by Brett Harper
Conservatives and moneymen took heart from Roosevelt’s speech, and Life, then a humor magazine, ran a devastating satire of “McSure’s” crusading magazine and its muckraking stable: “Ida Tarbarrell,” “Ray Standard Fakir” and “Sinkem Beffens.” The writers’ day wasn’t yet over, but it was in its twilight.
TAFT WAS THEODORE Roosevelt’s great friend and closest advisor, and early in 1906, Roosevelt was again set to give Taft the position he had always coveted: a seat on the Supreme Court. An elderly justice was resigning, and there were no great crises demanding Taft’s unique gifts for diplomacy. At first, Taft was inclined to accept the job. But his wife Nellie and most of his friends argued that he could become president instead. Although he hesitated for months, asking the president repeatedly to postpone the decision, in the end, Taft decided not to take the seat. Republican papers began hailing him as the only man who could beat the charismatic William Jennings Bryan, who had emerged from his Democratic eclipse and again seemed his party’s sure nominee. Taft would continue to assist Roosevelt and speak for the party in the coming midterm elections.
Taft was in Cuba mediating another rebellion when a crisis in his War Department forced Roosevelt to take a hand. It resulted in the worst decision of his presidency and a permanent stain on his record.
In Brownsville, Texas, a regiment of black soldiers was being systematically insulted and slighted by the white citizens of the town, and rumors circulated that a black soldier had assaulted a white woman. One August night in 1906, shooting broke out. A bartender was killed, and the police chief was seriously injured. White citizens blamed the soldiers, but the troops’ white officers maintained all of them had been in the barracks.
The shooting became a national scandal, and as commander in chief, Roosevelt had to take action. But the case hit a dead spot in his sense of justice. As Lewis L. Gould observed in his biography, “On racial matters, Roosevelt thought of himself as the heir to Abraham Lincoln. In fact, he followed the segregationist customs of that era and showed little of Lincoln’s capacity for growth.” Roosevelt categorized black people among the “lesser breeds without the Law,” and doubted their ability to govern themselves without white supervision. He supported the appointment of a few black officials to federal offices in the South during his first term, but he held off pressing the case after that, and he never pushed his party to reach out to African Americans or name African-American delegates to national conventions. Roosevelt even warned blacks that if they wanted to avoid lynchings, they should turn in criminals from their communities.
He took a similar course in the Brownsville case. After an investigating officer concluded that nine to fifteen soldiers had raided the town and begun the fight, Roosevelt gave the troops an ultimatum: If they wouldn’t end their “conspiracy of silence” and identify the murderers, all of them would be dishonorably discharged. When the troops still refused to name any shooters, he discharged all 167 men.
The draconian punishment touched off a firestorm, straining Roosevelt’s relations with blacks and white liberals and undermining his image as a champion of fair play. Taft, as secretary of war, was just one of many friends and counselors who urged the president to reconsider the order; as all of them pointed out, the regiment included six Medal of Honor winners, some soldiers who had served for as long as twenty-five years, and some who had fought alongside Roosevelt in Cuba. Their discharge disqualified them from reinstatement, pensions, admission to soldiers’ homes, and would even bar them from civilian government service.
Roosevelt was adamant. “I care nothing for the yelling of either the politicians or the sentimentalists,” he told Taft. “The offense was most heinous, and the punishment I inflicted was imposed after due deliberation.” When talk arose of Congressional action to reinstate the men, the president said he would “fight to the last ditch.” He softened after several months, permitting the former soldiers to apply for civilian government jobs and even allowing some of them to seek reinstatement. It wasn’t until 1972 that the record was finally cleared, when President Richard Nixon pardoned the Brownsville soldiers and made their discharges honorable.
TAFT’S CAMPAIGNING in the midterms was effective, and the elections proved an unexpected GOP success. Though the Republicans lost seats in the House as expected, they kept a solid majority and even added four seats in the Senate. Pleased, Roosevelt took Edith to Panama with him to inspect progress on the Canal – the first time any sitting president had left the country. He observed every phase of the project, clambering aboard a steam shovel and dining with workers in their mess halls. He was “dee-lighted,” he said, with what he saw.
