On Dec. 11, 1907, Puck paired this image of Roosevelt struggling to launch Taft’s ponderous candidacy with the caption: “How the Diabolo Can I Keep This Going Till Nomination Day?”
DURING THE SECOND SESSION OF the 59th Congress, which stretched from December 3, 1906, to March 4, 1907, Theodore Roosevelt’s long-standing apprehension over his waning influence on domestic legislation proved justified. Of the nearly five dozen measures the president had recommended in his annual December address, only a small number were given “favorable consideration”—the rest were rejected outright or simply “passed over in silence.” Reporters considered the session “an uneventful and poor spirited affair,” despite the passage of two important measures that had been held over from the previous session: a bill banning corporate contributions in federal elections and legislation preventing railroads from “knowingly” working their employees for more than sixteen consecutive hours. Aside from these two achievements many critical bills were blocked by the conservative Republican leadership: the Philippine tariff law, a child labor law for the District of Columbia, the eight-hour workday bill, a national inheritance tax, a progressive income tax, and a federal licensing law for corporations.
In addition, Roosevelt was deeply frustrated by new threats to his hard-won conservation measures. On February 25, 1907, the Senate passed an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriations Act, rescinding the president’s executive power to designate national forests in six western states. Thereafter, only an act of Congress could create a forest reserve, leaving “some sixteen million of acres,” Roosevelt later contended, “to be exploited by land grabbers and by the representatives of the great special interests.” Because a veto of the entire agricultural bill was not politically viable, Roosevelt and his chief of forestry, Gifford Pinchot, devised an ingenious remedy. With six days remaining before the bill would be signed, Pinchot mobilized his office to work round the clock, some employees toiling forty-eight hours without interruption to draft proclamations placing all 16 million acres into forest lands. No sooner was each proclamation completed than Roosevelt signed an executive order withdrawing the land from development. Through these orders, nearly three dozen new national forest reserves were designated in the American West, including Rainier and Cascade in Washington and Oregon, Bear Lodge in Wyoming, and Lewis and Clark in Montana. Only with the amendment rendered meaningless did Roosevelt sign the agricultural bill. “Opponents of the Forest Service,” Roosevelt later boasted, “turned handsprings in their wrath.”
Though he was pleased with this successful maneuvering, the president was painfully aware that his strength on Capitol Hill remained seriously compromised by his renunciation of a possible third term. Each passing day emboldened conservative members of Congress to challenge the administration’s programs and policies. Looking ahead to the election, Roosevelt feared that if the reactionary wing of his party successfully nominated and elected one of their own, they would work to dilute or even repeal his historic regulatory bills and, in the end, gut his achievements and demolish his legacy.
Of paramount importance was a successor who would sustain and advance his agenda, and there was no man he trusted more to uphold the progressive cause than William Howard Taft. Reporters were fascinated by “the deep, unbroken friendship” the two shared, “like unsophisticated schoolboys when together,” one journalist expounded, “each apparently under the spell of a romantic affection, a strong, simple sense of knightly companionship in the great field of moral errantry and patriotic adventure.” Roosevelt knew he would have to proceed carefully to help his friend get elected. “I am well aware,” he told William Allen White, “that nothing would more certainly ruin Taft’s chances than to have it supposed that I was trying to dictate his nomination.” Nevertheless, he defiantly continued, “it is preposterously absurd to say that I have not the right to have my choice as regards the candidates for the Presidency, and that it is not my duty to try to exercise that choice in favor of the man who will carry out the governmental principles in which I believe with all my heart and soul.”
To that end, Roosevelt launched a private campaign of persuasion, engineering a boom of support for Taft’s candidacy. In personal letters and meetings, he repeatedly insisted that he would “do all in his power” for Taft, though he could say nothing in public. To visitors, he extolled Taft’s“boundless courage,” emphasizing his absolute freedom from “any possible corrupting or beguiling influence.” In off-the-record conversations with journalist friends, he swore that “he would crawl on his hands and knees from the White House to the Capitol” to secure Taft’s election, but if they quoted him, he warned, he would disavow any such statement. A ditty in the Kansas City Times compressed the president’s stance perfectly:
IMPARTIAL MR. ROOSEVELT
Says Roosevelt: “I announce no choice,
To no man will I lend my voice,
I have no private candidate,
I care not whom you nominate—
Just so it’s Taft.”
