CHAPTER NINE

Governor and Governor General

Governor Roosevelt at work in Albany, New York, ca. 1900; Governor General Taft at his desk in Manila, ca. 1901.

A FOOT OF SNOW COVERED THE streets of Albany on January 2, 1899, the day Roosevelt was inaugurated as governor of New York. The thermometer registered several degrees below zero, but the bright sun and jingling sleigh bells lent a jubilant air to the thousands gathered at the statehouse. “There never was such a mass of people out to see a Governor installed,” the New York World reported. In the assembly chamber where the ceremony would take place, “the desks and seats of the members had been removed, and in their places were hundreds of camp chairs for the accommodation of the audience.”

“A deafening outburst of applause” greeted Roosevelt as he reached the flag-draped platform. He “stood for a moment in stern-faced dignity,” one journalist observed, “but the cheers continued, and then, like a sunburst the familiar Roosevelt smile broke forth.” His gaze was drawn to the Ladies’ Gallery where Edith and his six children stood, the boys desperately flapping both hands to attract his notice. When he threw his family a kiss, the “touch of human nature” spurred another round of thunderous applause.

Roosevelt’s brief inaugural address sketched out the creed he would follow as governor. “He is a party man,” a New York Tribune editorial remarked, one who “intends to work with his party and be loyal to it in all things that belong to it.” Nevertheless, he made it clear that he would “never render to party what belongs to the State, and the State is the first consideration.” Addressing fellow reformers who demanded renunciation of Boss Platt and the machine, Roosevelt emphasized that nothing would be accomplished “if we do not work through practical methods and with a readiness to face life as it is, and not as we think it ought to be.” Yet Mr. Platt would have to accept that “in the long run he serves his party best who helps to make it instantly responsive to every need of the people.”

“It was a solemn & impressive ceremony,” Edith told her sister Emily, confessing, “I could not look at Theodore or even listen closely or I should have broken down.” That afternoon, she stood by her husband’s side to greet more than 5,000 guests attending the festive reception in the executive mansion. But as soon as her public duties were fulfilled, she escaped to her room, where she could quietly read, write letters, and keep her diary. For this inordinately private woman, who seemed “physically to cringe” in the glare of “the public searchlight,” the prospect of life in Albany was intimidating. Reporters had already intrusively chronicled every aspect of the “general exodus” that carried “Mrs. Roosevelt, Miss Roosevelt, and the five little Roosevelts, the governesses, the nurses, the maid and the coachman, the mongrel but gentlemanly dog Susan, a new French Bulldog El Carney, the war horse Texas, and the other horses and the pony, as well as the guinea pigs” from Oyster Bay to the governor’s three-story mansion. Fanny Smith, who visited her old friend soon after her arrival, noted that Edith, “usually an extremely calm and self-controlled person,” paced “nervously up and down the room.”

Faced with the imposing task of transforming the cavernous governor’s mansion into a comfortable family home, Edith was understandably anxious. After securing the admittance of twelve-year-old Theodore Junior and ten-year-old Kermit to a local boys’ academy, she established a schoolroom in the basement for the younger children, Ethel and Archie. A nursery was created for little Quentin, a governess hired for fifteen-year-old Alice, and a third-floor billiard room remodeled to become the gymnasium. A competent staff orchestrated drawing-room receptions, musical entertainments, and large dinner parties, but Edith remained ill at ease on such elaborate occasions. She much preferred the sort of dinner parties and literary discussions she had once enjoyed with her intimate Washington circle. “If only I could wake up in your library,” she told Henry Cabot Lodge, “how happy I would be.” Edith soon began to adjust to her new role, however, just as she had settled into her new home. “Edith will never enjoy anywhere socially as much as she enjoyed Washington, nor make friends whom she cares for as much as she did for you and a few others,” Roosevelt confided to Maria Storer, “but she enjoys the position here greatly and has made some very good friends and is altogether having an excellent time. She is picking up in health and is looking very pretty.”

In February, a candid photograph of Edith appeared in newspapers. The image reveals a slender woman of medium height, dressed in plain but “perfect taste.” Although she had steadfastly refused interviews and declined to furnish a photograph for publication, reporters considered her neither “haughty, nor excessively modest.” She simply disliked personal publicity and proved as intractable as her husband once “her mind is made up.” Despite her habitual reticence, she never made reporters feel unwelcome in her home. Her family life was just not an appropriate subject for their stories. “Everything about her speaks of grace,” an Iowa journalist remarked. “There’s honor even among reporters, or at least there’s gratitude,” another explained. “We knew Mrs. Roosevelt’s wish to keep herself and the children out of the papers, and after her courtesy to us we were glad to respect that wish.”

Yet she was always prepared to entertain reporters and friends with humorous stories about the new governor. In a special scrapbook, she meticulously assembled every caricature relating to her husband, whether they “represented him as riding a hobby-horse or dispensing peanuts in paper bags from a corner stand.” While other wives were known to burn papers and magazines that burlesqued their husbands, Edith had perfect confidence in Theodore’s good humor and relished the laughter they shared over the cartoons.

NEWSPAPER READERS SOON LEARNED THAT Theodore Roosevelt was unlike any governor New York had known. He arrived in his office long before the usual hour of nine o’clock to begin the baffling task of sorting through his mail. Three or four hundred letters arrived each morning, a far larger volume than any previous governor had contended with. At 10 a.m., his official day commenced, with an hour reserved for assemblymen and senators, followed by rapid-fire meetings with political delegations, members of his administration, and individual petitioners. Roosevelt was“ever on his feet” during these sessions, ranging restlessly as he talked, laughed, or scowled. He punctuated sentences with his fists, “filling the entire room with his presence.” The stately desk, where his staid predecessors had “judicially” received visitors, might as well have been removed, one observer noted, for “it hardly knows the Governor.”

Despite Roosevelt’s often combustible and seemingly impulsive nature, he maintained a schedule so precise that he could reliably meet an individual slated for 12:20 to 12:25 and conclude business just in time to usher in his 12:25 appointment. Visitors were encouraged to “plunge at once” into their subject, for the governor deftly yet positively closed the interview after the allotted time. Roosevelt’s official day ended at 5 p.m., though he frequently remained in his office until seven o’clock. Once the governor departed the capitol for the short walk to the executive mansion, he was “not to be disturbed” unless by an emergency. “These evening hours,” wrote a correspondent who profiled the governor, “are set apart for his literary work, his reading and social converse with his family, the Roosevelt youngsters having a decided claim, even in the midst of the most pressing affairs of the State.”

Honoring his promise to regularly consult organization leaders, Roosevelt soon announced that he would visit New York City every weekend during the legislative session to meet with Boss Platt and Benjamin Odell, chairman of the Republican State Committee, an announcement that incensed staunch reformers. The New York Evening Post, an influential independent paper which had supported Roosevelt’s bitter fight against Tammany Hall as police commissioner, now decried his willingness to “touch Platt both politically and socially.” Never had a governor “so belittled the dignity of the office,” opined the Albany Argus: “Imagine for a moment William Seward, Samuel Tilden or Grover Cleveland running down to New York, like a capitol district messenger boy, to bring back the orders of some party boss.”

While Roosevelt absorbed attacks from Democratic papers with equanimity, he could barely contain his fury at “the irrational independents and the malignant make-believe independents” who remained aloof, never engaging genuine political issues for fear of sullying themselves. These“solemn reformers of the tom-fool variety,” Roosevelt complained, stridently assumed that any contact with the bosses indicated some “sinister” collusion. “I have met many politicians whom I distrust and dislike,” he told a friend, “yet there are none whom I regard as morally worse than the editors of the Post.” His indignation was aggravated by a conviction that the Post’s denunciation might cause some of his friends, the sincere reformers as opposed to the lunatic fringe, to misconstrue his actions.

Once again Roosevelt reached out to Steffens, proffering what the reporter termed “an understanding.” Steffens would meet the governor each Friday afternoon when he arrived in Manhattan for his weekly consultation with the bosses, keeping “in close touch with him all the time he was there,” and escorting him to the train station for his return to Albany on Sunday evening. “I was to know all the political acts he was contemplating, with his reasons for them,” Steffens recounted. By sharing the full context of each decision and appointment before it became public, Roosevelt trusted that Steffens would credit and document the complex, pragmatic maneuvering behind an ethical and effective approach to leadership. Roosevelt’s trust was well placed. Steffens kept the governor’s confidences until he determined a course of action, providing an authoritative account of the decision-making process for the Commercial Advertiser. “T.R. was a very practical politician,” Steffens recalled, “and it was partly from watching him sympathetically that I lost some of my contempt for politicians and practical men generally.”

Steffens was not the sole journalist to whom Roosevelt granted such inside access. The governor understood that however courteously he might handle Platt and the organization, he would inevitably clash with them on a range of salient issues. When the battles began, he would need the persuasive power of the press to marshal public sentiment for his reformist agenda. Only by “appealing directly to the people,” by “going over the heads” of party leaders, did he have any chance of pushing significant reform through the legislature.

To that end, Roosevelt soon declared that he would hold two press conferences each day he was in town. His unprecedented announcement thrilled the twenty-five statehouse correspondents, who quickly labeled the morning session “the séance” and the afternoon session “the pink tea.” The governor generally opened these informal conferences “with a smile and nearly always with a joke, generally at his own expense.” In the course of fifteen minutes, one reporter marveled, he would explain his objectives and the rationale behind them. He outlined his “future movements” and intentions regarding various controversial issues, clearly indicating which statements were on the record and which were simply shared confidences, not meant for publication. These lively forums impressed the journalists with “the wonderful mental activity of the man.” With his “marvelous fund of general information to draw upon,” Roosevelt never haltingly answered or appeared at a loss.

One of Roosevelt’s first acts as governor was to convene a meeting with Jacob Riis and three leading trade unionists to determine the most constructive labor legislation to sponsor. The labor leaders agreed that while some new laws were in order, workers would most benefit from the application of laws that already had been enacted to cover maximum hours of work, sweatshop conditions, prevailing wages, and safety requirements. In too many instances, such laws had been put on the books simply to satisfy public demand; as soon as publicity and interest faded, they became dead letters, and companies did as they pleased.

To dramatize these flagrant violations, Roosevelt requested that Riis accompany him one day on a series of surprise visits to tenement sweatshops, ostensibly under the supervision of state inspectors. “I think that perhaps if I looked through the sweatshops myself,” Roosevelt told Riis, “we might be in a condition to put things on a new basis, just as they were put on a new basis in the police department after you and I began our midnight tours.”

