This Mar. 18, 1906, cartoon, “Reinforcing the Bench,” shows Roosevelt using a “Big Stick” to persuade Taft to take a seat on the Supreme Court bench.
IN EARLY JANUARY 1906, WHILE attending a party in the New Jersey home of his Yale classmate John Hammond, William Howard Taft received a long-distance phone call from the president, informing him that Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown planned to announce his retirement when he turned seventy years old. Brown deemed his weakening eyesight “a gentle intimation” that the time had come “to give place to another.” Knowing that duty alone had led Taft to decline the appointment three years before, Roosevelt was delighted to present him with the open seat. Taft was disposed to claim the honor, though Nellie and other friends and advisers begged him to decline, insisting that he “would be shutting the door on any further political advancement” when he was considered “the logical candidate for president in 1908.” Since no commitment was required until March, the matter rested until Justice Brown formally announced his decision.
In the interim, Taft focused on pushing the Philippine tariff bill through Congress. The legislation was designed to substantially lower rates on products imported from the islands, an allowance that Taft believed was absolutely critical to the future of the Philippine economy. For two consecutive years, the bill had fallen victim to the powerful sugar and tobacco lobbies and their “standpatter” allies, as the protectionist bloc in Congress was known. But with the help of Democratic votes in late January 1906, it passed the House by an overwhelming vote of 257 to 71. Lauding the victory, Taft happily noted that several key members of the Ways and Means Committee had shifted their stance after touring the islands with his congressional delegation the previous summer.
When the bill proceeded to the Senate, Taft testified for two full days before the Senate Committee on the Philippines, hopeful that “the tremendous vote” in the House would sway the upper chamber. Connecticut senator Frank Brandegee led the opposition, arguing that Taft was “sacrificing” American economic interests for his “sentimental” desire to aid the Filipinos. “I do not believe,” the senator maintained, “that we are under any obligations whatever to the Filipino people to open our markets.” Taft was furious with Brandegee, privately labeling him “an infernal ass.” Despite Taft’s persistent efforts, the protectionist bloc managed to kill the bill in committee. “We suffered a very serious blow,” Taft related to his Filipino friends, “but I am not despairing.” Several publications had pledged to reveal those who had conspired in “smothering” the tariff legislation, so he remained hopeful the bill would eventually reach the Senate floor.
When Justice Brown officially announced his retirement on March 8, the press immediately began speculating that Taft would not only replace Brown but soon thereafter—if seventy-three-year-old Melvin Fuller retired during Roosevelt’s term—assume the position of chief justice. Had the tariff bill passed that spring, Taft later remarked, he would “undoubtedly have accepted,” but he informed Roosevelt in early March that he was too deeply occupied by critical matters in both the Philippines and Panama to consider the position. At Taft’s suggestion, the president offered the post to Philander Knox; when Knox declined, however, Roosevelt renewed the pressure on Taft.
Roosevelt foresaw that over the coming decades, as the federal government confronted the social and economic stresses born of the industrial age, the Court “would have as important decisions to face as [it] had in the days of Marshall.” Roosevelt had discussed the matter at length with Henry Cabot Lodge, who had impressed upon him the absolute necessity of Taft taking the appointment. The Court desperately needed “a big man—one who would fill the public eye and one in whom the public had confidence.” With five of the nine justices in their late sixties or seventies, the current Court was clearly “running down.” At such a critical juncture, the president claimed, he had no higher duty than to put the best man on the bench. On the following Friday, he intended to announce his nomination of William Howard Taft.
Before the decision was made public, Taft requested time to confer with his brothers in New York. He also confided to Roosevelt that Nellie “bitterly opposed” the appointment; in fact, she had warned that very morning that to accept would be “the great mistake of [his] life.” Roosevelt promised to meet with her personally and “explain the situation” before he made anything official. To accommodate such a discussion, Nellie remained behind for a noon meeting with President Roosevelt rather than join her husband on the 9 a.m. train to New York for the family council.
Before boarding the train to New York, Taft sent an explanatory note to Roosevelt outlining Nellie’s position. He had repeatedly assured his wife, he told Roosevelt, that he was so engaged in his cabinet duties and the management of his “three great trusts”—the Philippines, Panama, and the U.S. Army—that he “had concluded to stick to it and not seek at your hands or accept any appointment to the Bench.” Despite this resolve, he trusted that the president could better weigh the cost of losing him in the cabinet against “the crying need for putting strength in the Supreme Court.” If the president determined he could be most beneficial on the bench, he would “of course yield.” Even as he declared his preference for remaining in the cabinet, Taft appeared tortured by second doubts and hopeful the president might decide the matter for him.
Conflicting counsel produced during Taft’s conference with his brothers did little to clarify the situation. Charles thought he should take the nomination, so long as it was clearly understood (as Roosevelt had already promised) that he would be appointed to the chief justiceship once Fuller retired. Horace, long Nellie’s closest ally in advocating against a judicial career, was adamantly opposed, believing that his brother stood an excellent chance of becoming president. Moreover, Horace argued, “quite apart from the Presidency,” it would be a shame to have his “personality removed from politics.” For his part, Harry found talk of the presidency flattering but felt that Taft was better suited to be chief justice.