Indeed, the ferocity of Roosevelt’s desire for a Taft presidency far exceeded the candidate’s own. Taft’s declaration of his candidacy was so tepid, so lacking in conviction that it sounded as if he had decided not to run: “I wish to say,” he began, “that my ambition is not political; that I am not seeking the presidential nomination, that I do not expect to be the Republican candidate.” Still, he avowed, “I am not foolish enough to say that in the improbable event that the opportunity to run for the great office of President were to come to me, I should decline it, for this would not be true.” This tentative announcement prompted speculation that an unwilling Taft had “been drawn into the maelstrom of Presidential politics,” finally yielding to “the persistent pleading of the President and strong personal friends.” Even after announcing his candidacy, Taft indicated a preference for working “behind the scenes” and pursuing his duties “irrespective of politics.” He found the prospect of soliciting support repugnant and “was very much averse” to burdening his friends with requests for assistance. William Taft, observed a Chicago Tribune reporter, seemed to have “an almost morbid fear of being placed in the attitude of struggling for the Presidency.”
Initially, Taft’s reluctance appeared a winning quality, evidence that the office should seek the man rather than the man the office. “Taft is not a politician in the sense that he is a wire-puller and a seeker of power,” commended The Washington Post, “but as a natural statesman and leader, he draws all men to him. Let him appear at a public reception, let him make a speech before a large audience, let him attend a private gathering and when he leaves, at least fifty percent of the people will be his friends.” The New York Times too observed that while Taft might be ignorant of“the little details of politics, the methods of juggling a ward primary, and of playing horse with a caucus,” he nevertheless commanded “a bigger, broader kind of politics . . . the kind that is frank and open.”
Taft’s peculiar diffidence over his presidential hopes also freed him to take a principled stand when faced with trouble brewing in Ohio. In late March 1907, Roosevelt’s nemesis, the reactionary senator Joseph Foraker, openly assailed Taft’s candidacy, declaring his intention to challenge Taft for the endorsement of the Republican State Committee. The press predicted that a state committee endorsement of Foraker for president could prove crippling to Taft’s candidacy. Foraker “may cause trouble,” Roosevelt acknowledged to Kermit, adding that in Ohio, the senator was already mustering “the fight against Taft, and incidentally against me.”
When Foraker issued his statement, Taft was in the middle of a three-week trip to Panama, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Speaking on his brother’s behalf, Charles Taft accepted Foraker’s challenge, suggesting that the question of Ohio’s endorsement be put before the voters in a primary. “This is a direct contest between the friends of the Administration of President Roosevelt and his opponents,” he argued, relaying Taft’s readiness to let the voters decide: “We are willing to submit it to the Republican voters of Ohio and the sooner the better.” Nellie found the confrontation unsettling and concurred with the president that Taft “had nothing to gain” from heeding Foraker’s challenge and “much possibly to lose.”
The decision to call Foraker’s bluff, however, soon proved wise. Foraker understood that Roosevelt and Taft enjoyed more support among Ohio’s voters and realized that if he manipulated an endorsement from the state committee and subsequently lost to Taft in an open primary or convention, he might jeopardize his Senate seat. Through intermediaries, he therefore offered to endorse Taft for president in exchange for his support in the approaching senatorial contest. Taft flatly refused. “I don’t care for the Presidency if it has to come by compromise with Senator Foraker,” Taft told Arthur Vorys, his Ohio campaign manager. As “a question of political principle,” declared Taft, he could never strike a bargain to endorse a man who had consistently opposed the policies and programs of the Roosevelt administration. Furious, Foraker warned that henceforth, Taft should meet him in the political arena “with a drawn sword in his hand.”
In a long letter to Roosevelt, Taft acknowledged that affairs in Ohio had “become somewhat acute.” The state committee was scheduled to meet in late July, and Foraker might have sufficient votes to defeat a resolution endorsing Taft’s nomination. Still, Taft insisted, he had no regrets. “Rather than compromise with Foraker, I would give up all hope for the Presidency,” he stated. “I must explain to you that the Ohio brand of politics the last twenty years has been harmony and concession on the subject of principle to the last degree, provided it secured personal preferment and division of the spoil in a satisfactory way.” If Foraker hoped to win, Taft concluded, the senator would have to engage in “a stand-up fight.”
Roosevelt’s reply demonstrated an admiration for his friend’s character that far eclipsed any misgivings over his political acuity. “While under no circumstances,” Roosevelt wrote, “would I have advised you to take the position you have taken in refusing to compromise with Foraker on the lines that the local politicians want, yet, now that you have taken it, I wish to say that I count it as just one of those fine and manly things which I would naturally expect from you, and I believe you are emphatically right.”
Steeled for defeat when the state committee met to select candidates at the end of July, Taft enjoyed a stunning victory. The committee not only voted 15 to 6 to endorse Taft for president; they also refused to back Foraker in the Senate race. “I am hopeful that it will have a very good effect in other states,” a relieved Taft told Howard Hollister. Foraker’s political career came to an unceremonious end the following September, when William Randolph Hearst released letters suggesting he had received bribes from Standard Oil. Foraker later argued that the money was simply compensation for legal services, but the damage was done; he withdrew from the Senate race and never served in public office again.