Riis never forgot the appalling conditions they unearthed during their inspection tour. “It was on one of the hottest days of early summer,” he recalled. “I had picked twenty five-story tenements, and we went through them from cellar to roof, examining every room and the people we found there.” In building after building, the minimum requirements for licensing home work—“no bed in the room where the work was done, no outsider employed, no contagious disease, and only one family living in the rooms”—were found wanting or neglected entirely. As soon as the tour concluded, Roosevelt proceeded to the factory inspector’s office. “I do not think you quite understand what I mean by enforcing a law,” he admonished, insisting that inspectors “make owners of the tenements understand that old, badly built, uncleanly houses shall not be used for manufacturing in any shape.” Day’s end found Riis spent but Roosevelt percolating with new ideas and eager for extended discussion over a good meal. Immediately, he would increase the number of tenement inspectors, and when the legislature convened the following winter, he would successfully introduce a bill to revise the code of tenement house laws.

Years later, Roosevelt recalled his labor record as governor with satisfaction. Although his effort to pass an employers’ liability act failed, he did manage to obtain “the grudging and querulous assent” of the bosses for legislation establishing an eight-hour day for state employees, limiting the maximum hours women and children could work in private industry, improving working conditions for children, hiring more factory inspectors, and mandating air brakes on freight trains. At a time when laissez-faire attitudes reigned, even such limited measures represented considerable progress.

Roosevelt also took pride in a remarkably innovative conservation record. Within weeks of taking office, he invited an old friend, the architect Grant La Farge, along with the head of the U.S. Forestry Division, Gifford Pinchot, to spend the night at the governor’s mansion. Pinchot, like Roosevelt, had been born into a moneyed New York mercantile family but had chosen to dedicate his life to public service. A devoted naturalist and wilderness enthusiast, he had studied forestry conservation in France after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College. The tall, confident thirty-three-year-old brought great originality and ambition to his position when McKinley appointed him to head the Forestry Division.

Pinchot’s visit with Roosevelt was unforgettable from the outset: “We arrived just as the Executive Mansion was under ferocious attack from a band of invisible Indians,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and the Governor of the Empire State was helping a household of children to escape by lowering them out of a second-story window on a rope.” After rescuing his young pioneers, Roosevelt settled down to a long evening of food, drink, and conversation, punctuated by a spirited boxing match in which Pinchot “had the honor of knocking the future President of the United States off his very solid pins,” though the governor emerged victorious from the wrestling contest that concluded their visit. The alliance established that night would play a central role in future conservation policy.

In the months that followed, Roosevelt convinced the state legislature to preserve tens of thousands of forested acres in the Catskills and the Adirondacks. He appointed a single superintendent to replace the five-man Fisheries, Game and Forest Commission, which had become a haven for machine spoilsmen. He created the Palisades Park and used his bully pulpit to promote awareness of the state’s unique natural resources and the pressing need to conserve them. Roosevelt’s second annual message, the historian Douglas Brinkley argues, “was the most important speech about conservation ever delivered by a serious American politician up to that time.” Pinchot committed whole passages to memory “as if it were the Gettysburg Address,” while ornithologists considered its call for the protection of endangered birds “the tipping point for the Audubon Movement.”

“I need hardly say how heartily I sympathize with the purposes of the Audubon Society,” Roosevelt maintained, expressing his profound emotional investment in the matter. “When the bluebirds were so nearly destroyed by the severe winter a few seasons ago, the loss was like the loss of an old friend, or at least like the burning down of a familiar and dearly loved house. . . . When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished; as if we had lost all instead of only part of Polybius or Livy.” This lifelong sympathy proved instrumental in preserving natural lands and wildlife habitat in his state and would become a driving force to protect the entire nation’s wilderness.

THE GOVERNOR WAS INITIALLY SURPRISED that on many issues, even those involving labor and conservation, he “got on fairly well with the machine.” Indeed, his endeavors to placate Platt through weekly pilgrimages to the city seemed so successful that he was unprepared for “the storm of protest” when he came out in favor of a new franchise tax on corporations. Until this moment, Roosevelt acknowledged, he had “only imperfectly understood” the intricate web linking the Platt machine to the corporate world. Unlike other political bosses, Senator Platt “did not use his political position to advance his private fortunes.” He lived simply and had few interests beyond the powerful network he had meticulously constructed and nurtured over the decades. To keep control of the political organization he required regular revenue from the corporate world “in the guise of contributions for campaign purposes” and donations for “the good of the party.” These sums were distributed to his select candidates for the state legislature with the “gentlemen’s understanding” that they could be counted upon for important votes, particularly when an issue touched upon the corporations that fueled the machine. The public had small awareness and less understanding of this threat that Roosevelt labeled the “invisible empire.”

For decades, the state of New York had granted exclusive franchises to corporations to operate immensely lucrative electric street railways, telephone networks, and telegraph lines. These franchises, often secured by outright bribery, had been awarded with no attempt to obtain tax revenues from the corporations in return. After investigating the issue, Roosevelt concluded “that it was a matter of plain decency” for these corporations to pay their share of taxes for privileges worth tens or even hundreds of millions. In fact, a bill to tax such franchises had previously been introduced by John Ford, a Democratic state senator from New York City. The measure “had been suffered to slumber undisturbed” in the machine-dominated assembly until the governor’s surprise announcement brought the issue “into sudden prominence.”

At their next breakfast meeting, Platt furiously warned Roosevelt that the Ford bill would never be permitted to pass. If he persisted in pushing it forward, the governor risked an open break with the machine. This “radical legislation,” Platt argued, had no serious public support “until you sprang forward as its champion.” In its stead, Platt suggested that a joint legislative committee “consider the whole question of taxation,” with the obligation to report back the following year. Realizing that the tax bill had dim prospects for success without Platt’s support, Roosevelt agreed to postpone consideration until the commission issued its report. Reformers recognized the commission as a cynical effort to kill the bill and roundly derided the governor for bending to the subterfuge of the machine. “The time to tax franchises is now, not next year,” goaded the Tribune.“Roosevelt Stops Franchise Tax,” the Herald blared.

Stung by the swarm of criticism from reformers, Roosevelt altered his approach, explaining to reporters that despite his reservations about the Ford bill, he would like to see it become law. Well aware of the blackmailing power Tammany Hall would gain, he was particularly concerned by the provision allowing cities to determine tax assessments instead of the state. Nevertheless, a flawed bill was better than none, and Roosevelt concluded that if he “could get a show in the Legislature the bill would pass, because the people had become interested and the representatives would scarcely dare to vote the wrong way.” Through a complicated series of maneuvers, the bill was finally brought to a vote in both chambers just before the legislative session ended. While many Republicans in the lower chamber heeded Platt’s directive to vote against the measure, Roosevelt secured enough Republican support that, combined with a heavy Democratic vote, he was able to produce a majority.

“It was said to-day,” Steffens declared in the Commercial Advertiser, “that many of the men who supported the measure have been threatened with political destruction by the party leaders for their action in the matter. These men may rest assured,” Steffens knowingly asserted, “that they will have the sympathy and support of the governor for their courage in openly declaring themselves. He appreciates courage.”

Asked how the tax would affect his company, the counsel for one affected corporation was blunt: “Right in the solar plexus,” he replied. In the days that followed, the stock market suffered a significant drop. “You will make the mistake of your life if you allow that bill to become a law,” Platt warned Roosevelt at the close of a bitter letter. He promised the governor that an ugly confrontation was imminent unless Roosevelt summoned that “very rare and difficult quality of moral courage not to sign” the bill after endeavoring to pass it. “When the subject of your nomination was under consideration, there was one matter that gave me real anxiety,” Platt noted. “I had heard from a good many sources that you were a little loose on the relations of capital and labor, on trusts and combinations, and indeed, on those numerous questions which have arisen in politics affecting the security of earnings and the right of a man to run his own business in his own way, with due respect of course to the Ten Commandments and the Penal Code. Or, to get at it even more clearly, I understood from a number of business men, and among them many of your own personal friends, that you entertained various altruistic ideas.” In Platt’s lexicon, Roosevelt clearly understood, altruistic meant “Communistic or Socialistic.” The governor, Platt acknowledged, had lately adjourned a legislative session that “created a good opinion throughout the State.” Then, “at the last minute and to my very great surprise, you did a thing which has caused the business community of New York to wonder how far the notions of Populism, as laid down in Kansas and Nebraska, have taken hold upon the Republican party of the State of New York.”

“I do not believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected,” Roosevelt countered. “It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing that, whereas the populists, socialists and others really do not correct the evils at all, or else only do so at the expense of producing others in aggravated form, that we Republicans hold the just balance and set our faces as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other.” Their disagreement on this salient issue troubled him, he confessed to Platt, especially since “you have treated me so well and shown such entire willingness to meet me halfway.” Nevertheless, he firmly believed that the Republican Party “should be beaten, and badly beaten, if we took the attitude of saying that corporations should not, when they receive great benefits and make a great deal of money, pay their share of the public burdens.”

Corporate representatives descended on Roosevelt, warning that if he signed the bill, “under no circumstances could [he] ever again be nominated for any public office, as no corporation would subscribe to a campaign fund if [he] was on the ticket.” Refusing to be bullied, yet well aware that a break with the organization would be fatal, Roosevelt made one concession. Before signing the bill, he told Platt, he would call a special legislative session and try to pass an amendment that would substitute a state board of assessors for local authorities. He also agreed to hold a hearing with corporate representatives and solicit suggestions for additional improvements in the bill. In the event the extra session produced amendments that would weaken the tax, however, he would simply sign the Ford bill in its present form.

“Some of the morning newspapers repeat the expression of astonishment that Governor Roosevelt has consulted the attorneys of corporations,” Steffens reported in the Commercial Advertiser. “Some yellow minds cannot seem to understand that the governor is willing to fight the corporations to make them do right and yet be ready to negotiate just terms of peace—nay to fight for the corporations against wrong.” In fact, when Roosevelt learned that corporations in some communities had already paid local taxes, he agreed to an amendment providing that “any taxes already payable for public rights could be deducted from the franchise valuation.”

The passage of this amendment, along with the shift to state assessors, allowed Platt to make the best of a difficult situation when Roosevelt signed the bill. “Persistent efforts have been made by the Democratic newspapers,” the boss told reporters, “to have it appear that there are serious divisions in the Republican Party.” Such claims he blithely dismissed: “All agreed,” he now maintained, “that franchises were a proper and necessary subject of taxation.” While the original bill had been “carelessly drawn and thoughtlessly enacted,” these “just and reasonable” amendments enabled Platt and his organization to save face and support the bill.

“Passage of the amended franchise tax bill is a distinct personal triumph for Governor Roosevelt,” the Commercial Advertiser asserted in its lead editorial. “By exercise of tact and by concessions where no sacrifice of principle was involved, the governor achieved his ends. His integrity of motive and his eagerness to prevent party rupture were so apparent that Republican legislators were left no choice but to support him.”

