As September progressed, with little noticeable change in traditional party loyalties, Roosevelt calmed down. Every vote for the status quo ante was a vote for continued GOP dominance of all three branches of government.
Only one discord, an unresolvable one, affected Republican harmony. It was that of Brownsville. The Senate Committee on Military Affairs may have upheld the President’s action, and Foraker may have been eliminated as a candidate, but the anger of black voters in such key states as Ohio and New York was potentially threatening to Taft. They did not have to give their support to Bryan to cripple his candidacy; if they were merely solid in refusing to vote at all, he could lose and lose.
Roosevelt got, if not consolation for the major mistake of his presidency, a certain grim satisfaction out of seeing Foraker totally humiliated on 17 September. William Randolph Hearst, stumping for the Independents Party, revealed the existence of letters between Foraker and Standard Oil’s John D. Archbold, going back over a period of years, that amounted to black-and-white proof of a senatorial purchase. Sums as large as fifty thousand dollars were itemized as “fees” and “payments” for vague legal services and “understandings” that clearly involved legislation.
Foraker, devastated, admitted the authenticity of the letters, but claimed that they related to law work only, which he had performed during intersessional times, and before such outside work was frowned upon by the Senate. At least one check—the largest—had been not a payment, but a loan from Standard Oil, to help a colleague buy a newspaper. Hearst had neglected to mention that Foraker had paid Archbold back within a month.
These qualifications, however, had little effect on public outrage. Foraker himself neglected to explain how $150,000 in corporate contributions toward the redecoration of his Washington mansion in no way related to his defense of corporations on Capitol Hill. He was, overnight, a dead man politically, and Roosevelt urged Taft to make the most of his demise. “I would have it understood in detail what is the exact fact, namely, that Mr. Foraker’s separation from you and from me has been due not in the least to a difference of opinion on the Negro question, which was merely a pretense.… Make a fight openly on the ground that you stood in the Republican party and before the people for the triumph over the forces which were typified by the purchase of a United States Senator to do the will of the Standard Oil Company.”
Taft, however, was not a fighter, either open or covert. Lacking aggression, all he wanted was to be loved. For the most part, this need served him well on the hustings. Audiences forgave his lackluster speaking style and warmed to his portly, always cheerful demeanor. When pressing flesh, he discharged none of Roosevelt’s galvanizing energy, but instead imparted an unthreatening, gentle glow. He was everybody’s favorite fat uncle from childhood, dispensing coins and lollipops.
Bryan’s brazen vocal cords were worked to the limit as he crisscrossed the country, meeting large and rapturous audiences wherever he went, and saying little to tax either his or their own mental abilities. But as James Bryce sympathetically observed, “That a man who talks so much should be able to think at all is amazing.”
ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO Washington on 23 September and plunged into the only kind of campaign work he could do, barring a request (which never came) to tour on behalf of Taft. He fired off a series of press statements and public letters attacking every candidate in the Democratic ranks who seemed vulnerable to charges of corruption, or any other sins on the calendar of human frailty. His biggest triumph was in causing the resignation of the treasurer of the Democratic campaign, Charles N. Haskell—also on account of links to Standard Oil, which by now was equated in the public mind with Attila’s Kingdom of the Huns. That the links had been first announced, again, by Hearst in no way spoiled Roosevelt’s satisfaction in having deeply embarrassed Bryan. “How the President does enjoy a fight when there is need of one,” James Garfield wrote in his diary.
Taft came to Washington only once, on 18 October. He was fresh from a tour of the Baptist South, and feeling somewhat bruised by the hostility of evangelicals toward his Unitarian faith. Roosevelt sympathetically went to church with him. “I did this,” he wrote Kermit, “hoping that it would attract the attention of sincere but rather ignorant Protestants who support me, and would make them tend to support Taft also.” It was the first time President and candidate had met since July. Roosevelt was pleased to find Taft, as ever, “just a dear,” and confident of victory in a majority of states. Dixie, after all, had never been GOP territory.