DESPITE HIS VICTORY IN OHIO, Taft found the bitter struggle dispiriting. While Roosevelt reveled in the fight, urging his chosen successor to deliver a “mauling” to Foraker, Taft possessed no such bellicose spirit and could never forget that his “first substantial start in public life” was due to the early kindness of the now disgraced senator. The politics of personal destruction held no relish for a man “born with an instinct to be personally agreeable.” Reporters described Will Taft as “the kindest man they [had] ever known in public life.” Perhaps better than any other, Louise Taft understood the strengths and weaknesses of her favorite child. Asked what she thought of her son’s presidential candidacy, she confessed that she shared Will’s reluctance. “A place on the Supreme bench, where my boy would administer justice, is my ambition for him,” she admitted. “His is a judicial mind, you know, and he loves the law.” Though Taft had proven himself in the Philippines, Cuba, and Panama, the mother knew her son’s disposition and the toll that political discord exacted. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” she warned him when he declared his candidacy, shrewdly discerning that “Roosevelt is a good fighter and enjoys it, but the malice of the politicians would make you miserable.”
As the months passed, public enchantment with Taft as the reluctant politician began to wane. “He wins the hearts of individuals, but he does not fire the heart of the sovereign multitude,” observed reporter James Creelman of the weakening Taft boom. Taft’s reluctance to passionately embrace his political ambition began to shift from a sign of moral strength to an indication of weakness: “The country respects and trusts his ability and integrity, but its attitude is that of passive recognition and approval, not the head-long affection that brings power to a political leader of the first rank.” Why this “statesman of stainless name, unshakeable independence and creative and administrative abilities” had stirred “so little enthusiasm in the American people” had initially seemed a mystery to Creelman. The explanation, he finally suggested, lay in “the fact that the Secretary of War is not dowered with a political order of mind and is almost wholly devoid of political ambitions.” The New York Times concurred, adding that people will not flock to a candidate who “can scarcely be said to have waved his standard and asked people to flock to it.”
Though Taft had robustly stumped for Roosevelt, he did little in his own behalf to invigorate his popularity. As a candidate in his own right, Taft was expected to emerge as more than the genial defender and chief spokesman for the administration. Correspondents covering the campaign inevitably demanded the headline-generating phrasemaking and charismatic demeanor they had come to expect from Roosevelt. When Taft was criticized as not “fitted to say things that attract attention,” his campaign manager urged him to include anecdotes and striking figures of speech in his oratory. “I am not sure that I can make the epigrams that you are hunting for,” Taft responded disconsolately, turning to his habitual self-deprecating humor as he continued. “The truth is you have a pretty old horse to run and you’ve got to take me as I am.” Before each address, he was beset by grave misgivings, acutely aware that his drafts remained “infernally long” despite all efforts to prune his words. “Never mind if you cannot get off fireworks,” Nellie consoled him. “It must be known by this time that that is not your style, and there is no use in trying to force it. If people don’t want you as you are they can leave you, and we shall both be able to survive it.”
More problematic to critics than Taft’s speaking style was his failure to present a political figure independent from Theodore Roosevelt. On tariff reduction, the sole issue on which he had publicly been at odds with Roosevelt’s policy, he now softened his stance and repeated the president’s view that “revision must wait until after the election.” Though he did not echo Roosevelt’s “ferocious denunciation” of business, Taft positioned himself squarely behind the anti-trust and regulatory policies designed to prevent corporate abuses and deflate “swollen fortunes.” He passionately defended the railroad rate bill, the food and drug legislation, and the recent conservation measures. He called for a strengthened employer’s liability law, a progressive income tax, and an inheritance tax. With only a few “minor exceptions,” Taft proclaimed his “complete, thorough, and sincere sympathy” with Roosevelt’s policies. The New York Sun carped that “there is not an original note” in any of Taft’s speeches, jeering that “his ample corporeal capacity receives and contains all that Roosevelt has been, and is, and hopes to be.”
Taft expressed bafflement at the press’s surprise concerning his sympathy with Roosevelt’s policies. “I am much amused at the attitude of the New York papers,” he told Horace. “Did they suppose I was coming out to attack Roosevelt’s policies? Did they suppose I had stayed in the Cabinet thus long and disapproved of them?” But even some of Taft’s ardent backers wished that he would endeavor to set himself apart. “Is it possible,” Taft asked one concerned supporter, “that a man shows lack of originality, shows slavish imitation because he happens to concur in the views of another who has the power to enforce those views? Mr. Roosevelt’s views were mine long before I knew Mr. Roosevelt at all.” He would not, he insisted, “be driven from adherence to those views” by unjust, nonsensical criticism.