When Taft returned to Washington the next morning, he found a remarkable letter from the president awaiting him. After conversing with Nellie the previous morning, Roosevelt believed he had misconstrued his friend’s desires. All along, Roosevelt confessed, he had thought that Taft wanted the Court appointment and that all the president’s urgings toward that end were consequent with Taft’s deepest inclinations. But in the wake of his discussions of the matter with Nellie, he had resolved to leave the decision completely up to Taft himself. “My dear Will,” he wrote, “it is preeminently a matter in which no other man can take the responsibility of deciding for you what is right and best for you to do. Nobody could decide for me whether I should go to the war or stay as Assistant Secretary of the Navy . . . whether I should accept the Vice-Presidency, or try to continue as Governor.” In each defining situation, he concluded, “the equation of the man himself” must be “the vital factor.”
Roosevelt proceeded to offer his heartfelt advice, carefully considering each of his friend’s prospects. In the first place, he stated flatly, he considered Taft not only “the best man” to become the next president but the “most likely” to receive the Republican nomination and win the general election. (While Roosevelt held Elihu Root in equal esteem, he recognized that the conservative lawyer’s long corporate ties made him unavailable as a candidate.) “The good you could do in four or eight years as the head of the Nation would be incalculable,” Roosevelt asserted, adding that “the shadow of the presidency falls on no man twice, save in the most exceptional circumstances.” Naturally, no election is guaranteed, the president qualified, adding that he hoped that Taft’s “sweet and fine nature” would not “be warped” if he should fail. But even if the presidency did not materialize, Taft would enjoy “three years of vital service” in the cabinet and would certainly be “one of the great leaders for right in the tremendous contests” that lay ahead.
“First and infinitely foremost,” Roosevelt wrote, stressing the benefits of assuming a place on the bench, at only forty-eight-years of age, Taft would have “the opportunity for a quarter of a century to do a great work as Justice of the greatest Court in Christendom (a court which sadly needs great men) on questions which seem likely vitally and fundamentally to affect the social, industrial and political structure of our commonwealth”; secondarily, declining this opportunity to join the Court would diminish or foreclose Taft’s chance to serve as chief justice, for in order to fill the current vacancy with some other “big man,” like Elihu Root, the president might have to utilize the option of the top post.
“Where you can fight best I cannot say, for you know what your soul turns to better than I,” Roosevelt acutely observed in closing. “You have two alternatives before you, each with uncertain possibilities, and you cannot be sure that whichever you take you will not afterwards feel that it would have been better if you had taken the other. But whichever you take I know that you will render great and durable service to the Nation for many years to come.”
Taft was deeply moved by Roosevelt’s generous and candid endeavor to help him work through the momentous decision he faced. The letter was “all I could expect and more,” he told Nellie. If forced to decide immediately, he would accept, he explained to Horace—otherwise he might well jeopardize his chance at the chief justiceship. He would talk with the president, he concluded, and ask to defer the decision, allowing him to continue the tariff fight until Congress adjourned in July. Displaying decisiveness in contrast to Taft’s dilatory nature, Roosevelt agreed to release a statement explaining that since Brown would not retire until June and the Court not resume work until October, he had decided to postpone his nomination.
Throughout that spring, newspapers speculated on Taft’s prospects. It was a “somewhat unusual experience,” the New York Sun observed, “to possess a public servant whose usefulness and versatility are so generally recognized” that half his supporters hoped he would remain in politics, while the other half preferred to see him on the Supreme Court. Sadly, the Sun remarked with broad humor, it was “impossible, under the Constitution and laws, to cut Mr. Taft in two!” While the natural ambition of “the big, jovial, brainy” Taft might incline him toward the bench, theHutchinson (Kansas) News suggested, he had now “tasted power,” and perhaps an “easy berth” on the Court was no longer so appealing.
As early as the summer of 1906, editorials in Republican newspapers began touting Taft as the only man capable of defeating the Democratic front-runner, the charismatic William Jennings Bryan, in the upcoming presidential election. “He has done big things,” the Kansas City Star noted, “is magnetic and popular” and “would come nearer to carrying forward the Roosevelt policies than any other Republican.” The Journal of Commerce observed that “no American” stood higher “in the eyes of his countrymen” than the popular secretary of war. Day after day, Taft received letters begging him to look toward the presidency instead of the Court. “I do not see in the horizon any man in the Republican ranks except yourself who would give us good assurance of carrying the country,” Outlook publisher Lyman Abbott urged. “For the love of Mike, do not go to the Supreme Bench,” another friend pleaded; “there are certain lucky individuals who have a happy faculty of appealing to the imagination and the heart of the general public . . . and you are one of these lucky people.”
Though Taft disavowed any desire for the presidency, the prospect inevitably informed his decision to refuse the Court nomination. In a lengthy letter to Roosevelt in mid-July, he insisted that while the bench remained his ultimate preference, the timing was once again wrong. News that Congress had adjourned without passing the tariff bill had produced “a most gloomy” spirit in the Philippines, and remaining in the cabinet would allow him to continue his fight in the next session. “P.S.,” he humbly continued. “Please don’t misunderstand me to think that I am indispensable or that the world would not run on much the same if I were to disappear in the St. Lawrence River, but circumstances seem to have imposed something in the nature of a trust on me.” (Roosevelt eventually nominated Attorney General William Moody to fill the vacant seat.) In a second postscript, Taft contritely confessed that Nellie thought it “an outrage” to inflict such a long letter upon such a busy man!