The nearest thing to a campaign debate that month was that over the use of injunctions in labor disputes. Unions claimed that corporations had too much power, under existing law, to force strikers back to work, by unduly influencing judges. Samuel Gompers of the AFL castigated the Republican Party for reneging on instructions from Roosevelt himself, earlier in the year, to adopt an anti-injunction plank. But the issue appealed only to a hard core of union voters, and the President neutralized it by publishing one of his typical public letters, accusing Gompers of impugning the integrity of the courts. On 26 October, Roosevelt released another epistle, four thousand words long, summarizing Taft’s fair-minded labor policies as a judge in the 1890s and as the Cabinet officer responsible for the well-being of workers in the Panama Canal Zone. He proudly identified himself as an honorary locomotive fireman, and announced that no less a personage than “the secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Steamshovel and Dredge men” was going to vote Republican.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Theodore Roosevelt turned fifty. He celebrated with a solitary ride, jumping all the hurdles in Rock Creek Park. “That is, Roswell jumped them,” he wrote Jules Jusserand. “I just sat on his back and admired the scenery.”
By now, it was apparent that Taft was going to win, in a victory proportionate to his size if not his stature. Ohio black leaders announced for him, the Republican labor vote remained loyal, and Bryan’s search for a last-minute, election-breaking issue failed. The President did not deny himself credit for having turned Taft into an effective campaigner. “I told him he must treat the political audience as one coming, not to see an etching, but a poster,” he said to Jusserand and Archie Butt. “He must, therefore, have streaks of blue, yellow, and red to catch the eye, and eliminate all fine lines and soft colors.”
Changing the subject, Roosevelt began excitedly to discuss a lecture he had been invited to give at Oxford University after he emerged from Africa. It was to be entitled “Biological Analogies in History,” and would discuss the continuance and disappearance of species as illustrative of the limitations of Social Darwinism. He was already deep into paleontological and sociological research. To save time, he was dictating the lecture while Joseph De Camp painted his portrait. He wanted both it and another paper, commissioned by the Sorbonne, to be well in hand before he devoted himself entirely to safari preparations.
Jusserand, who had come to the Executive Office for tea, had to keep listening until almost eight o’clock. Captain Butt was finally permitted to escort him out.
“Was there ever such a man before?” the Ambassador asked.
CHAPTER 32
One Long Lovely Crackling Row
MR. DOOLEY Well, I see Congress has got to wurruk again.
MR. HENNESSY Th’ Lord save us fr’m harm.
ON 3 NOVEMBER 1908, Edith Roosevelt was dismayed to hear that Pine Knot had fallen to William Jennings Bryan.
The fake telegram was sent by her husband, radiant over the election of William Howard Taft as twenty-seventh President of the United States. He regarded the vote as a vindication of his own record, and a guarantee of four more years of Rooseveltism. “We have beaten them to a frazzle!” The next morning, he arrived in the Executive Office in high good humor. James Garfield and Captain Butt were waiting to see him. “You army officers and politicians who still have futures before you may continue the struggle,” he said, taking his secretary by the hand, “but Mr. Loeb and I will sing the Nunc Dimittis.”
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Taft’s Electoral College majority was overwhelming, at 321 votes over Bryan’s 162. He also helped maintain the Republican control of both houses of Congress. His popular plurality was less so—1,269,606 votes over Bryan, a decisive total, but only half as impressive as Roosevelt’s landslide in 1904. Missouri reverted to the Democratic Party. Other Republican losses were in Colorado, Nebraska, and Nevada, along with the new state of Oklahoma. Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Ohio chose Democratic governors. Charles Evans Hughes retained New York by the merest of whiskers.
Bryan was gracious, even self-mocking after his third failed run for the White House. He said he identified with the legendary Texan drunk who tried to get into a bar, and was escorted out. Trying again, he was hustled out; trying yet again, he was thrown out. “I guess,” said the drunk, brushing dust from his clothes, “they don’t want me in there.”