Nonetheless, by midsummer of 1907, Taft’s candidacy had stalled. A lingering problem, one supporter admitted, lay in “the feeling of uncertainty as to the President’s real intentions.” So long as the merest possibility remained that Roosevelt might rescind his pledge and run for a third term, many Republicans would not commit to anyone else. “The President is a hero in the eyes of the people,” as a friend expressed this concern to Taft, “and they will not surrender his leadership unless they are compelled to.” Particularly in the western states, a “well defined movement” had emerged “to force the nomination of Roosevelt.” Straw votes taken in the Nebraska and South Dakota legislatures revealed “an almost unanimous sentiment for Roosevelt,” and Kansas was reportedly poised to send a Roosevelt delegation to the convention whether he agreed to run or not.“It’s hard to write snappy Taft stuff when every damned man I meet gives three cheers for Roosevelt and refuses to talk of any other candidate,” another frustrated advocate acknowledged. “Nearly every man who says a good word for Taft doesn’t want his name used for fear he may offend Roosevelt. . . . It’s a plain, unabridged truth that 90 percent of the Taft sentiment I have found is second-hand or remnant Roosevelt sentiment.”
Nellie Taft had never been able to shake her intuitive apprehension that Roosevelt would change his mind about his own candidacy. As calls for a third term gathered steam and newspapers began to suggest circumstances under which the president might enter the race, her concern escalated. While running would be an “almost grotesque” betrayal of his friendship with Taft, the New York Sun speculated, the president would doubtless “welcome a situation in which his candidacy might seem inevitable, demanded by the patriotic and imperative clamor of the entire nation.” With sardonic, incisive humor, the editorial inquired: “May not the imaginative mind assemble conditions and considerations under which Mr. Taft will seem the victim of it all and also the appointed sacrifice to an illustrious Necessity?” The Sun’s piece further unsettled Nellie, who expressed her misgivings to Will: “How they hate him & they go farther than I in insinuating that this is all part of his scheme to get himself nominated as the only man,” she wrote, anxiously explaining how easily her husband could be labeled “a martyr and a scapegoat.”
In all likelihood, had Roosevelt not declared against a third term on the eve of his overwhelming victory in 1904, he would have pursued a third term. His White House years had been the most fulfilling of his life. Only forty-nine years old and in splendid health, Roosevelt was proud of his work and eager to expand his legacy. He reportedly boasted that he “could get the nomination by simply holding up [his] little finger.” Even as he warmed to the popular clamor for a third term, Roosevelt suspected that many of those who called for his reelection “would feel very much disappointed” if he actually ran, and would conclude that he had fallen “short of the ideal they had formed” as to the integrity of his character and the credibility of his word.
Roosevelt told one Cincinnati reporter, Gus Karger, that his decision not to run was an unregrettable “personal sacrifice” so long as Taft secured the nomination. “But I do not wish to have made it in vain,” he clarified, “by paving the way to the selection of a successor not in sympathy with the policies of this administration.” In case Taft’s canvass failed to take off, however, he would not foreclose the possibility of his candidacy. Moreover, Roosevelt argued, while a public reiteration of his vow not to run would rally support for Taft in the West, it might damage his cause in the East, and particularly in New York. Once he irrevocably stated that he would not join the race, he could no longer keep the party organization there from openly backing Governor Hughes. At least “for the moment,” Roosevelt convinced himself—and Taft—that saying nothing was “the wisest course.” Meanwhile, third-term proponents continued their vocal campaign; by late August, the odds in favor of Roosevelt’s renomination had grown “shorter.”
“Political affairs are kaleidoscopic,” Roosevelt warned his secretary of war on September 3, 1907. Though he still claimed that Taft was “the man upon whom it was most desirable to unite,” he acknowledged that his assessment might alter as the race evolved. Support for New York governor Hughes was growing; Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou was still hoping to run; Cannon and Fairbanks remained live possibilities. This unsettled situation made him “a little nervous,” Roosevelt admitted to Taft, adding that it was “a matter of real difficulty to prevent certain people declaring for [him].” Taft of all people, he assumed, would appreciate “that the first thing to be considered was the good of the nation and the next thing the good of the party.” After that, “any personal preference,” he portentously concluded, “must come in the third place.”