“Now, you beloved individual,” the president replied from Oyster Bay, “as for your long letter I enjoyed it thoroughly.” At Sagamore Hill, he explained, he had plenty of time to read and relax; indeed, after only three weeks on vacation, he was “rather shocked” to discover how easily he had adapted. “Ten years ago I got uneasy if I was left with leisure on my hands,” Roosevelt remarked, “and if I had no mental work I wished to be riding, chopping, rowing, or doing something of that kind all the time. Now I am perfectly content to sit still.” Writing again a few weeks later, he exclaimed: “By George, I am as pleased as Punch that you are to stay in the Cabinet!”
Relieved to have the Court decision behind him, Taft happily anticipated a two-month vacation with Nellie and the children at Murray Bay. There, he intended to continue the diet and exercise regimen that had enabled him to lose over 75 pounds during the previous eight months, reducing his weight from 330 to 254 pounds. During this period, he had faithfully maintained a rigorous, doctor-prescribed diet that excluded sugar, fats, milk, cheese, cream, egg yolks, and bread. He was allowed only grilled fish, lean meat, egg whites, clear soup, salads, vegetables, some fruits, gluten biscuits, and sugarless wine. At his heaviest, Taft had been forced to send away for a new bathroom scale; those available in Washington, he told Charles, were “boys” scales, registering no more than 250 pounds. Having reached a manageable weight by July, he discovered that his new physique was “not an inexpensive luxury.” His tailor had to completely reconstruct “twenty pairs of Trousers . . . twenty Waist Coats . . . two Prince Albert Coats . . . and five Sack Coats!” Horace was thrilled by his brother’s progress: “It is the best thing you have done for many a day.” Given his “infernally healthy” constitution, Horace jested, there was now “no reason why [you] should not live to be a hundred.”
DURING THE SUMMER IN MURRAY Bay, Taft’s customary day began at 7 a.m., with dictation to his private secretary Wendell W. Mischler. Still in his twenties when he joined the secretary of war Taft, Mischler would remain with Taft until his death. At nine o’clock, Taft joined his family for breakfast, then returned to work for another hour. Generating responses to the five thick batches of mail that arrived by train or steamship each day required three hours in the early morning and two more in the late afternoon. In the interim, Taft relished outdoor activities and socializing with his family—golf games with his brothers, trout fishing and rambles along the rocky shore, tennis and picnics with Nellie and the children. In one golf respite, Taft happened upon fellow Murray Bay vacationer Justice John Harlan “jumping up and down to coax a ball in that was hovering on the very edge of the first hole.” Having no luck, Harlan called over to Taft: “Come on! You jump. That will do the business.” The casual atmosphere of Murray Bay allowed Taft to dress in comfort, saving his “city clothes” for Sunday church. Without fancy dinners or formal receptions to attend, he could easily adhere to his diet. The nation’s problems seemed to recede with each passing day, and friends and family could almost “see youth returning to him.”
By the second week in August, as he began preparation for a major political speech, Taft’s equanimity started to unravel. The chairman of the Republican State Committee had asked him to give the keynote address at an event in Maine early that September to open the party’s midterm campaign. In a letter from Oyster Bay, Roosevelt underscored the importance of the speech. Taft organized his presentation around four topics: the legislative goals of Congress, questions surrounding labor unrest, the trusts, and the tariff. The first three issues gave him little trouble. He agreed wholeheartedly with Roosevelt’s regulatory legislation, his position on labor, and his anti-trust initiatives. But he strongly wished to call for a downward revision of the tariff, a step that Roosevelt feared would split the party in two.
Taft’s long struggle with conservative Republicans over the Philippine tariff had awakened him to the larger inequity of the entire domestic tariff structure—a system that created immense advantages for eastern manufacturers and massive corporations over western farmers and small business. He believed the tariff represented the “only weakness” in the Republican Party, and he wanted to address the problem publicly. Nonetheless, he remained well aware that he would be regarded as a spokesman for the administration, promising Roosevelt that he would revise his remarks if the draft seemed “too outspoken.” Nellie had read an “outrageously long” early draft, which she deemed reminiscent of a “dull” opinion from the bench. He had compressed the entire speech. “One’s wife is mighty useful under circumstances like this,” he proudly acknowledged to Roosevelt.
“It’s a bully speech,” encouraged Roosevelt in reply. He was confident that Taft had safely navigated the tariff issue by stating that revision would be possible only when popular sentiment within the party crystallized. Personally, he did not believe that reform would be realized before the presidential election. Yet, if the Republicans were victorious, they would probably have to present a plan for revision immediately afterward. “I neither wish to split the Republican party,” Roosevelt wrote, “nor to seem to promise something Congress would not do.” In fact, he suggested that Taft show the speech to the conservative party leaders, Speaker Cannon and Charles Littlefield.
