This “Bronco Buster” cartoon illustrates the jolt Roosevelt received when Democrats made huge gains in the 1910 midterm elections.
THE PROSPECT OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S return to American soil on June 18, 1910, left William Howard Taft fraught with anxiety. He was perplexed, he confided to Archie Butt, why Roosevelt had never once written to him during his travels. The letter Butt had hand-delivered as the former president left for Africa in March 1909 more than a year earlier remained unanswered. Roosevelt had never acknowledged the farewell gift that accompanied the letter. Butt, who had helped Taft choose the present—a gold ruler extendable to eight inches at one end, with a pencil affixed to the other—was bewildered. “There is no doubt that he received it?” Taft asked. “None whatever,” Butt assured him. “I gave it to him, and he held it up for the press men to see and sent his thanks by me and said he would answer it on his way over.”
Unaccountably, a copy of a telegram from Roosevelt to Taft, written aboard the SS Hamburg on the day he sailed, remains in Roosevelt’s own papers. “Am deeply touched by your gift and even more by your letter,” Roosevelt had written. “Everything will surely turn out all right, old man.” Perhaps, Butt speculated, “Roosevelt did write and gave the letter to someone to mail,” who then kept it “as a souvenir.” Perhaps Taft, expecting a letter, had forgotten receipt of the telegram. Either way, Taft waited stubbornly for the Colonel to reciprocate the correspondence and was deeply hurt when no letter came.
The lack of communication between the two men became public when Taft was forced to deny a newspaper report that Roosevelt had sent him a letter strongly endorsing the accomplishments of his administration. Upon further questioning, Taft had to admit that, in fact, he had “received no letters” from Roosevelt over the past year and a quarter. This was particularly striking, the Indianapolis Star noted, since “the colonel has kept up a pretty steady correspondence with many other persons.” Indeed, all social connection between the two families seemed to have cooled. Taft found it hard to understand why Edith Roosevelt had remained “singularly silent during all the time of his wife’s illness.”
Taft was not the only party harboring hurt feelings. Roosevelt was angered by reports from home suggesting that family members had not been accorded proper treatment from the White House under Mrs. Taft. Edith complained that although eighteen-year-old Ethel had been invited to a garden party during a visit to Washington, the first lady apparently had not done enough to recognize her. Alice and Nick Longworth had received a number of dinner invitations, but Alice felt slighted, believing she should have been asked to greet the guests at the head of the receiving line. The haughty young woman interpreted such minor omissions as a deliberate intent on the first lady’s part “to let the setting sun know its place.” The Roosevelt children, Butt observed, were convinced that Taft occupied the presidency “solely as a result of their father’s predetermination to put him there,” placing the new president and his first lady under a special obligation to the entire Roosevelt family. Taft fully appreciated the central role Roosevelt had played in his election, but felt that he had done all he could, given Nellie’s serious illness, to accommodate the family.“Everything which is done by either side is misconstrued,” Archie Butt told his sister-in-law; the fact that such “petty personal jealousies” could tarnish the long-standing friendship between Roosevelt and Taft seemed to him inexplicable. Further aggravating matters, Roosevelt could not fathom why no “word of welcome” from the White House awaited him when he came out of the jungle and met with scores of correspondents and friends in Khartoum.
When Taft finally decided at the end of May to swallow his pride and write once more to Roosevelt, he described the painful calamity of Nellie’s collapse openly. Her inability to speak, he confided, had been “nearly complete” for a prolonged period, requiring that everyone be “as careful as possible to prevent another attack.” While she had slowly recovered her physical strength, Taft explained, a year later Nellie still could only “speak a formula of greeting” at large receptions. Dinners and social events that called for conversation had to be circumvented. On the political front, he acknowledged that “the Garfield Pinchot Ballinger controversy” had brought him “a great deal of personal pain and suffering,” but he preferred not to “say a word” about the complex dispute. “You will have to look into that wholly for yourself,” he told Roosevelt, “without influence by the parties if you would find the truth.” Despite these personal and political difficulties, Taft hoped that his old friend would soon find time for an extended visit to the White House.
Concerned that his letter might not reach Roosevelt before he sailed from Europe, Taft made the decision to send Archie Butt to meet the Kaiserin in New York, where he might deliver a duplicate copy, along with a shorter note of welcome. To placate any wounded egos, Butt suggested to the president that Nellie also write her own note to Edith. That accomplished, Butt ventured, “you and Mrs. Taft have left nothing undone.” If Edith, “not understanding Mrs. Taft’s condition,” did not feel that enough consideration had been given to her children, then this kindly explanatory note would straighten out the perceived neglect. To Butt’s delight, Nellie agreed, though he privately worried that “when women get at cross purposes it is hard to get them straightened out again.”