ANY HOPES ROOSEVELT might have had that Taft would return to Washington to plot an ideologically continuous transition were disappointed when the President-elect headed straight back to Hot Springs to play golf. In his first public statement after arriving there, he announced, “I really did some great work at sleeping last night.”
Meanwhile, Roosevelt was composing an early valedictory for himself, addressed to George Otto Trevelyan:
Of course, if I had conscientiously felt at liberty to run again and try once more to hold this great office, I should greatly have liked to do so and to keep my hands on the levers of this mighty machine. I do not believe that any President has ever had as thoroly good a time as I have had, or has ever enjoyed himself as much. Moreover I have achieved a greater proportion than I had dared to think possible of the things I most desired to achieve.… Whatever comes hereafter, I have had far more than the normal share of human happiness.… But I am bound to say in addition that I cannot help looking forward to much enjoyment in the future. In fact, I am almost ashamed to say that while I would have been glad to remain as President, I am wholly unable to feel the slightest regret, the slightest sorrow, at leaving the office. I love the White House; I greatly enjoy the exercise of power; but I shall leave the White House without a pang, and, indeed, on the contrary, I am looking forward eagerly and keenly to being a private citizen again, without anybody being able to make a fuss over me or hamper my movements. I am as interested as I can be at the thought of getting back in my own house at Sagamore Hill, in the thought of the African trip, and of various things I intend to do when that is over.
He was not short of job opportunities. A large corporation offered him its presidency, at a salary of one hundred thousand dollars. The newspaperman Carr V. Van Anda offered him the editorship of a new metropolitan daily, to be formed out of a merger of the New York Sun and New York Press. The New York World suggested that he run for the Senate. Henry Adams thought he should emulate John Quincy Adams and become a Congressman. Philander Knox suggested he be made a bishop, to gratify his need to preach. A New York publisher made “a dazzling offer” for an exclusive on his postpresidential writings. G. P. Putnam’s tried to persuade him to complete his historical saga, The Winning of the West. Scribner’s offered him $25,000 for the story of his African adventure, McClure’s, $72,000, and Collier’s, $100,000. Lecture invitations came in sackfuls.
As before with the Nobel Prize, Roosevelt let his conscience, rather than greed, guide him. He had long ago been approached by the father-and-son team of Lyman and Lawrence Abbott to join their magazine, Outlook, as a contributing editor writing on current affairs. Lyman, an ordained clergyman with a strong social conscience, had been particularly persuasive. Although Outlook was not a wealthy periodical, its middle-class, mildly progressive profile appealed to Roosevelt. He gratefully remembered its support during the crises and controversies of his presidency—support that, by such a definition, had been continuous for seven years. Many magazines less loyal to him now wished to be generous, in exchange for what he could do for their circulation figures. For that reason if for no other, Roosevelt decided to accept Outlook’s offer. And in another gesture of loyalty, he signed a first-serial-and-book-rights deal with Charles P. Scribner’s Sons for fifty thousand dollars plus 20 percent royalties. In both cases, he could easily have doubled or tripled the money elsewhere. But, as he said to his editor at Scribner’s, Robert Bridges, “You have got the same standards of propriety that I have.”
The Abbotts proudly announced on 7 November that “on or after the 5th of March, 1909, Theodore Roosevelt will be associated with the Outlook’s editorial staff as a special Contributing Editor.” Only four days after the election, the President was having to get used to the nude look of his name shorn of any honorific.
Far from being disconcerted, he told Edith that that was how he wanted it styled on his new business cards. She thought Mr. would be more dignified. He thought not, and Archie Butt agreed with him.
“I might have known the true Georgians would stand together,” she said, laughing. “Why should he not have ‘Mr. Theodore Roosevelt,’ as any other gentleman would have on his card?”
“Because he is not like any other gentleman,” Butt said.
