibility, however remote, La Follette found it challenging to raise funds or build a national organization.
On November 26, Ray Baker joined a small group of La Follette supporters for a dinner meeting at the senator’s Washington home. “Will Roosevelt be a candidate? That is the great question,” Baker recorded in his journal. If Roosevelt did run, Baker acknowledged, he would draw away much of La Follette’s following, though the senator was “bearing the heavy brunt & toil of the work of making the progressive campaign.” They would have to reach some resolution, for if both men “split the progressive vote,” Taft might well “slip in.” John Phillips was concerned that Roosevelt was playing a deft political game by “encouraging La Follette and the Progressives” with the idea of eventually moving in “and appropriating the goods.” Co
nceding that Roosevelt remained one of the most “extraordinary, vital and energetic” people he had ever known, Phillips nonetheless considered Roosevelt’s candidacy a powerful “setback for the Progressive or Liberal Movement.”
Two weeks later, Baker traveled to New York to sound out the Colonel. Roosevelt still insisted that he was not a candidate, but he seemed to Baker “like a war horse beginning to sniff the air of distant battles.” Roosevelt revealed “with evident delight” that two delegations, one from New Hampshire and the other from Ohio, had recently come to visit. Both were unhappy with Taft, but neither was prepared to support La Follette. Unless Roosevelt decided to run, both delegations would end up backing Taft. The conversation between Baker and Roosevelt continued as they walked from the Outlook office to the Long Island train station. “Fully a third of the people we met in the hurrying crowds,” the journalist remarked, “recognized him & turned toward him or whispered to their companions.” Roosevelt kept moving forward, shouldering his way through the crowded streets “as if he were in a football scrimmage.” In parting, Baker reminded Roosevelt that the first presidential primaries were three months away. “Come to see me again in January,” Roosevelt responded. Their conversation left it “absolutely plain” to Baker that “if the demand is loud and long enough, and if the prospects seem right . . . he will certainly jump into the game.”
That same week, after lunching with her father at Oyster Bay, Alice Longworth carried a cryptic message to Archie Butt. “Now, Butt,” Alice began, “you know that we are all devoted to you. Father looks upon you as a son, almost. Certainly I have never known him to be fonder of anyone outside his own family than he is of you, so you must understand what he meant when he told me to give you this message.” Then she hesitated, afraid that Archie would not want to hear her out, but the major insisted she continue. “Alice, when you get the opportunity,” Roosevelt had requested of his daughter, “tell Archie from me to get out of his present job. And not to wait for the convention or election, but do it soon.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 96