IN THE SUMMER OF 1899, following his successful push for the franchise tax, Roosevelt prepared to head west to New Mexico for the first reunion of his beloved Rough Riders. “Would you let me ask a great favor,” he wrote William Allen White several weeks before the trip, “and that is that you should try to join me on the train and ride three or four hours with me. There is very much that I have to talk over with you. As you know, you have got the ideas of Americanism after which I am striving.”

White and Roosevelt had met two years earlier during the reporter’s first journey to the east coast at the invitation of Sam McClure. Before proceeding to New York, White spent a few days in the nation’s capital, where he was informed that “a young fellow named Roosevelt” in the Navy Department had read his famous editorial and book of short stories about Kansas and was eager to meet him. White was deeply impressed by his first glimpse of the man who would become a close friend, confidant, and correspondent: “a tallish, yet stockily built man, physically hard and rugged, obviously fighting down the young moon crescent of his vest; quick speaking, forthright, a dynamo of energy, given to gestures and grimaces, letting his voice run its full gamut from base to falsetto.” Roosevelt seemed, White’s description concluded, “to be dancing in the exuberance of a deep physical joy of life.”

“We walked from the Navy Department under the shade of the young trees that lined the streets that Summer day to the Army and Navy Club, had lunch, talked and talked, and still kept talking,” White recollected. Roosevelt was just then beginning to comprehend “the yearnings” of America’s working poor for social and economic justice, “to see clearly that our problems were no longer problems of production, but problems affecting the distribution of wealth and income.” For White, still adhering to conservative predilections, Roosevelt’s progressive ideas were a revelation. “He sounded in my heart the first trumpet call of the new time that was to be,” White recalled, stressing that such notes represented “youth and the new order” and “the passing of the old into the new.” The young journalist was overcome by “the splendor” of Roosevelt’s personality. “I had never known such a man as he,” White wrote more than a quarter of a century after Roosevelt’s death, “and never shall again.”

Roosevelt for his part felt an immediate kinship with the ebullient writer. Both men were blessed with confidence and energy, both ready to engage in the political and ideological contests that would define their country. While the rotund White had no interest in the physical challenges and trials that Roosevelt adored, preferring to spend his leisure time reading poetry or playing piano, his nimble, perceptive mind perfectly matched Roosevelt’s, and they shared a vigorous style of speaking and writing. Doubtless, Roosevelt also recognized that the celebrated journalist was an influential leader of middle-class opinion. “Between his newspaper editorials, magazine articles and a growing list of books,” one historian suggests, “White could claim one of the largest audiences of any writer in America at the turn of the century.”

Following their initial encounter, the two men had continued to exchange letters, articles, and books. Roosevelt purchased an out-of-town subscription to the Emporia Gazette, and sent his new friend a copy of his recently published work, American Ideals and Other Essays. “I read it with feelings of mingled astonishment and trepidation,” White recalled, confessing that “it shook my foundations, for it questioned things as they are. It challenged a complacent plutocracy.”

By the time Roosevelt’s train steamed through Kansas en route to New Mexico that summer of 1899, White was working “with the zeal of a converted disciple” to help his friend become president in 1904—assuming that McKinley would run again in 1900. Paul Morton, vice president of the Santa Fe Railroad, had offered Roosevelt his private car so the governor and his invited guests (including White and H. H. Kohlsaat, publisher of the Chicago Times-Herald) could relax and talk. On short notice, White had done his utmost to ensure that reporters and enthusiastic supporters greeted Roosevelt’s train at every stop.

In Topeka, 3,000 people gave the New York governor “a rousing reception.” At the Newton station, “cannon boomed, whistles were blown and the crowd cheered.” In Kansas City, men wore cards in their hatbands promoting Roosevelt in 1904. The largest audience gathered in White’s hometown of Emporia. “No public man who has come into Kansas during the last ten years has stirred as much personal enthusiasm as Roosevelt,” White’s Emporia Gazette proclaimed. Roosevelt made a short fighting speech that roused supporters. “Governor Roosevelt may be said to be an Eastern man with a Western temperament,” the Kansas City Star noted. “His sympathy with the people of the Transmississippi country and the power he has displayed in appealing to their fancy marks him as a person of unusual breadth.” Despite a mere forty-eight hours’ notice of his arrival, White rhapsodized, Roosevelt “had a larger crowd at the Kansas stations than McKinley had with the state central committee back of him. Reporters with both trains concede this. . . . There is no man in America today whose personality is rooted deeper in the hearts of the people than Theodore Roosevelt.”

Kohlsaat, who had never met Roosevelt before, was stunned by the fervor of the crowds. On travels with his close friend McKinley, he had witnessed nothing comparable to the New York governor’s reception. The night the train left Emporia, he and Roosevelt stayed up talking until midnight. Roosevelt was curious to learn about Kohlsaat’s relationship with McKinley. For seven years, Kohlsaat proudly noted, McKinley did not once give a speech to the nation “without either wiring, telephoning, or writing me, and sending me his speeches to read before delivering them.” When Kohlsaat the next day begged pardon for having sounded arrogant, Roosevelt put his mind at ease: “Do you know what I thought after I went to bed?” Roosevelt asked. “I wondered if you would do the same thing for me.”

Delighted to find that Roosevelt welcomed his advice, Kohlsaat suggested that he issue a pledge of support for McKinley’s renomination. McKinley’s friends, he had learned, were irritated by premature talk of the governor’s presidential ambitions. Recognizing the value of Kohlsaat’s counsel, Roosevelt immediately telegraphed the president, “telling of the sentiment he had found in the West for his renomination,” and provided a similar statement to the press for publication. Shortly afterward, Roosevelt received a telegram from President McKinley inviting him to the White House. “Oh mentor!” Roosevelt addressed Kohlsaat. “Was my McKinley interview all right? . . . Didn’t we have a good week together?”

Roosevelt wrote a warm letter to White as well, expressing deep gratitude for their trip together. His absolute trust in White allowed him to share his hopes and intentions unguardedly. Even in that summer of 1899, White recalled, “we were planning for 1904.” Before they parted, White promised to send Roosevelt a map analyzing the strengths of various factions in each western state, helping to determine which political leaders should be approached—and by whom. Meanwhile, he assured the governor that the trip through Kansas was already “bearing great fruit,” as evidenced by laudatory clippings from Kansas newspapers that White enclosed. He recommended that Roosevelt send a personal note to each editor and publisher he met along the way. “All of these men have endorsed you emphatically since your departure, and spoke of you not only as possibility, but as probability for 1904,” White assured him, adding that a personal acknowledgment “would convince those men of their wisdom.”

Increasingly, White began to identify the trajectory of Roosevelt’s success with nothing less than the nation’s prospects. “When the war with Spain broke out, I wanted to go the worst kind [of way],” White confided to Roosevelt, “but my wife was sick and I felt that my first duty was to her. Then when your regiment had such remarkable success and when you came home and were made governor and acquitted yourself so admirably, I formed a great desire to help you to be president of the United States. It has seemed to me that if I could perform some service for you that would land you in the presidency, I would perform as great a service for my country as I could perform upon the battlefield.”

In the years that followed, the two men exchanged more than three hundred letters. White reacted to Roosevelt’s speeches and Roosevelt religiously read White’s stories and articles as they appeared. “I think the ‘Man on Horseback’ almost your strongest bit of work,” he wrote, in response to White’s tale of an honest man corrupted by wealth as he builds a street railway empire and, in the process, loses his idealistic son. “There is a certain iron grimness about the tragedy with its mixture of the sordid and the sublime that made a very deep impression on me,” Roosevelt told his friend. After finishing another of White’s stories about a populist senator who hammers away at trusts and money power while building his own fortune through shady deals, Roosevelt penned a 2,000-word reply. “You are among the men whose good opinion I crave and desire to earn by my actions,” he frankly avowed. “I rank you with, for instance Judge Taft of Cincinnati and Jim Garfield of Cleveland, and with the men whom I am trying to get around me here, men of high ideals who strive to achieve these ideals in practical ways, men who want to count for decency and not merely to prattle.”

ROOSEVELT WAS PARTICULARLY INTRIGUED BY White’s views on the problem of the trusts, finding himself “in a great quandary what position to advocate about them.” His struggle for the franchise tax had sensitized him to the “growth of popular unrest and popular distrust” over the increasing concentration of power in large corporations. He told Lodge he was “surprised to find” that many workingmen who had supported McKinley and the Republicans in 1896 now insisted that William Jennings Bryan was “the only man who can control the trusts; and that the trusts are crushing the life out of the small men.” He feared that so long as Republicans failed to develop a cogent policy regarding trusts, those workers who suffered “a good deal of misery” would gravitate toward “the quack,” whose dangerous remedies would undo the benefits of the Industrial Revolution.

In the months that followed, Roosevelt consulted a variety of experts to develop a reasonable proposal for regulating the trusts, which he intended to present in his second annual message to the legislature when it reconvened in January. When a draft of the message was completed, he sent it to his old friend Elihu Root, a successful corporate lawyer who had just joined McKinley’s cabinet as war secretary. Root’s vehement opposition to the franchise tax measure had strained their friendship for a time, but he was “such a good fellow,” Roosevelt told Lodge, “that I was sure it would not last, and now I think every shade of it has vanished.” Root read the draft carefully, making a number of changes to tone down the governor’s rhetoric and moderate his condemnation of those who amassed their riches “by means which are utterly inconsistent with the highest rules of morality.” Roosevelt gratefully accepted most of Root’s suggestions. “Oh, Lord! I wish there were more of you,” he wrote; “you have the ideas to work out whereas I have to try to work out what I get from you and men like you.”

The lengthy message, delivered on January 3, 1900, opened with praise for the legislative achievements in the previous year, taking special note of the passage of the franchise tax law. More remained to be done to address the state’s industrial problems. “In our great cities there is plainly in evidence much wealth contrasted with much poverty and some of the wealth has been acquired or is used in a manner for which there is no moral justification,” Roosevelt said. Then, taking heed of Root’s advice, he carefully qualified this indictment, noting that “wealth which is expended in multiplying and elaborating real comforts, or even in pleasures which produce enjoyment at all proportionate to their cost will never excite serious indignation.”

“We do not wish to discourage enterprise,” Roosevelt stressed; “we do not desire to destroy corporations; we do desire to put them fully at the service of the State and the people.” He acknowledged that anti-trust legislation vengefully designed to punish the mere acquisition of wealth would be destructive but insisted that it would be “worse than idle to deny” the existence of abuses “of a very grave character.” Consequently, “we must set about finding out what the real abuses are, with their causes and to what extent remedies can be applied.”