Just as Roosevelt’s support for Taft showed distinct signs of faltering, Taft, ironically, began to feel more sanguine about his campaign. A three-week swing through the heartland and the Far West had gone surprisingly well. “So far as I am able to judge,” he reported to Charles, “the trip I have made through the west has helped me.” On a sweltering summer day in Columbus, more than 20,000 people had gathered to hear him speak. “It was as great a meeting as they ever had in Ohio,” Taft happily noted. In Kentucky, he had spoken to “a fine audience of 4000 people”; in Oklahoma, an immense hall “was filled to suffocation”; and in Denver, he was greeted by “every politician in the state and every state officer.” Not only had Taft’s formal speeches gone more smoothly, but he had also become increasingly comfortable waving and making brief remarks to the crowds clustered at train stations along his route. “Personal contact,” he acknowledged, “does a great deal.” His clear blue eyes and famous smile, the New York Times reported, made all who met the man “feel glad and sociable and sincere.”
Buoyed by his warm reception everywhere he traveled, Taft took Roosevelt’s ominous musings in stride. “Nellie was out of patience with the President’s letter,” he told Charles, “but I understand exactly his state of mind. Under the hammering of the New York papers, and the disposition to press Hughes on, he has become a little more discouraged,” Taft explained, claiming, “I don’t think he knows as much about the matter as I do, for I have crossed the country and been in all parts of it.” Regardless of his current optimism, he promised his brother that he was “not getting into a situation where a failure to get the nomination” would render him “bitter or indeed disappointed.” Rather, he assured Charles, “I think that in your general earnestness and zeal on my behalf, a defeat would be more disappointing to you than to me.”
The day before his scheduled departure for a long-promised visit to the Philippines, Taft responded to Roosevelt’s letter. “I fully understand the difficulties of your position, and exactly how you feel in respect to the candidacy of myself and the others,” he began; “I have been, however, agreeably surprised to receive the expressions of good will which I found in the trip across the Continent.” Acknowledging that “one hears the things he likes to hear,” he had found overwhelming evidence of “affirmative support” across the nation. Nonetheless, he was “prepared to learn at any time” during his Pacific journey that his “boom” had “busted.” Whatever the outcome, Taft insisted, he would remain grateful “for the great compliment you have paid me in taking an interest in the matter, and for making my boom at all possible.”
WILL AND NELLIE, WITH TEN-YEAR-OLD Charlie in tow, sailed for the Philippines on September 13. Taft met with officials in Japan and China for several weeks before heading to Manila. The former governor general was scheduled to open the first Philippine Assembly. Taft had long considered creation of a popularly elected assembly a vital step toward eventual Filipino sovereignty. Though the Philippine Commission still exercised executive powers, the new assembly would have the “right to initiate legislation” or “to modify, amend, shape, or defeat legislation proposed by the Commission.” As “the first parliament ever freely elected in Asia,” the historian Stanley Karnow explains, the assembly “was a tribute to the liberalism of U.S. colonial rule,” but “American democracy it was not.” Only those who owned land, paid taxes, and demonstrated literacy were allowed to vote.
Taft feared he would encounter “a chill” upon reaching Manila rather than the exuberant welcome of two years earlier. Since that time, the movement for independence had gained momentum, casting an unfavorable light on his prediction that it would take generations to prepare the people for self-rule. But his misgivings proved unfounded. “The enthusiasm of the welcome,” he related to Charles, exceeded anything he had experienced before, “and it was the more delightful in that it was unexpected.” The reception was particularly gratifying, he added, because it showed that the “common people,” along with the “wealthier classes,” celebrated his role in creating the National Assembly.
He began his address by frankly admitting that he had not changed his mind about the duration required to achieve genuine sovereignty, but conceded that the question would be determined largely by the success of the new assembly. He wisely acknowledged that the United States, unused to the undertaking of colonial rule and lacking a “trained body of colonial administrators and civil servants,” had made serious missteps. Adventurers and military men unsuited “by character or experience” for the serious work of public service had delayed effective government in the islands. In addition, he lamented the dilatory pace of American investment and roundly criticized the U.S. Congress for failing to reduce the tariff on the major Philippine exports of tobacco products and sugar. Yet, despite these obstacles, he believed the islands had made great advancements: hundreds of thousands of Filipino children were attending school; sanitation services and general public health had significantly improved; and a judicial system was now in place. Furthermore, he noted, miles of new roads and street railways had been built, a civil service had been established, and the problems with the Catholic Church had been largely settled. Taft ended his oration by extending his “congratulations upon the auspicious beginning of your legislative life” and conveying his “heartfelt sympathy in the work which you are about to undertake.”
At the Inaugural Ball, Taft once again won hearts with his graceful execution of the complex national dance, the rigadon. Will and Nellie attended a “thousand and one events” in the days that followed, inspecting projects that had been completed since their last visit and renewing old friendships and acquaintances at a succession of dances, parties, and banquets. “Everybody,” Nellie happily noted, “was glad to see us.” The Tafts remained in the Philippines from mid-October through the first week of November, far removed from the stock market collapse that threatened both Roosevelt’s legacy and Taft’s candidacy.