On the evening of September 5, 3,000 people gathered at the Alameda Opera House in downtown Bath, Maine, to hear Taft deliver “the first big Administration speech of the campaign.” The audience enthusiastically cheered Taft’s passionate defense of regulatory reforms and anti-trust initiatives. The president’s historic work to strengthen the federal response to long-standing abuses, Taft declared, “is the issue of the campaign, its only issue; its only possible issue.” Only when he turned to the tariff did Taft diverge from his central message. “With a frankness that is almost startling,” The Washington Post observed, the likely 1908 Republican nominee voiced his opposition to the conservative “stand-pat attitude” of both the president and the Speaker of the House, proclaiming “that his party must face tariff revision squarely and unhesitatingly.”
Reaction in the press was overwhelmingly favorable. The New York Sun called Taft’s speech “the frankest, the ablest and the most manly and engaging deliverance that has ever come from any member of Mr. Roosevelt’s Cabinet on any subject.” The solicitor general, Henry Hoyt, told Taft that he had “never made a sharper speech,” lauding it as “honest & courageous all the way through,” and adding, “All of us in our hearts agree with you about tariff revision.” Taft was delighted by the public praise but most anxiously awaited Roosevelt’s response. “It is the great speech of the campaign,” Roosevelt telegraphed him, “and I cannot imagine the people failing to recognize it as such.” Taft humbly replied: “A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.”
TAFT’S PLAN TO EXTEND HIS tranquil vacation at Murray Bay through September was abruptly cut short by turmoil in Cuba. Revolutionary forces, angered by electoral fraud during the 1905 presidential campaign, had taken control of most of the island outside of Havana, leaving President Tomás Estrada Palma in a precarious situation. Though the treaty ending the war with Spain had bound the United States to respect Cuban sovereignty, the Platt Amendment stipulated that the United States retained power to take action whenever necessary to safeguard the independent status of the island nation, and to support “a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty.”
“In Cuba what I have dreaded has come to pass,” Roosevelt told George Trevelyan on September 6: “A revolution has broken out, and not only do I dread the loss of life and property, but I dread the creation of a revolutionary habit, and the creation of a class of people who take to disturbance and destruction as an exciting and pleasant business.” On September 13, President Estrada Palma claimed he could not “prevent rebels from entering cities and burning property” and secretly requested the landing of U.S. troops “to save his country from complete anarchy.” Roosevelt confided to Ambassador Henry White that he was “so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All that we wanted from them was that they would behave themselves,” he added petulantly, “and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere.”
The following day, Roosevelt summoned Taft and Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon to a conference at Oyster Bay. The two men would travel to Cuba “as intermediaries,” Roosevelt decided, hoping to effect a peaceful solution. From Oyster Bay, Taft took the train to Washington, where he conferred with the judge advocate general to determine whether congressional approval was necessary if the president decided to send troops. The judge advocate general, Taft told Roosevelt, believed the treaty authorized presidential action without congressional approval. Nevertheless, Taft wished to get Attorney General Moody’s opinion. Roosevelt adamantly directed him not to consult Moody. “If the necessity arises I intend to intervene,” he explained, “and I should not dream of asking the permission of Congress. That treaty is the law of the land and I shall execute it.” His decision was in the interest of the country, he added, essential to “give independence to the Executive in dealing with foreign powers.” Furthermore, he was certainly “willing to accept responsibility to establish precedents which successors may follow.”
When Taft and Bacon reached Havana, they met with President Estrada Palma and the leaders of his Moderate Party. Not a single delegate from the Liberal Party, which represented Cuba’s less privileged, was present. Pushing for intervention to sustain their power, Estrada Palma and his supporters were dismayed when Taft refused to act before meeting with rebels in the field to fully evaluate the situation. The secretary of war had not traveled to Cuba intent on using American power to suppress the insurgents; he had come as an arbitrator hoping to reconcile differences peacefully.
Taft’s “informal, straightforward and kindly manner,” one reporter noted, “created a strong and favorable impression.” Even as he privately lamented “the utter unfitness of these people for self government,” Taft listened patiently to representatives from both sides. Reviewing the evidence regarding the 1905 election, he concluded that complaints of wholesale fraud were “well founded.” To orchestrate a compromise, he suggested that if insurgents “laid down their arms and dispersed to their homes,” a temporary executive acceptable to both sides would be appointed, the disputed legislative seats would be vacated, and planning would begin for a new election. The liberals agreed, but the moderates promptly sabotaged the possibility. Rather than accept the compromise terms, Palma announced that he, his cabinet, and every moderate congressman would resign, “leaving nothing of the Government.”
Meanwhile, the fierce skirmishes outside Havana continued. Having nearly routed government forces in the countryside, the rebels stood poised to enter the capital. “The insurgents are all about Havana,” Taft told Nellie nervously. “I don’t know that I can save bloodshed.” One insurgent encampment was situated only 1,200 yards from the house where Taft was staying. The rapidly shifting situation required William Taft to take decisive action without explicit guidance from the president. “Things are certainly kaleidoscopic,” Roosevelt telegraphed. “I must trust to your judgment on the ground.” The tense days during this standoff proved “the most unpleasant” Taft had ever experienced. “I am in a condition of mind where I can hardly do anything with sequence,” he confessed to Nellie, adding, “I would give a great deal to talk it over with you.” Unable to sleep, he found himself awake at three in the morning, watching a severe thunderstorm build and roll over Havana Bay. Were it not for Nellie and his family, Will reflected, he would not be sorry if one of the bolts flashing in the sky struck him dead.