“The first essential,” Roosevelt maintained, “is knowledge of the facts, publicity.” Such exposure would open the trusts to investigation for “misrepresentation or concealment regarding material facts” and reveal a corporation’s involvement in “unscrupulous promotion, overcapitalization, unfair competition, resulting in the crushing out of competitors” or the “raising of prices above fair competitive rates.” He recognized that “care should be taken not to stifle enterprise or disclose any facts of a business that are essentially private” but insisted on the state’s right to protect the public from monopoly and even from the “colossal waste” of resources in “vulgar forms of social advertisement.” With the facts in hand, measures—including taxation—could be devised to regulate the trusts. Most immediately, Roosevelt reiterated, “publicity is the one sure and adequate remedy which we can now invoke.”

Advocating “the adoption of what is reasonable in the demands of reformers” as “the surest way to prevent the adoption of what is unreasonable,” Roosevelt hoped to propel “the party of property” toward a more “enlightened conservatism.” The bosses had no interest in Roosevelt’s musings about a transformed Republican Party. On the contrary, Tom Platt and Benjamin Odell considered the message, even with Root’s modifications, dangerously provocative toward business. Odell warned that Roosevelt’s call to increase publicity surrounding corporate activities would spur manufacturers to leave New York State. Tensions with the party bosses escalated further when the governor threw his support behind a bill that would compel corporations to disclose information on “their structure and finance.”

To Roosevelt’s great disappointment, the public did not rally behind the bill. The danger of the trusts, apparent to farmers and wage earners, had not yet penetrated the consciousness of middle-class America. In three years’ time, Ida Tarbell and her fellow muckrakers would reach that important audience through their narrative abilities, putting faces and names to the giant corporations, shining a bright light on the sordid maneuvers that were crushing independent businessmen in one sector after another, dramatizing the danger in a way the voting population could no longer ignore. In 1900, however, the trusts remained amorphous entities, arousing vague apprehension but insufficient outrage to exert pressure on the political machines operating as their protectors. And in the absence of public demand, it was not difficult for Platt to prevent the legislature from acting on Roosevelt’s proposal.

DISSENSION BETWEEN PLATT AND ROOSEVELT continued to intensify. The three-year term of the state’s superintendent of insurance was coming to a close in February 1900. Lou Payn, the current superintendent, was Platt’s “right-hand” man. His reappointment was a foregone conclusion. Reading newspaper reports of Payn’s cozy relationships with the very companies he was supposed to oversee, Roosevelt issued an announcement that he would seek a new superintendent. Straightaway, the party countered with a statement that Payn would continue at his post “no matter what the opposition to him may try to do.” At a contentious breakfast, Platt “issued an ultimatum” to the governor, warning “that if he chose to fight,” he would most certainly lose, for “under the New York constitution the assent of the Senate was necessary not only to appoint a man to office, but to remove him from office.” There was no need to remind Roosevelt who controlled the senate. “I persistently refused to lose my temper,” he recalled. “I merely explained good-humoredly that I had made up my mind.”

Though he steadfastly refused to consider Payn’s reappointment, Roosevelt moved to conciliate the organization. At the next breakfast meeting, he gave Platt a list of good machine men and told him to select any name on it. Still, Platt refused to compromise. While independent newspapers endorsed Roosevelt’s decision to remove Payn, they criticized his attempt to mollify Platt. “Why does he not fight in the open?” the Evening Post queried. “He could openly say that he found a rogue in office whom all the powers of political corruption in both parties were banded together to keep there, and that he, the people’s Governor, must appeal to the good citizens to sustain him in his fight against the whole confederate crew. That would be real war, and how the people would volunteer for it! That would be raising a standard to which honest men could repair. But what sort of banner is it on which the chief insignia are muffins and coffee devoured by Roosevelt and Platt, sitting cheek by jowl?”

The impasse persisted until Roosevelt, with the help of a newspaper investigation, uncovered a loan of more than $400,000 that Payn had received from a trust company controlled by an insurance firm under the superintendent’s jurisdiction. Unwilling to risk a scandal and extended scrutiny, Platt finally capitulated. He agreed to the nomination of Francis Hendricks, one of the men on Roosevelt’s list, whom the governor considered “thoroughly upright and capable.”

“I have always been fond of the West African proverb: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,’ ” Roosevelt exultantly told a friend. “If I had not carried the big stick the organization would not have gotten behind me.” At the same time, he pointed out, had he “yelled and blustered,” he would not have been able to muster 10 votes in the senate for Hendricks’s nomination. Indeed, following the righteous recommendations of the Evening Post “would have ensured Payn’s retention” and facilitated “a very imposing triumph for rascality.”

“The outcome of the Payn contest is a complete vindication of the governor’s way of accomplishing results,” Steffens’s Commercial Advertiser declared. “Could the governor have accomplished any more than he has if he had declared open war on the organization?” The Evening Postremained dissatisfied. Although Hendricks’s appointment promised an “honest administration of the Insurance Department,” the Post declared, the governor should have selected his own man “without consulting the organization, and he could thus have dealt the Republican machine such a blow as it has never suffered. The moral courage of the Governor at Albany was not equal to the physical courage of the Colonel before Santiago.”

Roosevelt’s stormy relationship with Senator Platt troubled him far less than the perpetual hail of invective from fellow reformers. “Could they assail such a man more viciously and persistently than they have assailed him?” the Commercial Advertiser queried in his defense. “Are they not making it possible for the politicians to say: ‘We gave the reformers a governor who secured reforms and who would not do what we wished him to do: they fell upon him because he did not get reforms in their way, not because he did not get reforms.’ Why not simply choose one of our own machine men from here on in? They surely won’t attack him more fiercely than they have Roosevelt.”

Even as he excoriated “the dogs of the Evening Post” for their attacks, Roosevelt preserved his friendship with the Post’s longtime editorial writer, Joseph Bucklin Bishop. “I value you too much to go into recrimination,” he wrote to Bishop in the wake of another derogatory Post editorial. “Now, I have a proposal to make. Wouldn’t you like to come up here and meet some of the ‘wild beasts’?” During his weekends in New York, Roosevelt encouraged Bishop to visit at Bamie’s Madison Avenue town house so they could air their disagreements. “I will explain to you the merits of the police bill, if it passes,” he suggested, “and you shall explain to me its demerits, if it fails.” Their lively correspondence mollified rancor that might have hardened into lasting hostility. After being quoted that he was uncertain which he regarded “with the most unaffected dread—the machine politician or the fool reformer,” Roosevelt hastily assured Bishop that he was “emphatically not one of the ‘fool reformers.’ ”

In late 1899, after sixteen years at the Post, Bishop made the wrenching decision to leave the newspaper. His standing there had deteriorated after he declined to follow “positive orders to suppress the truth” concerning Roosevelt’s accomplishments. “The policy of the Evening Post,” he was informed, “is to break down Roosevelt.” Consequently, Roosevelt was thrilled when Bishop joined Steffens at the Commercial Advertiser. “You are about fourteen different kinds of a trump,” Roosevelt told him. “I thank Heaven for the Advertiser continually.” With both Bishop and Steffens writing for the well-regarded paper, Roosevelt now had two advocates who might promote vital support among the practical reformers.

In the months that followed, the friendship between Bishop and Roosevelt deepened. Roosevelt sought Bishop’s advice on speeches, appointments, and legislation. He invited him to stay overnight in the governor’s mansion, met with him regularly over meals in Manhattan, and exchanged letters two or three times a week. “Good Lord, what an interesting correspondence we have had at times!” Roosevelt remarked. Their friendship remained strong even when Bishop publicly disagreed with the governor and told his readers why. “I need not tell you that no criticism of yours can alter in the least my affectionate regard for you,” Roosevelt assured Bishop. “You have shown yourself a friend indeed, and above all, when you differ I know you differ because you honestly think you must.”

Roosevelt’s ability to countenance criticism in the interest of friendship also marked his relationship with the humorist Finley Peter Dunne. Dunne’s weekly columns in the Chicago Times-Herald, featuring his adopted persona, the irreverent Irish bartender Martin Dooley, placed him among the nation’s most popular and influential literary figures. Dunne later recalled that his “first acquaintance with Col. Roosevelt grew, strangely enough, out of an article that was by no means friendly to him.” In the fall of 1899, a copy of The Rough Riders, Roosevelt’s wartime memoir, came across Dunne’s desk. “Mr. Dooley’s” book review in Harper’s Weekly mocked Roosevelt’s propensity for placing himself at the center of all the action: “Tis Th’ Biography iv a Hero be Wan who Knows. Tis Th’ Darin’ Exploits iv a Brave Man be an Actual Eye Witness,” Mr. Dooley observes. “If I was him, I’d call th’ book, ‘Alone in Cubia.’ ” Three days after this satirical assessment amused readers across the country, Roosevelt wrote to Dunne: “I regret to state that my family and intimate friends are delighted with your review of my book. Now I think you owe me one; and I shall exact that when you next come east you pay me a visit. I have long wanted the chance of making your acquaintance.”

“I shall be very happy to call on you the next time I go to New York,” Dunne replied. “At the same time the way you took Mr. Dooley is a little discouraging. The number of persons who are worthwhile firing at is so small that as a matter of business I must regret the loss of one of them. Still if in losing a target I have, perhaps, gained a friend I am in after all.” The humorist never had to make the choice he feared; he continued to lampoon the nation’s premier target without losing Roosevelt’s friendship. “I never knew a man with a keener humor or one who could take a joke on himself with better grace,” Dunne recalled. For years, Roosevelt told and retold the story of meeting a charming young lady at a reception: “Oh, Governor,” she said, “I’ve read everything you ever wrote.” “Really! What book did you like best?” “Why that one, you know, Alone in Cuba.”

IN JUNE 1900, AS ROOSEVELT’S first term as governor began to wind down, Lincoln Steffens wrote a lengthy political analysis for McClure’s. He described Roosevelt’s tenure as “an experiment”—a test to determine whether a leader could serve both the party machine and the good of the state, whether he could simultaneously maintain his ideals and get things done. Steffens vividly depicted the fights over the insurance commissioner and the franchise tax, both of which ended in Roosevelt victories. It remained unclear, however, whether the Roosevelt experiment itself would succeed. Despite an ostensible truce between the governor and Boss Platt, wrote Steffens, “the organization doesn’t like Mr. Roosevelt as Governor, neither does ‘Lou’ Payn, neither do the corporations. The corporations cannot come out openly to fight him; they have simply served notice on the organization that if he is renominated they will not contribute to campaign funds.”

Publicly to deny the popular governor a second term would cast the organization in a starkly negative light. The “obvious solution,” Steffens predicted, “would be to promote” Roosevelt to “the most dignified and harmless position in the gift of his country”—the vice presidency. “Then everybody could say, ‘We told you so,’ for both the theorists and the politicians have said that it is impossible in practical politics to be honest and successful too.” This astute piece, together with several of Steffens’s previous articles on Roosevelt, initially attracted Sam McClure’s attention.“Your TR article is a jim-dandy,” McClure told Steffens, resolving then and there to bring him from the Commercial Advertiser to his own publication. “I could read a whole magazine of this kind of material. It is a rattling good article.”