IN OCTOBER, A SERIES OF difficulties on Wall Street escalated into what later became known as the Roosevelt Panic of 1907. Stock prices had been slumping since the previous March; in July and August, a number of companies, including a mining firm and a major street railway company, fell into bankruptcy. As industrial production slackened toward summer’s end, experts calculated that stock market losses approached $1 billion. Wall Street blamed Theodore Roosevelt’s “crusades against business” for the decline, arguing that his excessive regulation had paralyzed the economy. “By slow and insidious degrees,” the Sun editorialized, “he has upset the public confidence, arrayed class against class, and fomented mistrust and hatred.” The New York Times concurred, tracing the country’s ills to the administration’s “deep-seated, undiscriminating hostility” to business. By “going up and down the country, planting the doctrine of discontent,” another critic charged, Roosevelt had “sowed the wind, and we will reap the whirlwind.” Union Pacific Railroad president E. H. Harriman, a lifelong Republican, bitterly claimed that he would “take Bryan or Hearst rather than Roosevelt. We cannot be worse off than we are now with that man in the White House.”
In a defiant rejoinder, Roosevelt dispensed with his characteristic even-handed rhetoric. He stridently railed against “certain malefactors of great wealth,” who conspired “to bring about as much financial distress as they possibly can in order to discredit the policy of the government, and thereby to secure a reversal of that policy so that they may enjoy the fruits of their own evil-doing.” These plutocrats, he charged, would even “welcome hard times or a panic” to install “a safe type” in the White House. “They are as blind to some of the tendencies of the time, as the French noblesse was before the French Revolution.” Those business interests that shrank from regulation, the president suggested, should examine their own operations. He was “responsible for turning on the light,” he noted proudly, not “for what the light showed.” Curiously, Roosevelt omitted all mention of the muckraking journalists who had proven so instrumental in illuminating industrial abuses.
As summer turned to early fall, Roosevelt continued to frame the downturn as “a temporary period of weakness,” part of a worldwide contraction after a period of great prosperity. Unwilling to cancel his agenda, he left Washington on September 29 to deliver a series of speeches in the West, a trip that would culminate in a ten-day bear hunt in northeast Louisiana. Yet, while Roosevelt hunted bear, the bear market savaged Wall Street and the financial crisis deepened.
In early October, banking moguls F. Augustus Heinze and Charles W. Morse drove up copper prices in an attempt to corner the market. Their sensational failure—and the resulting depression of stock value—might have remained an isolated incident if news had not leaked that their costly speculation had been funded by the stately Knickerbocker Trust Company, the second largest investment bank in New York. Spooked by rumors that the venerable institution might fail, investors stood in queues outside the bank doors from dawn till dusk attempting to reclaim their funds. On the afternoon of October 22, the Knickerbocker ran out of money and was forced to shutter its offices. Three weeks later, the bank’s president, Charles T. Barney, committed suicide. Evidence that the respected firm had abandoned sound banking practices to gamble with customers’ deposits shattered confidence in other financial institutions. In the days that followed, customers rushed to retrieve money, some standing all night on the sidewalks, others sleeping in the vestibules. Reports indicated that “hardly a bank or trust company” was spared, as the Panic threatened to compromise the nation’s entire financial structure.
In the absence of a centralized banking system, seventy-year-old J. P. Morgan served as “a one-man Federal Reserve.” The magnificent library at his Madison Avenue house was designated “Panic Headquarters.” Surrounded by rare books, Renaissance paintings, and exquisite tapestries, Morgan and his partners met with a carefully selected group of leading bankers. Day after day, often late into the night, this financial cabal monitored the precarious situation, transferring monies from one bank to another, declaring which institutions to save and then raising sufficient funds to rescue them. Within two days the bankers had pledged nearly $10 million.
As Roosevelt hurried back to Washington, Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou took a day train to New York. Meeting with Morgan’s group that evening, he promised that the government would add $25 million to the bankers’ fund to be distributed at Morgan’s discretion. “It was an extraordinary transference of power to a private banker,” the biographer Ron Chernow observes. The next day, reporters noted that immense bags of bank securities were delivered to the U.S. subtreasury and J. P. Morgan’s headquarters. This quick action saved dozens of banks and trust companies, including the venerable Trust Company of America.
Despite these efforts to stabilize the banking system, stock prices continued to tumble. On Thursday, October 24, the president of the New York Stock Exchange broke the news to Morgan that his brokers no longer had the cash to continue trading. Determined to avoid a shutdown that would likely precipitate the wholesale collapse of financial institutions across the city, Morgan called an emergency meeting. Less than thirty minutes had elapsed before a messenger brought word that Morgan’s group had pledged $25 million to keep the exchange open. Elated at this reprieve, exuberant stockbrokers hooted and cheered, hailing J. P. Morgan as “the Man of the Hour.” The crisis had proven that Morgan “was still the chief among the country’s financiers,” the New York Evening Mail observed, “the one leader who could inspire the confidence of the multitude and command the resources of the nation.”