After a week of rancorous negotiation, Taft finally brokered a four-point plan. President Estrada Palma would remain in office long enough to officially request American intervention. The United States would set up a provisional government, with Taft as the initial temporary governor general. The insurgents, secure in America’s pledge that new elections would be held, would begin to disarm. And to keep the peace, American forces would land in Cuba. Taft wisely emphasized that this provisional government would “be maintained only long enough to restore order and peace and public confidence.” The Cuban Constitution would remain in full force and Cuba’s flag would continue to fly over government buildings. Once elections were held, the U.S. military would be withdrawn.
Taft anticipated that his course of action would be criticized back at home but took solace in the fact that “all parties here seem to be delighted.” A resolution without further bloodshed and war, he assured Nellie, would “go a long way to make such attacks futile.” A telegraph from Oyster Bay confirmed Taft’s judgment: “I congratulate you most heartily upon the admirable way you have handled the whole matter,” Roosevelt wrote, adding that he was “especially pleased with the agreement which the revolutionary committee signed.”
As soon as the accord became public, the rebels began to disarm. Taft promptly cabled Nellie to join him in Havana, knowing her presence would bring him “great comfort.” He planned to remain in Havana for several weeks, until Charles E. Magoon, the former governor of the Panama Canal Zone, could relieve him as governor general. Eager for adventure, Nellie decided instantly to go. Accompanied by Robert Bacon’s wife, she sailed from Norfolk on a steamer escorted by a battleship and three hundred Marines. “For the first time in my life I felt as if we were actually ‘going to war,’ ” she recalled. Her ceremonious reception as “the first lady of the land” was reminiscent of her days in Manila. On the day after their arrival, Nellie Taft and Mrs. Bacon hosted a splendid gala at the palace, with a guest list comprising more than three hundred Cubans from both sides of the dispute. “Everybody seemed to be especially happy and festive after the month of gloom,” Nellie recalled, “and the pretty white gowns, the gay Cuban colours and the crisp smartness of American uniforms mingled together in the great rooms with quite brilliant effect.” Once Magoon was sworn in as governor general, the Tafts made plans to depart Havana. “Upon my word you seem to have handled everything in a most masterly way,” Roosevelt commended his secretary of war as he wrapped up his stay in Cuba. “I doubt whether you have ever rendered our country a greater service.”
As the Tafts prepared to embark from the Havana dock on October 13, Magoon reported, “the shore of the Bay was lined with thousands of cheering people, all available water craft was pressed into service to escort the ships to the mouth of the harbor, the forts exchanged salutes with the vessels.” Nellie recalled a widely printed cartoon depicting poor Magoon seated “in agony on a sizzling stove labeled ‘Cuba,’ while Mr. Taft appeared in the distance in a fireman’s garb carrying a long and helpful-looking line of hose.” Indeed, the political situation on the islands was far from resolved, and preparation for the new elections proved unexpectedly complex. In the end, Magoon would struggle for over two years to complete a new census and revise the electoral laws; not until early 1909 were national elections finally held. After the election, Magoon finally relinquished control to a newly elected liberal administration and the U.S. troops sailed for home.
Though many critics opposed the very concept of intervention in Cuban affairs, Taft’s role in the crisis was generally praised. “Merely to record the movements and missions of the Secretary of War requires a nimble mind,” the New York Sun remarked. Most men would have considered it “a labor of Hercules” to negotiate peace in the midst of a revolution: Taft—accustomed to settling volatile dilemmas from Manila to Panama, from Ohio to Maine—simply threw “a change of clothing into a traveling bag” as if he were setting forth on a holiday and “returned to his War Department duties.” Taft himself presented a far less jaunty picture of his struggle to implement peace in Cuba: “If mental worry kept me down I should have lost 50 pounds in this crisis,” he revealed to Charles. Instead, having sought comfort in food during “those awful twenty days,” he had gained back 15 or 20 pounds, necessitating yet another alteration of his wardrobe.
TAFT SCARCELY HAD TIME TO unpack before Roosevelt dispatched him on a three-week speaking tour through a dozen states in advance of the midterm elections. “The paramount issue,” a midwestern editorial observed, was “whether the president shall be sustained during the remaining two years of his term by a republican congress.” No one could present a better case for the Roosevelt administration than William Howard Taft, the most prominent cabinet member, “the jolly good fellow” most likely to secure the next Republican nomination.
All 5,000 seats at the Lyric Stage in Baltimore were filled, and hundreds more people stood in the back and packed the galleries when Taft stepped to the podium. Though he spoke for an hour and three quarters, defending the measured use of federal power to correct abuses of the industrial system, not one person rose to leave. “This is rather contrary to your theory that no audience can stand more than an hour,” he teased Nellie, conceding wryly that a few might have “sneaked out saying to themselves that a man who has the egregious vanity to think he can entertain an audience for more than an hour ought not to be encouraged.” In Cleveland, Danville, Decatur, Omaha, and Pocatello, Taft addressed similarly enthusiastic crowds. Seven thousand people thronged to hear him speak in Boise, Idaho, where he was met with sustained applause: “Hats were thrown up in the air, women stood up on the chairs and waved their handkerchiefs.”