Roosevelt first became aware of Platt’s unwelcome “solution” in late January 1900, when three high-ranking representatives from the Republican National Committee came to Albany. They cautioned that he “would be tempting Providence to try for two terms” as governor, emphasizing the near certainty that he would “hopelessly” lower his standing “with either the independents or the party men” before a second term was out. Only “great luck,” they claimed, had enabled him to get by thus far “without cutting [his] own throat.” On the other hand, the vice-presidential nomination was a fait accompli if he decided within the next few weeks. Disconcerted by the drift of the conversation, Roosevelt informed the committeemen that he had absolutely no interest in the position. The vice presidency, he told Platt the next day, is “not an office in which a man who is still vigorous and not past middle life has much chance of doing anything. As you know, I am of an active nature.” He had “thoroughly enjoyed being Governor” and strongly desired a second term. “As Governor,” Roosevelt added, “I can achieve something, but as Vice-President I should achieve nothing.”

Henry Cabot Lodge questioned Roosevelt’s rationale, concurring with the committeemen that his friend was “tempting Providence” by remaining in New York. He would be wiser to accept the political haven of the vice presidency, “the true stepping stone . . . either toward the Presidency or the Governor Generalship of the Philippines.” Roosevelt conceded that “in New York with the republican party shading on the one hand into corrupt politicians, and on the other hand, into a group of impracticables . . . the task of getting results is one of incredible difficulty, and the danger of being wrecked very great.” Nevertheless, this very challenge rendered the work both more important and absorbing. He could not bear to be a mere “figurehead,” with no other task than presiding over the Senate.

Moreover, he confided to Lodge, “the money question is a serious one with me.” As governor, he made $10,000 a year and was “comparatively well paid, having not only a salary but a house which is practically kept up all winter.” Between the remnant of his inheritance and the few expenses in Albany, he had been able to save money for the first time in years. For Edith, perpetually worried about family finances, this stability was a great “comfort,” especially since their older children would soon start private school. The vice president’s salary was $2,000 less and no house was provided. Furthermore, the Roosevelts would be expected to entertain as lavishly as their predecessors, men frequently selected based on their resources and affinity for the social side of the office. Even if his family lived simply, Roosevelt concluded, the position “would be a serious drain” for him, causing both him and his wife “continual anxiety.”

In addition, Roosevelt did not perceive the vice presidency as a likely avenue to the White House; a student of history, he was well aware that over sixty years had passed since a sitting vice president had been elected to the presidency. His chances in 1904 would be far better if he served as governor of the most populous state in the Union than if he languished in “oblivion” as vice president.

Despite these objections, Roosevelt reasoned, “if the Vice-Presidency led to the Governor Generalship of the Philippines, then the question would be entirely altered.” That post was the one he desired above all others, even a second gubernatorial term. From the moment the United States acquired the islands as a provision of the treaty in 1899 ending the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had coveted the job of creating a new government in a Philippines free of Spanish tyranny. The vigorously paternal leadership he envisioned would “prove to the islanders that [his country] intended not merely to treat them well, but to give them a constantly increasing measure of self-government” until they could “stand alone as a nation.”

During the acrimonious Senate debate over ratification of the peace treaty, Roosevelt had expressed nothing but contempt for anti-imperialists who justly argued that acquisition of the Philippines would signal “a violent departure from the established traditions and principles of our republic.” They are “little better than traitors,” Roosevelt flatly told Lodge, while his public rhetoric made the alternatives stridently clear. “We shall be branded with the steel of clinging shame if we leave the Philippines to fall into a welter of bloody anarchy,” he proclaimed, “instead of taking hold of them and governing them with righteousness and justice, in the interests of their own people even more than in the interests of ours.”

Serving as the civilian leader on the islands “would not be pleasant,” Roosevelt told Maria Storer, “for I should have to cut myself off from my family,” who would surely not relocate to the war-torn Philippines. Yet he considered the task “emphatically worth doing” and was increasingly convinced that “the chief pleasure really worth having for any man is the doing well of some work that ought to be done.” Moreover, Roosevelt’s evolving doctrine of sacrifice and satisfaction applied to nations as well as individuals. In a widely quoted speech delivered in Chicago in April 1900, he insisted that “if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and win for themselves the domination of the world. . . . It is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.”

McKinley had assured Lodge that Roosevelt was “the ideal man to be the first pioneer Governor” but explained that the appointment would not be made until American troops stationed in the Philippines suppressed the native uprising that had followed the treaty. Known as the Philippine Insurrection, that conflict had erupted when the Filipinos learned, after decades of fighting for independence, that they had been betrayed into exchanging the rule of Spain for American occupation. With 35,000 additional troops authorized by Congress, Roosevelt projected that within two years the rebellion would be crushed, a necessary step before the United States could execute its avowedly beneficent intentions. As governor of New York, he would be free to instantly resign and assume the pioneering post, whereas he would be irreversibly “planted” in the vice presidency for four years. Although he hated to counter Lodge’s judgment on a matter of such importance, Roosevelt decided to “declare decisively” that he did not want the post of vice president.

Lodge reluctantly accepted Roosevelt’s decision but warned that if he attended the Republican Convention in June, continued refusal in the face of popular clamor for his nomination would damage his future prospects. “There are lots of good men who are strongly for you now who will not like it,” Lodge cautioned. Though Roosevelt acknowledged his friend’s admonitions, he was constitutionally incapable of forgoing involvement. He allowed himself to be chosen as one of four delegates-at-large from New York and made plans to bring Edith, Corinne, and her husband, Douglas, to Philadelphia.

Three weeks before the convention opened, Judge Alton Brooks Parker was a guest of the Roosevelts at the governor’s mansion. Over dinner, Edith expressed her excitement over her first national convention. “You will have the most wonderful time of your life,” Judge Parker promised. “You will see almost all the Republican Senators and Members of Congress, many of them with brilliant careers in the public service. And . . . you will see your handsome husband come in and bedlam will at once break loose, and he will receive such a demonstration of applause from the thousands of delegates and guests as no one else will receive. . . . Then, some two or three days later, you will see your husband unanimously nominated for the office of Vice-President.”

“You disagreeable thing,” Edith interrupted. “I don’t want to see him nominated for the vice-presidency.” Parker, who regarded Edith highly, instantly regretted his words when he saw how “very anxious” she was that his “prophecy should not come true.” For Edith, the vice presidency foretold only burdensome expenses and a stilted social life filled with formal receptions and idle chatter. Most important, she and Theodore had had more time together in the gubernatorial mansion than they had in years. She was by his side when he made his rounds to local fairs and Pioneer picnics. “I really think she enjoyed it as much as I did,” Roosevelt proudly reported to Lodge after an eight-day stretch of “the county fair business.” Sagamore Hill beckoned when the legislature adjourned in summer and was close enough to Albany to provide a romantic escape, even in the fall.

Judge Parker joined the Roosevelts at another dinner party a few days after his disconcerting conversation with Edith. “You gave my wife a bad quarter of an hour the other night,” Roosevelt told him. “Did you mean all you said to her?” Parker replied that he meant “every word,” adding that Roosevelt’s only possibility of evading the vice-presidential nod was to avoid Philadelphia altogether and deliver elsewhere a categorical refusal of the nomination.

By the time the convention opened in late June, Roosevelt was no longer certain how to proceed. As he pondered his future, his doubts grew: even if he secured the gubernatorial nomination for a second term, there was at least “an even chance” that he would be beaten. And even if he did win, he could easily “come a cropper” with any subsequent misstep that would signal “in all probability the end of any outside ambition.” Nevertheless, he continued to prefer the hazardous pursuit of a second term to being buried alive in the vice presidency.

The moment Roosevelt arrived in Philadelphia, the stampede for his nomination began—just as Lodge and Judge Parker had predicted. Entering the crowded lobby of the Hotel Walton around 6 p.m., he was met by “vociferous applause” and thunderous cries of “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy.” When the raucous crowd launched into a chorus of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” journalists noted, “Roosevelt blushed, doffed his hat and bowed his acknowledgments as he recognized the tune played after his charge up San Juan Hill.”

He had scarcely finished breakfast the following morning, the New York Tribune reported, when “he had reason to suspect that something of importance affecting his political fortunes had happened in the course of the night”: one state delegation after another “invaded” his room, announcing that he was their unanimous choice for vice president. Throughout the western states, where Roosevelt was regarded as one of their own, the enthusiasm was overwhelming. Corinne was with her brother when the Kansas delegation arrived. “Round and round the room they went,” she recalled, chanting, “We want Teddy, We want Teddy, We want Teddy,” to the accompaniment of “fife, drum and bugle.” Similar demonstrations of support came from California, Colorado, the Dakotas, and Nevada.

The bosses of the eastern states followed suit. To a man, they pledged the full support of their delegations. Platt had done his work well. The only resistance had come from the conservative party chairman, Ohio’s Mark Hanna. “Don’t you realize,” Hanna famously objected, “that there’s only one life between this madman and the White House?” In the end, even Hanna conceded that Roosevelt would add more strength to the ticket than any other candidate. “There is not a man, woman, or child in the hotels of Quakertown tonight,” the Washington Times reported, “who does not believe that TR is to be nominated as President McKinley’s running mate.”

“These fellows have placed me in an awful position,” Roosevelt complained. “If I refused it, people will say that ‘Roosevelt has a big head and thinks he is too much of a man to be Vice-President.’ ” Lodge had little patience with Roosevelt’s continued reluctance: “If you decline the nomination,” he informed his friend, “you had better take a razor and cut your throat.”

Roosevelt eventually resigned himself to the inevitable nomination. The next morning, “the sun shone brightly” for the first time in several days as the formal proceedings began. When the chair recognized Roosevelt to second McKinley’s nomination, “the magic” of his personality “sent the multitude into convulsions of enthusiasm.” From the gallery, Edith watched her husband stride toward the platform amid “the sea of waving, cheering humanity.” The jubilation continued while Roosevelt commanded the stage. “He made no acknowledgements, no salutations to the plaudits, but like a hero receiving his due, calmly awaited the subsidence of the tumult.” His expression relaxed only once, the New York Tribune correspondent remarked, “when he caught a glimpse of his wife in the gallery and waved his hand to her.” At last, with his uplifted hand, the demonstration subsided.