Just as one firestorm was contained a new blaze erupted. On November 1, Morgan learned that Moore & Schley, a leading brokerage house, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Understanding that the firm’s failure “would bring down a few more stories of the tottering financial pyramid,” Morgan evolved an ingenious plan. The troubled brokerage house owned a large stake in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TC&I), one of the few significant combinations to escape the grip of United States Steel. In a meeting with U.S. Steel’s chairman, Judge Elbert Gary, Morgan proposed that U.S. Steel purchase TC&I, exchanging its own solid bonds for TC&I bonds to redeem Moore & Schley. As a precondition, Gary insisted on Roosevelt’s assurance that the purchase would not trigger an anti-trust suit. “Can you go at once?” Morgan demanded.
That evening, Judge Gary and Henry Clay Frick took the overnight train to Washington. Meeting with the president at eight o’clock the following morning, the two U.S. Steel representatives maintained that “under ordinary circumstances they would not consider purchasing the stock,” which was priced “somewhat in excess” of the firm’s true value. Nevertheless, they believed it was “to the interest of every responsible businessman” to avoid a “general industrial smashup.” Roosevelt assured them that he “felt . . . no public duty” to file suit under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
The announcement of the deal not only saved Moore & Schley; it also helped restore confidence in the market. But when the terms of the TC&I purchase were made public, Roosevelt came under heavy criticism. John Moody, a respected financial analyst, termed the $45 million purchase price “the best bargain . . . ever made in the purchase of a piece of property”; the coal and iron ore deposits alone, he estimated, were worth “hardly less than $1 billion.” Some suspected that Roosevelt had been hoodwinked into legitimizing U.S. Steel’s bid to “swallow up a lively competitor, while wrapping itself in the cloak of public spirit.”
Roosevelt adamantly denied such charges. “The Nation trembled on the brink,” he contended, justifying his decision by pointing to the speed and volatility of the financial markets: “Events moved with such speed that it was necessary to decide and to act on the instant, as each successive crisis arose.” A decision had been necessary before the stock market opened that morning. “I would have showed myself a timid and unworthy public servant, if in that extraordinary crisis, I had not acted precisely as I did.” In the years ahead, however, the contentious decision would open a painful rift in Roosevelt’s friendship with William Howard Taft.
ALTHOUGH THE IMMEDIATE DANGER OF the financial panic subsided, a general malaise began to seep into every sector of the economy, costing laborers their jobs and farmers their livelihood. “Whether I am or am not in any degree responsible for the panic, I shall certainly be held responsible,” Roosevelt grumbled to his physician, Dr. Alexander Lambert. “The big moneyed men” had long since “reached a pitch of acute emotional insanity,” he told Kermit. That anger-fueled hysteria would begin to infect even friends and supporters, he suspected, “because when the average man loses his money he is simply like a wounded snake and strikes right and left at anything, innocent or the reverse, that presents itself as conspicuous in his mind.”
“From all sides,” Ida Tarbell observed, “the business world, the press, leaders of public opinion—there came such a berating of the President as a man has rarely had to endure.” No longer simply a “destroyer of credit,” Roosevelt had now become an “assassin of property.” From Kansas, William Allen White wrote to cheer his friend. “I feel personally hurt by all this abuse that is being heaped on you,” he began. “The whole system is bending its energy to turn back the clock, and the prayers and the assistance of every good American should be with you in this crisis.” Roosevelt found some consolation in White’s words but remained pessimistic about his prospects. “I care a great deal more for such a letter as you have written to me than I do for the attacks that are being made upon me,” he replied. “If there is much depression, if we meet hard times, then a great number of honest and well-meaning people will gradually come to believe in the truth of these attacks, and I shall probably end my term of service as President under a more or less dark cloud of obloquy. If so, I shall be sorry, of course; but I shall neither regret what I have done nor alter my line of conduct.”
On the morning of November 16, Ray Baker arrived at the White House for a scheduled discussion about his series on race in America. Instead, when Baker noticed a thin red pamphlet called The Roosevelt Panic on the president’s desk, the conversation quickly turned to the economy. Wall Street, Roosevelt explained, had circulated this incendiary tract “to destroy his program of reform.” For two hours, Roosevelt shared his vantage on the troubling situation. “It looks now,” he told Baker, “as though there would be let down in business throughout the country for some time to come. I shall be blamed for it: my enemies will make capital of it. It is probable that before next summer I shall be the bête noir of the country.” While still hopeful for Taft’s nomination, the president feared that “the country at the next election would have to choose between an extreme radical like Bryan and a republican reactionary; that in either event the moderate reform movement which he advocates would be lost sight of.” Continuing the conversation with Baker the next morning, Roosevelt repeatedly insisted that “the fight must be carried through.” The idea of either a reactionary or Bryan as the next president, Baker observed, seemed to set “his fighting blood to running!” The journalist departed with a growing conviction that Roosevelt was seriously considering another run. “A man may sometimes have to jeopardize his own soul,” the president had cryptically commented, “when the interests of the country are at stake.”