As an official representative of the president, Archie Butt was among the first to board the Kaiserin. “Oh, Archie, but this is fine,” Roosevelt said, warmly clasping the hand of his former military aide. Archie dutifully delivered Taft’s two letters to Roosevelt, explaining that the first was a duplicate of one previously sent, and the second a note of welcome. Roosevelt said he had received and answered the first letter just before setting sail from England, but opened the second one at once and read it through. “Please say to the President that I greatly appreciate this letter and that I shall answer it later,” he replied. Butt then told Roosevelt about Nellie’s stroke “and how she dreaded to see anyone whom she had known in the past.” He trusted his account would explain why the first lady had not entertained the Roosevelt clan more expansively. Roosevelt said only “that he had heard much that had distressed him.”
When Edith Roosevelt came in, Archie presented her with Nellie’s letter, which she quickly tucked into her handbag. Distracted by the arrival of Alice and Kermit, Edith seemed to forget the correspondence—an oversight confirmed in a subsequent conversation with Archie Butt. Inviting Archie to Oyster Bay in July, Edith pointedly quipped, “if the master will let you off,” adding, “Remember me to the President although you brought me no word.” Archie reminded her that he had given her a letter; “she looked startled for a minute,” only then recalling the note in her handbag. “Of course I will answer it,” she recovered. “I appreciate it even if it has come a little bit late.”
Archie caught the midnight train from New York and reached Washington in time for breakfast with Taft, providing a full account of his interactions with the Roosevelts. “I feel it is due largely to you that yesterday has passed off as it has,” Taft said. “I want you to know that I am grateful.” Butt learned that when Taft came back from his trip to Villanova the previous night, he had found Roosevelt’s response to his first letter. In Butt’s judgment, the response was “courteous,” though it lacked the warmth that had characterized the friendship between the two men. “I am of course much concerned about some of the things I see and am told,” Roosevelt wrote, “but what I have felt it best to do was to say absolutely nothing.” Several days later, Taft received a second letter from Roosevelt thanking him for his “kind and friendly words of welcome.” Nonetheless, he still avoided any commitment to a visit with his old friend. “Now, my dear Mr. President,” Roosevelt wrote, “your invitation to the White House touches me greatly, and also what Mrs. Taft wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt. But I don’t think it well for an ex-President to go to the White House, or indeed to go to Washington, except when he cannot help it.” Overall, the feel of the letter disheartened both Taft and Butt. Former presidents, of course, frequently returned to the capital.
TAFT’S DISTRESS OVER ROOSEVELT’S COOLNESS was temporarily dispelled a week later by the nearly complete triumph of his administration’s legislative agenda. Even in the face of intense “factional wrangling,” the 61st Congress produced a splendid record, passing “more general legislation than any preceding session for many years.” There had been many “dark days” during the winter and spring, the New York Tribune remarked, when almost everyone “lost faith” in the president’s “ability to control and lead the dissident forces he had been called upon to command.” Surprising many, the insurgents and the regulars had come together to enact a series of “strongly progressive” laws. “Taft a failure? Taft not effective?” one editorial remarked, aping the rhetoric of skepticism that had plagued Taft early on. “We never had such a towering wood pile of work from the congressional saw mill.”
A new railroad bill bolstered the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission to initiate action against rate hikes, created a “special Commerce Court” to expedite judgments, and brought telegraph and telephone companies under the authority of the Interstate Commerce Act. These provisions strengthened federal control of railway rates, the historic program Roosevelt had begun. Publicizing campaign contributions both before and after congressional elections was mandated; individual statehood for Arizona and New Mexico granted; a Bureau of Mines created to improve the hazardous conditions in the mining industry; and money appropriated for the Tariff Board “to ascertain the difference in the cost of production, at home and abroad.”
Passage of the postal savings bank bill, granting people of small means (who had generally hoarded their cash in fear of bank runs) the guarantee of the U.S. Treasury, was considered Taft’s “crowning achievement.” For nearly four decades, the big banks, stirring the specter of socialism, had defeated the idea of post office banks. “I am not in favor of having the government do anything that private citizens can do as well or better,” Taft had repeatedly argued during his transcontinental trip the previous fall, but “the laissez-faire school, which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force,” had long fallen out of favor. When the bill finally passed, Taft declared, “I am as pleased as Punch,” proudly touting it as “one of the great Congressional enactments. It creates an epoch.”