“The notices have all been favorable,” Nellie informed him from home. Nonetheless, she was concerned that he seemed unable to forgo mention of the tariff, sparking an antagonism within the Republican Party that could cost him the nomination. Taft acknowledged the legitimacy of her political estimate but felt so strongly on the issue he would wage the fight notwithstanding. Furthermore, he hoped his wife wouldn’t get “the blues” when he explained that despite feeling more “at home” with his audiences, he still found scant enjoyment in the political game and wished she could “put aside any hope in the direction of politics.”
Despite her husband’s protestations, Nellie was unwilling to relinquish the prospect of a Taft presidency. In Roosevelt, she found a powerful ally, though she continued to fear that he coveted another term for himself. On Saturday, October 27, with Taft in transit from Pittsburgh to Cleveland, Roosevelt invited Nellie to lunch at the White House. He confessed his concern to her, explaining that some Kentucky supporters had told him that Taft had flatly “turned them down” when they approached him about setting up an organization of support, maintaining that he was “not a candidate.” If Taft could not be “more encouraging,” Roosevelt continued, it might “become necessary for him to support someone else.” When Roosevelt mentioned Charles Evans Hughes, the New York attorney who had successfully investigated the life insurance industry and was now running against William Randolph Hearst for governor, Nellie grew annoyed by the tone of conversation. “I felt like saying ‘D——you, support who you want, for all I care,’ ” she confessed to her husband, “but suffice it to say I did not.”
“I think what the president is anxious to do,” Taft cannily speculated to his wife after considering her account of the White House luncheon, “is to stir you up to stir me up to take more interest in the Presidential campaign, with a broad intimation that if I did not take more interest he would not.” Taft also posted a letter to the president conveying his understanding that Roosevelt might have to support a Hughes candidacy. “If you do,” Taft assured the president, “you may be sure it will awaken no feeling of disappointment on my part.” In fact, Taft confirmed, his recent travels had convinced him that “the strong feeling” he had encountered everywhere was not for him, but for the renomination of Roosevelt himself. The people did not want a “substitute,” he explained; they wanted a third term.
Taft, meanwhile, continued to speak before spirited crowds. In some states, he spoke seven or eight times a day as his train moved from city to city. Despite the frenetic pace, he took the time every few days to update Roosevelt on local and state issues. “I am immensely interested in your account of the campaign,” Roosevelt responded. “I take the keenest pride in what you are now doing. Three cheers for ‘offensive partisanship’!”
When the votes were tallied on November 6, Roosevelt was tremendously pleased. Republicans had expected significant losses in the midterm elections following their landslide victory two years before. Instead, the party retained a strong majority in the House, losing only twenty-eight seats, and actually added four seats in the Senate. “Our triumph at the elections has certainly been great,” Roosevelt wrote to Kermit. His party’s hold on Congress, he believed, would make the last two years of his term “very, very much easier than they otherwise would have been.” Roosevelt readily acknowledged his debt to Elihu Root and especially to the dutiful William Howard Taft. “I am overjoyed,” he told his secretary of war, enthusiastically praising Taft’s efforts as he added, “I cannot sufficiently congratulate you upon the great part you have played in the contest.” He was particularly pleased by Governor Frank Gooding’s reelection in Idaho and the defeat of the “scandal-mongering” William Randolph Hearst in New York—a victory he considered nothing less than a triumph for civilization. “By George,” he confided to Taft, “I sometimes wish I was not in the White House and could be on the stump.”
TWO DAYS AFTER THE ELECTION, the president and first lady embarked on a long-anticipated trip to Panama. “I’m going down to see how the ditch is getting along,” Roosevelt shouted from the deck of the yacht set to carry him from the nation’s capital down the Rappahannock River to the sea, where he would board the warship Louisiana. The “ditch,” one reporter explained, referred to the massive artificial lake under construction on the Isthmus of Panama that promised to rival “the pyramids . . . the Colossus of Rhodes [or] the hanging gardens of Babylon.” Roosevelt began the six-day sail in “particularly good spirits,” delighted to be taking an unprecedented step in the history of the presidency—leaving the country to visit a foreign land. Indeed, when his trip was first announced, “a large portion of the public gasped,” anxious that “such a jaunt would be contrary to law.” The public was assured, however, that “modern inventions” would enable the president to keep abreast of the nation’s business “no matter where he may be.”
Roosevelt’s three-day visit to Panama was packed with “a little of everything.” Wishing to judge the progress of the construction firsthand, the president climbed atop a steam shovel and barraged the operator with dozens of questions about his work. He traveled by train to several excavation sites, observed drilling machines at work, and watched as dynamite charges were detonated. He met with laborers, toured their sleeping quarters and bathrooms, and listened to their complaints. He even dropped by the workers’ mess rooms, insisting that he sample the food they were served. Overall, the New York Tribune reported, the president came away “well pleased with what he saw,” and the men were well pleased to see him.