But now the president’s lame-duck fears were coming true. Congress had rejected or ignored all but a few of the nearly five dozen bills he had recommended for its winter session. Aldrich and his right-wing Republicans had blocked the bills Roosevelt cared the most about, including those legislating an eight-hour workday, a progressive income tax, and a federal licensing law for corporations.
Roosevelt resorted to extreme tactics to save some of his cherished conservation goals. When Congress linked an agriculture bill with an amendment revoking the president’s executive power to designate national forests, he couldn’t afford to veto the entire measure. In the six days before he was scheduled to sign the bill, Roosevelt had his forestry chief, Gifford Pinchot, muster his staffers to work around the clock. They drafted proclamations putting 16 million acres – land the amendment would have opened to developers – into nearly three dozen new national forest reserves. Only after Roosevelt signed each proclamation did he sign the bill, with its now irrelevant amendment, into law.
With conservatives gaining power, Roosevelt began to fear they could control the nomination of his successor in 1908. He hoped to pass the job to Taft, and began orchestrating a pro-Taft movement in the party. He couldn’t publicly express any preference, but he told journalists off the record that “he would crawl on his hands and knees from the White House to the Capitol” to get Taft elected. Indeed, Roosevelt seemed to want that a good deal more than Taft did. Taft’s announcement of his candidacy was tentative. He conceded he would not turn down the nomination if it were offered.
At first, Taft’s diffidence seemed to charm the voters. With his bear-like bulk, his formidable abilities, ever-friendly personality, and jovial cheer, he had always been popular. He had proved himself a successful campaigner and the popular president’s mainstay, and the fact that he wasn’t greedy for power seemed only to his credit. With time, though, Taft’s lack of ambition made him look weak, and his unequivocal allegiance to Roosevelt’s views prompted critics to say that his speeches and ideas were unoriginal. Enthusiasm for his candidacy began to wane.
Most Republicans would have preferred Roosevelt – and as long as there was a chance that he might renege on his pledge and run for a third term, few wanted to commit to Taft. Through the summer of 1907, as letters and telegrams poured in urging him to run, Roosevelt was having third and fourth thoughts. He was forty-nine years old and in his prime; he loved his job and would like to keep it. He began to tell reporters that his promise not to run would hold as long as the party chose Taft, but if someone else seemed the likely candidate, he wouldn’t rule out running.
Then a series of minor calamities on Wall Street metastasized into the Panic of 1907. A long decline in stock prices turned into a rout, several large companies tumbled into bankruptcy, manufacturing began to decline, and there was no bottom in sight. Financiers blamed what many called the president’s “crusades against business,” and most newspapers agreed. Uncharacteristically, Roosevelt fired back, accusing “certain malefactors of great wealth” of conspiring “to bring about as much financial distress as they could” in order to discredit him and elect “a safe type” to the White House.
The crisis deepened in October, when the Knickerbocker Trust Company, New York’s second-largest investment bank, closed its doors after a risky speculation venture caused a run on t
he bank, which, in turn, started a run on other banks. As he had done before, J. P. Morgan intervened. In an attempt to calm the panic and stabilize the markets, Morgan organized a group of bankers who pledged $10 million to rescue distressed firms and stem the crisis. From Washington, George Cortelyou, now secretary of the treasury, hurried to Morgan’s Madison Avenue mansion and told the bankers the government would add $25 million to their fund. At least two dozen banks and trust companies were saved from closing.
Still, stock prices kept falling. The panic spread until Morgan’s group ran out of money, and the president of the New York Stock Exchange told Morgan that his brokers couldn’t keep trading without cash. Morgan called an emergency meeting of his group and raised another $25 million. That, at last, was enough; for several days, the panic eased.