Finally, Roosevelt addressed the adoring crowd: “We stand on the threshold of a new century big with the fate of mighty nations,” he proclaimed. “We face the coming years high of heart and resolute of faith that to our people is given the right to win such honor and renown as has never yet been vouchsafed to the nations of mankind.” It was not a speech, observed one reporter, “of rounded periods, such as Senator Lodge could deliver, nor did it have the fervor or the rich metaphor of the Wolcotts and Dollivers.” Nevertheless, no other speech proved “so effective, none so full of character and none which found so responsive an audience. It carried everything before it, and old campaigners sighed that such energy was beyond them.”

Once the frenzy of the convention had waned Roosevelt admitted to a friend that he felt “a little melancholy.” While he “should be a conceited fool” not to appreciate such resounding support, the thought of four years in the restrictive office of the vice presidency remained abhorrent. “His friends were in despair,” Jacob Riis wrote, “his enemies triumphed. At last they had him where they wanted him.”

His family shared Roosevelt’s aversion to the prospect. “Oh, how I hate this Vice Presidency,” Corinne told Fanny Parsons. “Poor Edith feels it tremendously too.” Indeed, Edith admitted to Emily that she “had hoped to the last moment that some other candidate would be settled upon.” Her only comfort was the prospect that her husband might “get the rest that he sadly needs and for the next four years he will have an easy time.”

WHILE THEODORE ROOSEVELT TRIED TO reconcile himself to the unhappy combination of events resulting in his nomination as vice president, William Howard Taft would embark on the most gratifying period of his long public career. In late January 1900, a telegraph boy knocked on the door of the consultation room at the circuit court in Cincinnati. He handed Judge Taft a telegram, summoning him to the White House for “important business” with President McKinley. “What do you suppose that means?” he excitedly asked Nellie that evening. She had no answer. Had there been an opening on the Supreme Court, the summons might have foretold his long-desired appointment to the bench, but no vacancy then existed.

Secretary of War Elihu Root and Navy Secretary Long had joined McKinley in the Oval Office when the president informed Taft that he intended to appoint him to a new Philippine Commission, charged with formulating a civilian code for governance. “He might as well have told me,” Taft remembered, “that he wanted me to take a flying machine.” Taft protested that he was not the right man for the task. He was emphatically not an expansionist and had been “strongly opposed to taking the Philippines,” believing the United States should not take on a responsibility“contrary to our traditions and at a time when we had quite enough to do at home.” Such objections were “beside the question,” McKinley countered; now that the Philippines had fallen to the United States, “it behooved the United States to govern them until such time as their people had learned the difficult art of governing themselves.”

Taft agreed that once the islands were occupied, we were “under the most sacred duty to give them a good form of government” but insisted he was not the man best equipped for that important responsibility. He did not speak Spanish, which would hamper easy relationships with the Filipino people. Furthermore, he was loath to relinquish his long-cherished lifetime appointment as a judge. “Well,” said McKinley, “all I can say to you is that if you give up this judicial office at my request you shall not suffer. If I last and the opportunity comes, I shall appoint you.” Long confirmed that the president was speaking of a place on the Supreme Court. “Yes,” McKinley assured him, “if I am here you’ll be here.”

War Secretary Root offered the decisive argument. “You have had a very fortunate career,” he told Taft. “You are at the parting of the ways. Will you take the easier course, the way of least resistance . . . or will you take the more courageous course and, risking much, achieve much?” Taft asked for a week to ponder the matter with his wife and brothers.

On the overnight train heading back to Cincinnati, Taft “didn’t sleep a wink.” Root’s words about courage frequented his thoughts, and the president’s implied promise of a Supreme Court appointment beckoned powerfully. Despite his mounting excitement, Taft was certain that the long distance and “the atrocious climate of Manila” would not prove a happy prospect for Nellie. Unlike Roosevelt, he could not imagine a protracted absence from his family. By the time he reached home, his countenance was “so grave” that Nellie “thought he must be facing impeachment.”

Will explained the president’s proposal to his wife, doubtful she would consider joining him. Much to his surprise, Nellie never hesitated: “Yes, of course,” she exclaimed, the opportunity gave her “nothing but pleasure.” She later admitted that perhaps she should have given the prospect of moving three children under ten years old more than 8,000 miles from home more consideration, but her excitement overcame all anxiety. “I knew instantly,” she recalled, “that I didn’t want to miss a big and novel experience.”

Taft’s brothers echoed Nellie’s enthusiasm. “You can do more good in that position in a year than you could do on the bench in a dozen,” Horace maintained, acknowledging, “I hated to have us take the Philippines, but I don’t see how in the world we can give them up.” Harry agreed, certain that both Will and Nellie would profit “the rest of [their] lives” from “the educational effect of the experience.” Harry added that his brother should ask to be made president of the commission so he “could have a voice in selecting some of [his] colleagues.”

Three days later, Taft wrote to Root, accepting the post with the stipulation that he be made head of the commission, “responsible for success or failure” of the venture. Root readily agreed; he and McKinley had assumed that Taft would be granted that authority. Notwithstanding, Taft’s resignation from his beloved bench was, Nellie believed, “the hardest thing he ever did.”

News of Taft’s appointment must have disquieted Roosevelt, who nurtured a slim hope that “the Philippines business” could wait a few years, that the fighting would not abate before he was in a position to serve as the first governor general. Though Taft’s appointment to the presidency of the commission did not ensure that McKinley would make him civilian governor when hostilities ended, Roosevelt undoubtedly realized that Taft was now the obvious and logical choice.

The two men had kept in close contact over the years, and Taft remained a loyal friend. At the close of “a very hard month” in the governor’s office, Roosevelt had found solace in an encouraging letter from Taft. “Need I tell you how your letter pleased me, and how much touched I was by it?” he wrote back, explaining that he had endeavored to follow Taft’s counsel and “make the good of the State [his] prime consideration, and yet not follow any impractical ideas.” Still, Roosevelt noted, it was “not always easy to strike the just middle,” and he inevitably made mistakes. “The thing I should most like,” he revealed to Taft, “would be to have someone here just like yourself to advise with.” In a letter to their mutual friend Maria Storer, Roosevelt wistfully reiterated his affection and respect: “I wish there was someone like [Taft] here in New York, for I am very much alone. I have no real community of principle or feeling with the machine. So far I have gotten along very well with them, but I never can tell when they will cut my throat.” For his part, Taft habitually tracked Roosevelt’s battles closely and had wholeheartedly rejoiced in his “final triumph” over Lou Payn.

Though Roosevelt received news of Taft’s appointment with ambivalence, his happiness for his friend soon overcame any personal disappointment. “Curiously enough,” Roosevelt told him, “I had just written you a note, but I will tear it up, for now I see that you are going on the new Philippine Commission. . . . You are to do a great work for America, and of all the men I know I think you are best fitted to do it.”

While Will traveled to Washington to discuss the composition of the commission with the president and the secretary of war, Nellie began to prepare for the odyssey ahead. “That it was alluring to me I did not deny to anybody,” she happily remembered. “I read with engrossing interest everything I could find on the subject of the Philippines.” Meanwhile, within eight weeks, she managed to vacate their house, store their belongings, and pack for shipment what they would need. “Robert was ten years old, Helen eight, while Charlie, my baby, was just a little over two. It did not occur to me that it was a task to take them on such a long journey, or that they would be exposed to any danger through the experience,” she recalled matter-of-factly.

In mid-April 1900, the five commission members and their families, along with a translator, five secretaries, a stenographer, and an Army surgeon, gathered in San Francisco to board the Hancock and begin their two-week journey to the Philippines. “We soon became well acquainted, as people do on shipboard,” Nellie recalled, “and proceeded at once to prove ourselves to be a most harmonious company.” This close-knit group, with whom Nellie would spend “the most interesting years” of her life, included a former Confederate general, “one of the ablest lawyers in Tennessee”; a New England judge who had served as chief justice of Samoa; a professor from the University of Michigan who had been on two scientific expeditions to the Philippines; and a historian from the University of California who had written on politics and economics. Nellierelished “the bonds of friendship” that developed over drinks, meals, political discussions, and continuous rounds of cards. They learned Spanish together and shared books on British colonization and the history of the Philippines. And their children became fast friends.

No sooner had the Hancock landed in Manila Bay than the complexity of Taft’s mission was immediately apparent. “The populace that we expected to welcome us was not there,” recalled Taft, “and I cannot describe the coldness of the army officers and army men who received us any better than by saying that it somewhat exceeded the coldness of the populace.” The Filipinos’ lack of faith in the advent of the blue-ribbon commission was unsurprising. Brutal fighting still raged in scattered regions of the islands. Further, reports circulated of water torture and other cruelties practiced by American soldiers against the Filipinos, and condescending suggestions that the Filipinos were not yet fit for self-government roused deep resentment.

Taft had expected to be met by General Arthur MacArthur, who had occupied the Philippines for nearly two years and was serving as military governor. But MacArthur was nowhere to be seen. The general regarded the commission’s arrival with displeasure, for it compromised the absolute authority he had exercised in the governance of the islands. According to the president’s new instructions, the military governor would retain executive powers until the termination of hostilities, while the new Philippine Commission would become the legislative body. Taft and his colleagues had authority to appropriate money, determine taxes, create political departments, and establish courts. MacArthur bluntly informed Taft that he regarded the appointment of the commission “as a personal reflection on him, and that while he was of course obliged to submit to [its] presence there, he resented it nevertheless.”

In his first public statement, Taft appealed to the people of the islands, declaring that the commission’s arrival signaled a better day and presaged the beginning of the end of military rule. “We are civil officers. We are men of peace. We are here to do justice to the Philippine people, and to secure to them the best government in our power,” he reassured them, explaining that the people would retain “such a measure of popular control as will be consistent with stability and the security of law, order and property.” He promised to build schools and roads, to open clinics and improve harbors, to establish a system of justice based on the American model, and eventually to create a political structure run by the Filipinos. He explained that “the field” of his work could not yet include those regions where insurgents remained active. Once the rebels laid down their arms they could rely “on the justice, generosity, and clemency of the United States” to accord them “as full a hearing upon the policy to be pursued and the reforms to be begun, as to anyone.”

Harper’s Weekly deemed Taft’s address “the precise kind of speech” demanded by the situation, suggesting that when a man like Taft made promises, he could be believed. “He is not a New York politician who would sacrifice his soul for office; he is not an anxious member of Congress who would promise anything to get a second term,” Harper’s maintained, heartily endorsing Taft and his agenda. “He is Judge Taft and when we say that he is Judge Taft, we mean to imply that he represents all that is best in American manhood, involving integrity of character, a sane mind, and the loftiest of motives.”