Although the Tafts had been invited to join the president and Edith on the Panama trip, Taft had already arranged to follow his western political tour with a weeklong inspection of half a dozen Army bases in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Illinois, Kansas, and Texas. At each base, he was received with elaborate ceremony. “Not in the history of the post at Fort Sill has there been accorded to an officer of the war department a larger reception,” one reporter remarked. At Fort Leavenworth, “several thousand school children waved flags; whistles were blown, church bells rung and hundreds of cannon crackers were fired.” After a final stop at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Taft settled down for the long train ride home. “One trouble about travel,” he wrote Nellie, “is that with nothing particular to do on the cars, meals assume an undue importance.” And, indeed, Taft’s extensive travels had prompted him to add 15 more pounds to his girth.
WHEN TAFT ARRIVED AT HIS War Department office shortly after his return, he found himself thrust in the midst of a firestorm. During his lengthy absence from Washington, the president had made a unilateral decision on a matter he would normally have discussed with his secretary of war. Roosevelt had issued a sweeping presidential order discharging without honor an entire battalion of black soldiers for an incident three months earlier in Brownsville, Texas.
Racial tensions in the small southern city had been building since late July 1906, when the battalion first arrived at Fort Brown from Nebraska. Local papers had denounced the government’s decision to transfer the troops to a region where privileges granted in the North “would certainly be denied them.” A series of minor confrontations had taken place: black soldiers were forced off the sidewalk, hit with revolver butts, and denied access to public bars. Rumors of a black soldier assaulting a white woman in her home circulated. Then, just past midnight on August 14, a group of soldiers had allegedly entered town and fired into buildings, killing a saloonkeeper and so grievously injuring the chief of police that his arm was later amputated. Eyewitnesses produced contradictory accounts: some claimed that the townspeople had fired first; others pointed to “colored soldiers in khaki and blue shirts” as the aggressors. No one could identify any of the individual soldiers, all of whom had returned to their barracks immediately after the shootings.
With Taft en route to Cuba when the first official account reached Washington, Roosevelt took charge, ordering the inspector general of the Army to investigate the incident. Six days later, Major Augustus Blocksom wired an initial report. Even while acknowledging that racial prejudice had motivated townspeople to heap abuse upon the enlisted men, he nevertheless discounted the report that the citizens had fired first, blaming an unidentified group of about “nine to fifteen” soldiers for initiating the raid. Interviews with battalion members had failed to disclose the identities of those involved. Blocksom therefore recommended that if the soldiers continued to obstruct the investigation by refusing to cooperate, they should be collectively “discharged from the service.” Because the townspeople of Brownsville remained “in a state of great nervous tension,” with civilians patrolling the streets with guns “openly at night,” he suggested the battalion be temporarily transferred to Fort Reno, Oklahoma. “It is very doubtful,” the Brownsville Herald observed, “whether our people would ever tolerate the presence of negro soldiers here again.”
Roosevelt accepted Blocksom’s recommendation to remove the troops, ordering the inspector general, Ernest A. Garlington, to Fort Reno to conduct further interviews with the enlisted men. When Garlington arrived on October 18, he called the troops into formation on the Parade Grounds and read them an ultimatum from the president: If they continued to conceal the names of those involved in the raid, they would be discharged en masse. When not a single man broke rank, Garlington recommended that the entire battalion be dishonorably discharged at once. Although “this extreme penalty” undoubtedly meant that men with “no direct knowledge” of “who actually fired the shots” would be found guilty, because they stood together, he argued, “they should stand together when the penalty falls.”
Taft was on the campaign trail in early November when Roosevelt accepted Garlington’s recommendation. The president directed that all 167 men be dishonorably discharged from the Army, a status that not only prevented them from reenlistment but barred them from any civil service position. The battalion included several Medal of Honor winners, soldiers with a quarter of a century of distinguished service, and men who had fought beside Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. To prevent negative publicity, the order was deliberately delayed until after the midterm elections.
When the order was finally revealed, telegrams and resolutions condemning the president’s “despotic usurpation of power” flooded both the White House and the War Department. “Deep resentment” percolated in the black community, where Roosevelt had once been lionized for opening“the door of hope” by inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner and publicly fighting to confirm several high-level black appointees. The decision was deemed “a truckling to sectional prejudice” and a bid by the president to capitalize on newfound popularity in the South in the wake of his wildly successful trip through the region. “Once enshrined in our love as our Moses,” one black preacher lamented, Roosevelt “is now enshrouded in our scorn as our Judas.”
Reading through the pile of telegrams and petitions on the Saturday of his return, Taft consented to meet Mary Church Terrell—a leading black educator, graduate of Oberlin College, and member of New York’s Constitutional League. All she wanted, Mrs. Terrell informed the secretary, was for him “to withhold the execution of that order” until a trial could be set to determine “the innocent ones.” With “a merry twinkle in his eye,” she recalled, Taft responded with gentle irony: “Is that all you want me to do?” She “realized for the first time what a tremendous request” she had made, Terrell explained, and “how difficult it would be to change the status of the soldiers’ case.” Still, there was something in Taft’s “generous-hearted” manner that made her believe he would do what he could.
That very day, Taft cabled Roosevelt—then en route from Panama to Puerto Rico—that he intended to “delay the execution of the order” until he received a response. He did not think the president fully realized “the great feeling that has been aroused on the subject,” or the negative impact on Army morale and racial relations. Taft always believed it better to reconsider a case when a decision raised serious questions. “If a rehearing shows that the original conclusion was wrong, it presents a dignified way of recalling it; and if it does not, it enforces the original conclusion.”