And in truth, Roosevelt was still brooding over the prospects of another term. “I hate for personal reasons to get out of the fight here,” he told one friend. “I have the uncomfortable feeling that I may possibly be shirking a duty.” The leader who quits “the fight before it is finished” deserves little respect, he confided to another supporter. Nevertheless, he countered, a political leader “must understand the temper and convictions of the people.” And while he believed he could win the Republican nomination, Roosevelt had misgivings about the general election. Nothing would be more humiliating than to break his word and then lose.
The time had come, Roosevelt finally decided, to make clear that he would not seek a third term under any circumstance. On the evening of December 11, he released an unusually succinct statement: “On the night after my election I made the following announcement.” Verbatim, he repeated his pledge renouncing a third term and concluded with an equally curt finality: “I have not changed and shall not change the decision thus announced.”
Roosevelt’s proclamation arrived “like a clap of thunder out of the clear sky,” the National Tribune reported. “Washington has been throbbing with political gossip ever since.” Derisive speculation abounded among the president’s critics: “I suppose he has come to the conclusion that it would not be worthwhile for him to run,” Democratic senator Tillman charged, stridently observing that “the pitiful condition into which he and Cortelyou have got things shows that he could not be elected.” Although Roosevelt would undoubtedly “do his utmost to name the man who [would] carry out his policies,” William Randolph Hearst noted, only time would tell whether the popularity he once enjoyed or the rejection he currently endured would prove more potent for his chosen candidate.
In Republican circles, commentary focused primarily on Taft’s brightening prospects. With Roosevelt “definitely and positively out of the Presidential race,” party leaders were free “to come out squarely for Taft.” California senator Frank Flint insisted that the state had been for Taft “all along” and could now openly declare its support. Kansas senator Chester Long concurred, calling Taft’s candidacy “the only one worth considering.”
As the political world debated Taft’s future, Will and Nellie crossed the Atlantic on the SS President Grant. They had cut short their round-the-world tour upon receiving news that Taft’s mother was critically ill. Louise Taft had been in splendid health until the previous summer, when she developed an acute inflammation of the gall bladder. Before his departure for the Philippines, Taft had stopped at the old family mansion in Millbury, Massachusetts, where his mother and her sister Delia resided together. Doctors considered Louise’s condition serious, yet Will and his brothers were convinced that her cheerful nature and her “strength, constitution and courage” would carry her through. She remained mentally clear and for a time seemed to be “on the road to recovery.” On her eightieth birthday in September, Annie Taft reported, “her cheeks were as rosy as a young girl’s and she was happy as a child at seeing us. There was something marvelous about the youthfulness of her face.” As winter approached, however, she “slowly but steadily” lost ground. On December 4, Charles telegraphed Will in St. Petersburg that the end was near. “Still have hope that she will survive until you arrive,” Charles wrote two days later, but Taft’s ship had left Hamburg, Germany, when he received word that his mother was dead.
When the SS President Grant arrived at Quarantine in New York, a courier handed Taft a confidential letter from the president. “I hope you will say nothing for publication until you see me,” Roosevelt cautioned. “Things have become somewhat intricate and you want to consider well what steps you are to take before taking them,” he explained. “A great many of your ardent supporters became convinced that your canvass was being hurt by the refusal of many people to accept my declination as final, and that numbers of people who were sincerely attached to you, but who were even more devoted to me, did not come out for you because they thought I was still a possibility . . . I therefore decided to make one more public statement.”
Neither politics nor strategy were foremost on William Taft’s agenda. No sooner had he landed than he made plans for an immediate trip to Cincinnati. “I was very much pained not to be able to come here to attend the funeral,” he told a friend. Missing the final “epoch” in his mother’s life had left him with a terrible “sense of something wanting,” a loss he hoped to mitigate by laying “a wreath on her grave and [calling] on her old friends.” While his mother’s death represented “a great change” for the entire family, he took solace in the knowledge that through eight decades, she had lived according to her own design, never riddled by a longing “for something else.” Ever a force “to be reckoned with,” Louise Taft had been a formative power within her own family, just as she had helped shape every community in which she lived. And although she would not see the new chapter that was beginning for her son William, Louise Taft had never doubted his devoted and amiable soul.