As chief executive, General MacArthur occupied the official Malacañan Palace. Left to secure his own housing, Taft finally settled on a comfortable house with a wide veranda overlooking Manila Bay. A central hall separated the large dining room from several roomy bedrooms, and a drawing room was located over the carriage entrance. Three more large downstairs chambers and baths, which Nellie allocated to the children, were equipped with “high canopied and mosquito-netted” beds. The Spanish furniture was “very fine,” and electric ceiling fans cooled every room. The house staff included “the cook, the number one boy, the number two boy and the laundryman.” The cook, Nellie happily noted, could be given word as late as six or seven o’clock that Taft had eight people coming to dinner and “a perfect dinner would be served.” Though their house staff were far outnumbered by the several dozen servants at the Malacañan, the Tafts came to love what Nellie affectionately termed their “homely and unpalatial abode.”

Each morning, a coach driven by two horses carried Taft to the old capitol building on Cathedral Plaza in the Walled City, where both military and civilian headquarters were lodged. MacArthur and the military occupied most of the building, forcing the commission to work in tight quarters. Nonetheless, Taft was contented so long as he had space for the large library of books on civil law, history, and government that he had purchased for $2,300 before leaving the States. Taft generally began his workday reading the newspapers and writing letters. At ten o’clock on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the commission held executive sessions to hammer out legislation on banking and currency, the courts, public works, civil service, health, and education. The five members were charged with designing—from the foundation up—a new colonial government for a population of nearly 7 million. Once the proposed legislation was drafted, public hearings would be held to solicit contributions from the Filipino people. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, the door was opened for anyone “who wish[ed] to see them.” At one o’clock, Taft drove back to the house for lunch and a Spanish lesson, before returning to preside over the commission’s afternoon session. Not until six or seven o’clock would he and a fellow commissioner set out on foot for their homes. “The walk is about two miles and a half and the exercise we get is very good for us,” he told his mother-in-law. Dinner was “rather a formidable” affair at which they often entertained guests. Nellie and her sister Maria “put on lownecked gowns” and Will changed into more formal attire. “We begin with soup, have fish, not infrequently an entrée, and the roast and dessert and fruit,” he reported in loving detail. Lest his mother-in-law chide him for gaining weight, he rationalized that “in this climate one’s vital forces are drawn upon by work so much that one’s appetite is very strong at meals.”

Taft’s “policy of conciliation,” his strategy of reaching out to the Filipino people, aroused undisguised antipathy within the insulated regime MacArthur had established. Upon hearing that Taft had referred to the Filipinos as “our little brown brothers,” the soldiers promptly composed a marching song “which they sang with great gusto and frequency,” climaxing with the jeering refrain: “He may be a brother of William H. Taft, but he ain’t no friend of mine!” Believing that it would take ten years to pacify the islands, MacArthur considered Taft’s desire to provide education and involve the populace in government as both wrongheaded and ultimately hazardous. As the British colonialists understood, such policies could only lead to “agitation and discontent and constant conspiracy.”

The military, Taft sorrowfully reflected, was determined to treat the Filipinos as “niggers.” Nellie shared his dismay. “It is a great mistake to treat them as if they were inferiors,” she told her husband, “and it really surprises me that the powers that be do not insist upon a different policy.” Nellie deplored MacArthur’s refusal to entertain anyone in the palace “except a select military circle,” and condemned his abhorrence of “even small gestures of social equality among the different races in the Philippines.”

In defiance of the established order, Nellie “made it a rule from the beginning that neither politics nor race should influence [their] hospitality in any way.” Though her dining room seated only twelve in comfort, she could host parties for hundreds of people in her spacious garden. “We always had an orchestra,” she recalled, “and the music added greatly to the festive air of things, which was enhanced too, by a certain oriental atmosphere, with many Japanese lanterns and a profusion of potted plants.” While Nellie’s insistence “upon complete racial equality” marked a spirit of tolerance far ahead of military attitudes, her guest lists were nonetheless drawn from a narrow segment of the population—educated Filipinos of “wealth and position”—the very class Taft hoped to enlist in the new government.

Although Taft’s annual salary of $17,500 was more than he had ever earned, he had to pay his own considerable expenses and could barely sustain his household and lifestyle. Once again, his brother Charley came to his rescue, sending an unexpected $2,500 check. “To say that I was overcome and struck dumb by your generous present is inadequate,” Will responded. “Nothing ever diminishes the ardor and enthusiasm of your loyalty to the family.” Nellie, too, committed her resources to further her husband’s goals, spending a small inheritance she had received to pay for receptions and dinners.

Meanwhile, the Philippine Commission made steady progress. The members revised the Spanish tax code, which had burdened the poor while “giving [the] wealthy comparative immunity.” They built a series of schools throughout the islands and brought five hundred recent college graduates from America as teachers. These idealistic young educators, deemed by one historian “precursors of the Peace Corps,” arrived carrying “baseball bats, tennis rackets, musical instruments, cameras and binoculars.” Under Taft’s guidance, the commission built roads, railways, and hospitals, improved harbors and ports, and instituted extensive legal reforms.

Nellie worked side by side with her husband. Upon arrival, he had encouraged her to “enter upon some work of public importance like the organization of a Philippine Orchestra and Philippine bands.” She needed no further prompting. Drawing on her love of music and organizational experience, she helped create the Philippine Constabulary Band. Led by an African-American captain, comprised of musicians from all over the islands, the celebrated band would achieve international renown and win a coveted prize at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. While Taft worked on regulatory measures to improve sanitation, Nellie decided her personal cause should be the reduction of infant mortality in Manila. To that end, she instituted an educational campaign on good nutrition and launched a highly successful program to provide the city’s children with sterilized milk, a campaign credited with saving many lives. In all her endeavors, she advocated respect for the native culture. When the Army engineers, “in the interest of efficiency and sanitation,” threatened to demolish “the medieval walls of the old city of Manila,” Nellie successfully campaigned to protect this cherished historical monument.

Taft was immensely proud of his wife. He likened her activism to that of Lady Curzon, who had accompanied her husband to India and achieved worldwide fame for championing women’s health. On the eve of their fourteenth anniversary, Will gave Nellie a handwritten note. “I wish to record the fact that it was the most fortunate [day] of my life and every year only confirms me more strongly in that opinion,” he wrote. “Every year I feel more dependent on you . . . and every year, my darling, I love you more.” Nellie had never been happier. She had welcomed her new living situation “with undisguised surprise and pleasure.” The children flourished in their new environment. Bob and Helen were enrolled in one of the new public schools, where they had met “congenial companions.” In the evenings and on weekends, they lived outside. In the year-round warm weather, they raced their little ponies on the Luneta, the public stretch of sandy beach bounded on both ends by bandstands, where “everybody in the world came and drove around and around the oval, exchanging greetings and gossip.” Two-year-old Charlie, nicknamed “the tornado” for his high-spirited whirl of activity, was petted and simply adored.

Each passing month bolstered Taft’s confidence. His judicial training proved indispensable as he labored to draft legislation and regulations. His kind generosity and inclusive style of leadership won the regard of his fellow commissioners. The Filipino people, too, were attracted to the warmth of his personality and his willingness to embrace the native culture. After much practice and intent studying of a diagram indicating the various movements, he and Nellie learned to execute the rigodon, the complicated national dance of the Philippines, “an old fashioned quadrille” that required “graceful and somewhat intricate but stately figures.” Observing Taft’s impressively large frame, spectators marveled at his surprising agility. This gentle giant, one reporter noted, attended scores of state balls, “literally dancing and smiling his way into the hearts of the people.” Indeed, his “unusual size,” which required a double rickshaw, created an aura of “superiority.”

As Taft became better acquainted with the people of the Philippines, he grew increasingly confident that he would deliver “a good government” and “prosperous” economy to the islands. While he doubted that independence could soon be granted to an illiterate, and in his words, an“ignorant, superstitious people,” he trusted that the enlightened colonial rule of the United States would gradually prepare them for self-government. His success depended on McKinley’s election, which would ensure consistent support as he constructed new political, educational, and economic institutions. “Not that I am an expansionist,” he told a friend, “for I have not changed my mind on that general subject, but only that in the situation into which events have forced us, the Democratic policy of abandonment of these Islands was impossible.”

Taft was tremendously heartened by the news of Roosevelt’s vice-presidential nomination. The administration had “a good deal to carry” after being in power for four years, he told his brother Charles. Mistakes had “doubtless” been made, and the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, still enjoyed a formidable following among the working class. Roosevelt’s name on the ticket, he explained, added “a following of hero worshippers who [would] give life and vitality to the campaign.” Charles agreed, hopeful that Roosevelt would “draw in line all the younger element of the country.”

“I could wish that you had continued Governor of New York to do the work thoroughly you have so well begun,” Taft told Roosevelt after the Republican National Convention, “but the national election is the more important and you were right to make the sacrifice. The situation here is much more favorable than I had been led to suppose. The back of the Insurrection is broken and the leaders are much discouraged and anxious, most of them, for peace.” The remaining insurgents, he claimed, were “restrained from surrender by nothing now but the possibility of Bryan’s election.” By joining the Republican ticket and rendering “success most probable,” he believed Roosevelt “was performing a great service not only to the people of his own country but to the Filipinos as well.”

In a warm reply to his friend, Roosevelt acknowledged his regret at forgoing a second gubernatorial term but maintained his satisfaction if he should prove “any help to the ticket this year.” Nonetheless, he added wistfully, “I had a great deal rather be your assistant in the Philippines . . . than be vice-president.”

Roosevelt’s immense contribution to the Republican ticket was beyond question. Telling Mark Hanna that he was “as strong as a bull moose” and should be used “up to the limit,” Roosevelt carried the entire campaign on his shoulders. “No candidate for Vice-President in the whole history of this Republic ever made such a canvass,” Boss Platt acknowledged. While McKinley remained at the White House, Roosevelt became “the central figure, the leading general, the field marshal.” Breaking every record, “he traveled more miles, visited more States, spoke in more towns, made more speeches and addressed a larger number of people than any man who ever went on the American stump.”

Surrounded by his wife and children on November 6, 1900, Roosevelt waited for the results at Sagamore Hill. Throughout the evening, scattered messages arrived from the telegraph operator at the railroad station three miles away. Around ten o’clock, a newspaper correspondent knocked on the door, bringing news of a smashing Republican victory. On the other side of the world, Will and Nellie were on their “tiptoes with excitement.” The time difference of thirteen hours between the United States and the Philippines exacerbated their anxiety. “We lived through the day knowing that the United States was asleep, and went to bed just about the time the voters began to go to the polls,” Nellie recalled. Finally, just before lunch the next day, a War Department cablegram announced the eagerly anticipated result: “McKinley.”

“My dear Theodore,” Will saluted his friend in a celebratory letter, “the magnificent victory in the states of the Far West and in New York is eloquent testimony to the good which you have done. The party for whom you made a great sacrifice will not forget it. I have no doubt that you will be the nominee in 1904.” Taft felt personal gratitude toward Roosevelt, for McKinley’s election allowed him to continue his work, a mission which had come to mean more than he had ever imagined when he reluctantly resigned from the bench.