But one more crisis would damage Roosevelt himself. On November 1, a major brokerage house on the verge of bankruptcy threatened a new chain of institutions. The brokerage held a large bloc of bonds in Tennessee Coal & Iron, one of the few companies in the industry that hadn’t been swallowed up in the U.S. Steel trust. Morgan proposed that the brokerage could be saved if U.S. Steel would buy Tennessee Coal, swapping solid U.S. Steel bonds for the shaky ones held by the brokerage. The deal was set - provided U.S. Steel wouldn’t be sued for coming to the rescue. The next morning, at the White House, Roosevelt promised not to invoke the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against U.S. Steel.
The markets stabilized again. But when the details of the arrangement later surfaced, it was revealed that U.S. Steel had paid just $45 million for a company that might be worth $1 billion. Roosevelt denied that he had been deceived by Morgan and his associates, but many thought he had been naive.
Though the panic was over, the ensuing economic slump still loomed – and Roosevelt knew he would be blamed for it. Roosevelt, resigned to ending his term under a cloud, was still debating whether to run again, but the equation had become more complex: While he believed he could have the nomination for the asking, he was no longer confident about winning the general election. Better to turn the job over to Taft.
On December 11, 1907, Roosevelt released a verbatim copy of the promise he had made on election night, adding only: “I have not changed and shall not change the decision thus announced.” Though he had a year left in office, his presidency was effectively over.
Even as the campaign warmed up in the summer and fall of 1908, the president was challenging Congress to pass a new Employers Liability law, replacing one that the Supreme Court had found unconstitutional, and to act on the rest of his regulatory measures. He kept up the pressure to the end; in his final message to Congress, he pushed for dozens of bills and criticized lawmakers for passing an amendment forbidding the Secret Service from investigating wrongdoing, including offenses committed by members of Congress. Clearly, he said, “Congressmen did not themselves wish to be investigated.” When they challenged him to present specifics, he pointed to scandals involving South Carolina’s Ben Tillman and Texas Senator Joseph Bailey, who was facing allegations of financial misconduct. “Pandemonium broke loose,” reported The New York Times, and the House voted to reject the outgoing president’s message “on the ground that it lacked due respect.”
On the campaign front, Taft was gaining force as a speaker, and his rivals for the nomination were fading. By late January 1908, New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes posed the only credible threat to Taft’s campaign. Determined to help give Taft an advantage, Roosevelt scheduled a speech lambasting Congress for the same day Hughes was set to deliver a major campaign address.
The president’s fireworks stole Hughes’ thunder and buried his speech to the inside pages of most newspapers. He declared it “a matter of humiliation to the nation” that industrial employees weren’t given care after an accident on the job and denied charges that his regulatory measures had caused the recent panic on Wall Street. The near-collapse, he said, was “due to the speculative folly and flagrant dishonesty of a few men of great wealth,” who tried to escape blame for their sins by pointing fingers at “those who have sought to put a stop to the wrongdoing.”
A cartoon in the New York World neatly summed up the effect of the speech: Roosevelt is shown banging a bass drum, drowning out Hughes, who is trying to speak. The president’s message, wrote The Denver Post, “hurls defiance at a legislature that thought in its folly that the day of Roosevelt was done”; The Boston Daily Globe said the president had achieved “sledgehammer eloquence.” “It has maddened my enemies,” Roosevelt crowed, and “I believe it has helped Taft’s nomination.”
After a late evening at the White House, Ray Baker reported that, for the first time in their long association, Roosevelt seemed tired. He was “through,” the president told the reporter; his time had passed. There were new issues coming up, difficult economic questions, “and I am not deeply interested in them. My problems are moral problems, and my teaching has been plain morality.” He planned to spend a year on safari in Africa after leaving office, he said: “The best thing I can do is to go entirely away, out of reach of everything here.”
Even that late in his term, however, the president still toyed with the idea of a third term as president. As the Republican convention approached and delegates converged on Chicago, many believed only one man could beat William Howard Taft: Theodore Roosevelt. A stampede to draft the president seemed increasingly likely. Any crowd of politicians, said the San Francisco Chronicle, could turn into “a mob, ready to accept what psychologists call ‘suggestion.’”