MID-NOVEMBER BROUGHT the first snow of the season. It fell, melted a little, then froze slick enough to prevent rides in Rock Creek Park. Roosevelt continued to play singles and doubles with members of the Tennis Cabinet, or, when they were not available, with the ever-willing Archie Butt. He enjoyed the velocity of the ball off the glassy lawn, the sharp air in his lungs, and the exchange of French Revolutionary shouts with his favorite partner, Jules Jusserand. (“Honneur au courage malheureux!” “À la lanterne!”) But as the month progressed, he became oddly silent on court, and played with less verve. Butt surmised that he was bracing himself for the return to town of the Sixtieth Congress, and its almost certain hostility to any further attempts at reform.
If so, his pessimism was justified. His last Annual Message, issued on 8 December, was so imperious a call for enhanced executive authority that it amounted to a condemnation of the doctrine of checks and balances. “Concentrated power is palpable, visible, responsible, easily reached, quickly held to account. Power scattered through many administrators, many legislators, many men who work behind and through legislators and administrators, is impalpable, is unseen, is irresponsible, cannot be reached, can not be held to account.”
His legislative requests were, for the most part, those of previous years, either strengthened or doggedly renewed: for control (“complete,” now) of railroad operations, extended employer’s liability and workmen’s-compensation laws, an eight-hour day in all government departments, forest protection, and inland-waterway improvements.
The only really new note in Roosevelt’s Eighth Message sounded so extreme, not to say eccentric, that it was criticized more as an attack on the courts than as what it really was: a deep and brilliant perception that justice is not a matter of eternal verities, but of constant, case-by-case adaptation to the human prejudices of judges. “Every time they interpret contract, property, vested rights, due process of law, liberty, they necessarily enact into law parts of a system of social philosophy; and as such interpretation is fundamental, they give direction to all lawmaking.”
This suggestion that the judicial branch of government was actually a branchlet of the legislative was almost as revolutionary as Roosevelt’s claim that concentration of power was democratic. Although he wrote in language considerably more thoughtful than that of his Special Message of the previous January, the mere implications of his words were enough to convince conservatives like Joseph Cannon that the best way to treat the President, as his legislative time ran out, was to ignore him.
Unless, of course, he was being deliberately and flagrantly provocative, as when he suggested, in another paragraph, that congressmen who had voted to limit the activities of the Secret Service “did not themselves wish to be investigated.”
PRESIDENT-ELECT TAFT arrived in town just in time to coincide with the release of the Message a
nd thus present an alternative image—tranquil and uncomplicated—to Roosevelt’s perpetual Sturm und Drang. He was in reality depressed and wishing that he was headed for the Supreme Court, rather than the White House. But reporters were so beguiled by his winks and chuckles that they saw nothing strange in his unwillingness even to consider Cabinet appointments until February. “I suppose I must do it then.”
Roosevelt, beguiled too, told Archie Butt, “He is going to be greatly beloved as President. I almost envy a man who has a personality like Taft’s.” Then, with a self-mocking leer, “No one could accuse me of having a charming personality.”
Butt certainly could, after seven months of almost daily exposure to evidence in proof. Pondering the President’s remark, he decided that the difference between Taft and Roosevelt was that of the inanimate versus the animate. Taft’s personality was soothing, “like a huge pan of sweet milk,” whereas Roosevelt’s was galvanic. “When he comes into a room and stands as he always does for one second before doing something characteristic, he electrifies the company and gives one just that sensation which a pointer does when he first quivers and takes a stand on quail.”
“HE WAS IN REALITY DEPRESSED AND WISHING THAT HE
WAS HEADED FOR THE SUPREME COURT.”
President-elect William Howard Taft, 1909 (photo credit 32.1)
About the only trait the two men had in common was their shared love of laughter. In company or alone, they were continually roaring with mirth, Taft quaking from head to foot, Roosevelt so convulsed that he had to hang on to a window frame for support. Members of the Gridiron Club had an opportunity to see them in action on 12 December, as they sat through a skit that satirized Roosevelt’s forthcoming role as a paid-by-the-word foreign journalist.
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