As Taft had predicted, insurgent activity began to decrease once Bryan’s defeat confirmed America’s resolve to remain in the Philippines. “Hardly a day passed that did not bring news of the capture or surrender of insurgent officers,” Nellie recalled. “The attitude of the native is completely changed,” Taft told his brother, “and he is looking around to get in on the ‘band wagon.’ ” By early January 1901, he believed that the momentum had shifted in favor of peace. “The leaders in Manila,” he told Senator Lodge, “are hastening to form a party called the ‘Federal Party,’ which is pushing and pressing for peace and which will have an organization in every province and town in the Islands before many months have passed.” The time had come, he continued, to prepare for the transition from General MacArthur and the military authority to the civilian commission. “Their methods of doing things are so very different from ours,” he mordantly remarked, “and the people will welcome a change.”

To ready the Philippine Commission for full control and responsibility, Taft organized a two-month expedition to the southern provinces, where open hearings would be held to explicate new municipal codes that specified a Filipino governor in every province. Nellie insisted on accompanying the commission. “Of course,” Taft told his brother Charles, Nellie would not leave the children behind, so they came along as well. In the end, all the wives and children of the commission were included in the foray, comprising a party of sixty on the Army transport ship. The cluster of wives and children “greatly pleased” the Filipinos, Nellie noted, making the visits far more festive. “Much to the disgust of the military authorities present,” she remembered with satisfaction, “we assumed the friendliest kind of attitude.”

The desire of the provinces to substitute civil government for military rule was “manifest on every side,” Taft reported to his brother Horace. In each provincial capital, “the streets were crowded with men, women and children waving flags and shrilly cheering.” Bands playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” led the commission to the public hall where daylong hearings were held. “Spectacular” festivities followed the working day, Nellie recalled; torchlight parades, fireworks, six-course banquets, and balls celebrated their progress. Altogether, she later wrote, it was “a singular experience, an expedition perhaps unique in history, with which was ushered in a new era, not to say a new national existence, for the people of the Philippine Islands.”

At long last, in late February 1901, Congress passed the Spooner Amendment that declared the Insurrection over and called for the transfer of power from military to civilian authorities. Taft informed Roosevelt that he had been selected as the first governor general. “The responsibilities of this position, I look forward [to] with a great deal of hesitation,” he confided. “The pitfalls are many and the territory to be traversed is almost unknown.” Still, he admitted, “there is a natural gratification in taking control of things.”

Roosevelt would have given a great deal to change places with his friend. “I envy you your work,” he told Taft eight days after he was sworn in as vice president, bemoaning his own situation. “More and more it seems to me that about the best thing in life is to have a piece of work worth doing and then to do it well.” The lull in Roosevelt’s customary frenetic activity allowed time for painful reflection: “I did not envy you while I was Governor of New York,” he wrote, “nor while I was on the stump last fall taking part in the campaign which I believed to be fraught with the greatest consequences to the Nation; but just at present I do envy you. I am not doing any work and do not feel as though I was justifying my existence.”

Roosevelt similarly registered his discontent in a letter to Maria and Bellamy Storer; neither McKinley nor Mark Hanna, he wrote, “sympathize with my feelings or feel comfortable about me, because they cannot understand what it is that makes me act in certain ways at certain times, and therefore think me indiscreet and overimpulsive.” Though the president was “perfectly cordial,” Roosevelt insisted, “he does not intend that I shall have any influence of any kind, sort or description in the administration from the top to the bottom.” Roosevelt longed for some active enterprise in Cuba or the Philippines, but the president had no interest in sending him where real work might be done. The vice presidency “ought to be abolished,” he told his friend Leonard Wood. “The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing. I do not think that the President wants me to take any part in affairs or give him any advice.”

When Congress adjourned for nine months in the spring, suspending the vice president’s sole constitutional responsibility of presiding over the Senate, Roosevelt retired to Oyster Bay. “I am rather ashamed to say,” he wrote Taft at the end of April, that I do “nothing but ride and row with Mrs. Roosevelt, and walk and play with the children; chop trees in the afternoon and read books by a wood fire in the evening.” Despite this peaceful existence, Roosevelt admitted to “ugly feelings,” aware that he was “leading a life of unwarrantable idleness.”

Taft tried to buoy his friend’s spirits with the prospect of a presidential bid in 1904. “I look forward with great confidence to your nomination for President at the next convention,” he declared, “and I sincerely hope it may be brought about. Four years in the Vice-Presidential chair will save you from a good many hostilities that might endanger such a result, while the prominence of the position keeps you continually to the front as the necessary and logical candidate.” But to Roosevelt it seemed more likely that Taft would get the nod. “I doubt if in all the world there has been a much harder task set any one man during the past year than has been set you,” he observed, praising Taft’s work under such trying circumstances: “In spite of all the difficulties you have done well, and more than well, a work of tremendous importance. You have made all decent people who think deeply here in this country feel that they are your debtors. . . . It has paid after all, old man.”

On the Fourth of July, 1901, William Howard Taft was inaugurated as governor general of the Philippines. The spectacular ceremony featured “music, fireworks, gold lace and glitter, dancing and feasting and oratory.” A pavilion had been erected in Cathedral Plaza, the large square in the center of the Walled City, to accommodate the celebration. It was “an occasion of great dignity and interest,” Nellie happily remembered. “Americans and Filipinos, all in gala attire, were pressed close together . . . the plaza below was thronged with Filipinos of every rank and condition, in all manner of bright jusis and calicos; while above the crowd towered many American soldiers and sailors in spic-and-span khaki or white duck.” General MacArthur, who would be departing Manila the next day, stood by as the Filipino chief justice administered the oath of office to Taft. Resplendent in a “crisp white linen suit,” Taft appeared “larger even than his natural size.”

In his inaugural address, Taft hailed the transfer of authority from the military to the civilian commission as “a new step” toward “Permanent Civil Government on a more or less popular basis.” He announced that three leading Filipino citizens would be added to the five-member commission and that educated Filipinos would have voices both in the legislature and in the governance of the provinces. In time, as Stanley Karnow and James Bradley observe, the flaws in Taft’s attempt to construct a democracy “from the top down” would become clear. Reliance upon the elite, refusal to sanction any opposition to the Federal Party, and the policy of granting suffrage to a select minority further entrenched the existing “feudal oligarchy,” thereby expanding “the gap between rich and poor.” On this inaugural day, however, Taft’s forthright speech elicited “the wildest of cheering, and the playing of national airs.” Such a manifestation “of popular approval,” one correspondent noted, “indicates an auspicious beginning for the administration of the new governor.”

The next morning, the Tafts relocated their household to the historic Malacañan Palace. “In some ways we regretted that the move was necessary,” Nellie recalled, “for we were very comfortable in our ‘chalet.’ ” Until they occupied the palace where MacArthur had presided the Filipinos would not “be convinced that civil government was actually established.” Despite her reservations, “the idea of living in a palace . . . appealed to my imagination,” Nellie acknowledged. Set on twenty beautifully landscaped acres of trees, flowers, and fountains, the palace stood on a bend in the Pasig River, with windows open all around. There were about twenty rooms on the first floor, “all of them good sized and some of them enormous, and it took a great many servants to keep the place in order,” Nellie noted, recollecting the impressive space in detail: “The great living-rooms open one into another, giving a fine perspective, and they lead, through a dozen different doorways, on to a splendid, white-tiled verandah which runs out to the bank of the Pasig.” There were a half-dozen houses on the grounds for secretaries and assistants.

Barely established at the palace, Nellie placed an immediate announcement in the newspapers stating that she would hold a reception every Wednesday, open to everyone on an equal basis. Her receptions were soon thronged with “Army and Navy people, civilians of every occupation,” and “American school teachers.” Never before had the military mixed socially with the islanders, so Nellie had to cajole the Filipinos to attend “by asking many of them personally and persistently.” In short order, she proudly remarked, “there began to be as many brown faces as white among our guests.” But Nellie refused to confine herself to the company at the palace and was eager to explore the native culture: she attended local parties and dances, often accompanied by a group of young Army officers, including Archie Butt. Stationed in the Quartermaster Department, Captain Butt was “a great society beau in Washington, and was said to be the handsomest man there,” Nellie told her mother. “You would be amused to see Maria and me frisking around with youths years younger than we are, and dancing cotillions with the best of them,” she boasted. “Of course the position gives us a great deal of attention which I for one would never have otherwise,” she added, “and of course we feel we might as well make the best of it while we have the opportunity.”

When news of the triumphant inauguration reached the United States, Roosevelt wrote a long letter to Taft. “It seems idle to keep repeating to you what a lively appreciation not only I but all the rest of us here have of what you are doing. But when you are so far away. . . . I do want you to understand that you are constantly in the thoughts of very many people, and that I have never seen a more widespread recognition of service among men of character than the recognition of the debt we owe you.”

Though he rejoiced in his friend’s success, Roosevelt was less sanguine about his own prospects. “Here everything is at slack water politically,” he continued, addressing Taft’s expressed hope for a Roosevelt presidency in 1904. “I should like to be President, and feel I could do the work well,” he acknowledged, but “it would be simply foolish for me to think seriously of my chances of getting the office, when the only certain feature of the situation is that my own State will be against me. . . . If the convention were held now, my hold is still so strong both in the west and in New England that I might very well get the nomination without regard to New York. But my present position is one in which I can do absolutely nothing to shape policies, and so looked at dispassionately, I cannot see that there is any but the very smallest chance of my keeping enough hold even to make me seriously spoken of as a candidate.” Considering the circumstances, he told Taft, “you are of all the men in this country the one best fitted to give the nation the highest possible service as president. . . . Sometime I want to get the chance to say this in public.”

Utterly frustrated and increasingly dispirited, Roosevelt even made plans to begin law school again in the fall, figuring that two additional years of coursework would enable him to pass the bar examinations and launch a legal practice. He also inquired about the possibility of becoming aprofessor of history at a university. “Of course, I may go on in public life,” he reckoned, “but equally of course it is unlikely, and what I have seen of the careers of public men has given me an absolute horror of the condition of the politician whose day has passed; who by some turn of the kaleidoscope is thrown into the background; and who then haunts the fields of his former activity as a pale shadow of what he once was.”

On September 6, 1901, that kaleidoscope shifted in a way Roosevelt never anticipated. A young anarchist walked up to shake hands with President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Removing a revolver screened by a handkerchief, the assassin fired two shots into McKinley’s chest. Eight days later, the wounds proved fatal. Theodore Roosevelt, at forty-two years of age, became the youngest president in the history of the country.