Upon learning that Taft had delayed the order, reporters speculated that the terms of the soldiers’ discharge might be modified. Taft publicly remarked that he would prefer honorable discharges, which would allow eventual reinstatement and access to the Soldiers’ Homes. Furthermore, he questioned the president’s legal power to preclude employment in the civil branch. The New York Times reported that the incident had placed such “a severe strain upon the relations between the President and his Secretary of War” that a new appointment to the cabinet might be required.
Taft heard nothing from Roosevelt over the weekend. On Monday, he left Washington for a daylong meeting at Yale, where he had been elected to the Yale Corporation. When he returned on Tuesday afternoon to find that there was still no response to his cable, he met with William Loeb, Roosevelt’s private secretary. Loeb showed him a letter the president had written to Massachusetts governor Curtis Guild, Jr., just before leaving for Panama. “The order in question will under no circumstances be rescinded or modified,” Roosevelt had declared. “There has been the fullest and most exhaustive investigation of the case.” Viewing this document, Taft sadly concluded that he no longer had a right to delay the order. The next morning, a telegram from Roosevelt confirmed that he remained inflexible: “Discharge is not to be suspended,” he wrote. “I care nothing whatever for the yelling of either the politicians or the sentimentalists. The offense was most heinous and the punishment I inflicted was imposed after due deliberation.”
Criticism of the Brownsville order mounted into early December. When Congress convened on December 3, the conservative Republican senator Joseph Foraker introduced a resolution calling for a full investigation into the matter. Foraker’s inquiry, which proposed to study whether the president’s order overstepped his authority, provoked what the New York Times characterized as a “fighting mad” reaction from Roosevelt. Foraker had been among the most outspoken opponents of Roosevelt’s railroad legislation; consequently, his resolution was seen as a blatant political maneuver to wrest control of the Republican Party from Roosevelt, Taft, and the progressives. “It is impossible to admit that he could be sincere in any belief in the troops’ innocence,” Roosevelt testily asserted.
In a letter to Congress “tingling with indignation,” Roosevelt insisted that “he was not only acting well within his constitutional rights, but that it was his duty to strip the uniform” from “murderers, assassins, cowards and the comrades of murderers.” The discrimination that the soldiers had endured at the hands of the townspeople offered no “excuse or justification for the atrocious conduct.” Indeed, the president asserted that dismissal was “utterly inadequate”—had the murderers been identified and found guilty, they would have been executed. Several days later, Roosevelt underscored his defiant stand, informing reporters that he would “fight to the last ditch” rather than abandon his order. If Congress should adopt legislation to reinstate the soldiers, he would veto it. If the legislation passed over his veto, he would find another means to prevent the soldiers’ reenlistment. “Not even the threat of impeachment proceedings,” one paper remarked, “would deter him from the stand pat course he had decided to follow.”
Roosevelt’s strident response provoked both anger and sorrow in the black community. The Suffrage League of Boston predicted that his “extraordinary language” would likely incite “race hatred and violence” against 10 million innocent Negro citizens. The Washington Bee declared that“the colored man [would] be deceived no more,” for Roosevelt, “intoxicated with peevishness and vindictiveness,” had made it evident that he was no friend to their cause. “We shall oppose the renomination of Theodore Roosevelt,” the Bee concluded, “or anyone named by him.”
Though he maintained his public bravado, Roosevelt gradually softened his position, sending a new round of investigators to Brownsville to ask further questions. At Taft’s urging, he even revoked the provision barring soldiers from civil jobs with the government. Eventually, he allowed individual soldiers to apply for reinstatement, though the burden to prove innocence concerning the raid and the raiders’ identities lay with each applicant. Regardless of these concessions, Roosevelt’s handling of the Brownsville affair became a permanent scar on his legacy. Six decades later, the U.S. Army finally “cleared the records” of all 167 soldiers “dishonorably discharged” in what had proved to be the “only documented case of mass punishment” in the institution’s history.
Privately, Taft continued to believe that had he been present in Washington during the Brownsville incident, he might have prevented the president from issuing his draconian order. In other difficult situations, he had successfully mollified Roosevelt’s pugnacity. Nevertheless, once the order was promulgated, Taft never wavered in his public support for the president. When Richard Harding Davis applauded his “courage and good judgment” in ordering the delay, Taft demurred, telling the reporter his action had “been misunderstood.” Because of his absence at the time of the original decision, he maintained to Davis, he had simply not been aware of the facts or of the extensive investigation the president had already carried out.
Only his innermost circle was privy to Taft’s continuing anxiety. “This Brownsville matter is giving me a great deal of trouble,” he confessed to Howard Hollister, adding plaintively that he sometimes wished himself “out of it all” and engaged in “some quiet occupation which did not involve crimination and recrimination.” William Taft understood that his chance for the Supreme Court had come and gone, that “when a man has got his face pointed in one direction the only manly way to do is to keep on and take the mud that is thrown.” He fully recognized the futility of agonizing over lost possibilities, he assured Hollister, “but the difficulty with worry is that it does not disappear with argument.”