Two factions of Republicans were promoting a draft-Roosevelt movement. The first was the president’s loyal cadre of reformers and moderates. The second group, Taft’s right-wing opponents, calculated that a move to draft the president would weaken Taft but would open the door to another candidate when Roosevelt refused to accept.
There were two moments when the convention seemed ready to turn into a stampede. One came when Henry Cabot Lodge, giving the keynote speech, triggered chaos with his first mention of Roosevelt’s name. The crowd erupted in a demonstration that lasted forty-nine minutes, with a steady chant of “Four years more! Four years more!” Someone threw a four-foot Teddy bear into the air, and the crowd kept it aloft like a beach ball, tossing it from one delegation to another and eliciting a fresh roar each time it went aloft. The tumult only eased when an Oklahoma committeeman grabbed the bear and sat on it. Lodge finally brought order, telling the delegates that no one would persuade the president to go back on his word: “He says what he means and means what he says, and his party and his country will respect his wishes as they honor his high character and great public service.” The delegates excited animation subsided; the danger, and the possibility, passed.
The next day, Taft gave his nomination speech to polite applause. As the delegates were about to vote, someone carried a large lithograph of Roosevelt onto the stage and chaos erupted again – to the alarm of Taft’s backers, including his family, who were getting telegraph bulletins in his Washington office. The outburst lasted nearly fifteen minutes before the hall quieted down, at which point the delegates discovered that Lodge had been grimly counting votes all through the outburst, and the count had already reached Massachusetts. Soon it was done: William Howard Taft was the Republican nominee for President of the United States.
Presidential campaigns were still brief and dignified affairs for the most part, with candidates giving a few formal speeches, relying on others to speak for them at rallies and picnics. As Taft retreated to Hot Springs for a month of exercise and diet before the traditional Labor Day start of the campaign, Roosevelt bombarded him with advice: “Do not answer Bryan. Attack him!” Taft then vetoed his strategists’ advice to run a front-porch campaign against Bryan, resolving instead to make his own speaking tour of the country. His train visited twenty-one states in forty-one days. The tour was a success; Taft impressed the crowds as a straight talker and a man of conviction.
The president, worried that Taft wasn�
�t being tough enough on the stump, sought to “put a little vim into the campaign” with a series of public letters endorsing Taft and challenging Bryan. Bryan had claimed that he, not Taft, was Roosevelt’s “natural successor,” since Roosevelt’s views were closer to the Democratic platform than to the policies of his own party. Roosevelt’s fiery rebuttal pointed out that under the last Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, not a single antitrust suit had been filed. Afterwards, Taft wrote his mentor, Bryan’s “claim to be the heir of your policies is now the subject of laughter and ridicule rather than of serious weight.”
When the returns came in on election night, Taft carried twenty-nine of forty-six states and beat Bryan by 1.25 million votes. With his usual diffidence, Taft told Roosevelt that the victory was “chiefly your work,” and the joyful president saw it as a vindication of his policy. “All those who love you,” he wrote his successor, “must feel a thrill of exultation.”
Roosevelt’s last days in the White House were a whirl of action. He hated to leave, admitting that he would have liked “to keep my hands on the levers of this mighty machine.” His last State of the Union message outlined his political philosophy, demanded dozens of new laws, and admonished Congress to take action, bolstering the federal government to “carry into effect the new spirit of democracy.” He gave speeches, threw parties, and held farewell receptions at which ministers and ambassadors, an aide reported, “wept as they said goodbye.”
On March 4, 1909, the new president was inaugurated in a blizzard so thick the ceremony was moved indoors. When it was over, the Tafts rode up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Roosevelt went to Union Station, on his way to Africa.
On safari with Kermit and an entourage of some 250 big game hunters, visiting friends, guides, cooks, and porters, the former president made it a point to pay as little attention as possible to happenings in distant Washington. He wrote no letters to Taft, with whom he had been in almost daily correspondence for years whenever they were parted. His year off was meant to give him a clean break with the presidency and keep his restless mind occupied with outdoor life. As was typical, he took it to extremes.