The insurgents rightly took credit for adding amendments that improved each of these laws, but Taft deserved equal praise for corralling support from “Old Guard” Republicans, who at last fulfilled the promises they had made during the bitter tariff fight to support the rest of his legislative program. “When people come to write history fifty years from now,” a New York Times reporter observed, “they might give credit to the worth of a plain-minded gentleman whose head wasn’t thoroughly filled from the beginning with himself, but who really and honestly tried to enact into legislation the things he himself had written into his party’s platform.” Charley Taft was delighted by his brother’s legislative success, writing to tell him, “I always had faith that it would come out that way, but it is a satisfaction to see it in black and white. . . . The record is immense; the accomplishments are tremendous.”
Accompanied by Archie Butt and several of his cabinet members, Taft went to the president’s room in the Senate on Sunday night, June 26, to sign the remaining bills before Congress adjourned. Members of both Houses “congratulated him on the fact that the measures on which he had been most insistent had been passed.” He was “in a jovial mood,” the Washington Times reported, “and seemed greatly pleased with the way the session was ending.” Happy for his chief, Archie noted that “the only incident which marred the closing hours” was that not a single insurgent senator “came in to pay his respects or to say good-bye.” Particularly in light of the party’s legislative success, Taft was baffled by their continued hostility over the tariff struggle and the Ballinger-Pinchot episode. When the president had finished signing, he told Butt he was not ready to return to the White House, asking him to prepare the car “to take a joy ride.” Soon, Archie wrote, they were “humming through the Soldiers’ Home and down through the park.” The following day, tired but happy, Taft left for his home in Beverly, where Nellie had settled for the summer.
UNLIKE TAFT, ROOSEVELT WAS INCAPABLE of extended periods of leisure; he rested at Sagamore Hill for a single day before heading to Manhattan to take up his duties as contributing editor to the weekly public affairs magazine The Outlook. Before leaving for Africa, he had signed a $12,000 annual contract with the publisher, Dr. Lawrence Abbott. The Outlook had appointed a three-room suite for Roosevelt: an office for his secretary, a waiting room for visitors, and a private room for the Colonel. Through a hidden wall, Roosevelt could escape to a side elevator without entering the main hall. Overall, the suite’s “mahogany furniture, polished floors, and rich rugs” provided a “magnificence unusual for an office building.”
Sorting through the 5,000 letters he had received during his absence, Roosevelt issued a statement expressing his “very real gratitude” to the many letter writers, along with his “real regret” that he could answer only “a small proportion.” Asked by the newspapermen when he would comment on the current political situation, he declared that he would “not make a speech for two months” and that even then, his commentary would be “non-political.” Indeed, he insisted, “I don’t know that I will ever make a political speech again.” Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. “Yes,” Roosevelt laughingly said. “I won’t say never.”
And indeed, before a week had passed, Roosevelt had broken his resolve in dramatic fashion. Encountering New York governor Charles Evans Hughes at his thirtieth Harvard Reunion, Roosevelt was soon talking animatedly about how he could offer political support. Their discussion, observers noted, was “marked by frequent gestures”; Roosevelt repeatedly “brought his clenched fist down on the palm of his other hand.” Throughout his governorship, Hughes had fought the party bosses, finally deciding to accept Taft’s proffer of a Supreme Court seat rather than run for another term; but before leaving office, he hoped to pass a historic bill shifting the power of nomination from the party machine to the people. After listening to Hughes, Roosevelt impetuously agreed to back the governor’s direct primary bill.
To substantiate his pledge, Roosevelt sent a telegram to the New York County Committee chair, Lloyd Griscom, roundly endorsing the direct primary bill. “I believe the people demand it,” he maintained, and “I most earnestly hope that it will be enacted into law.” With this action, Roosevelt “plunged into the very thick of the political controversy.” He had taken “the helm and become the State leader in the approaching campaign.” The Colonel’s advocacy, the New York Tribune editorialized, “is likely to prove the most potent factor in determining the fate of that measure.”
During Roosevelt’s reemergence into the political arena, he carefully limited his contact with William Howard Taft. After spending the night at Henry Cabot Lodge’s summer home in Nahant, Massachusetts, a small town only ten miles from Beverly, Roosevelt, most likely at Lodge’s suggestion, called on the president at the Summer White House. Archie Butt and Secret Service agent Jimmy Sloan were on the porch when the big touring car carrying Roosevelt and Lodge arrived. Hearing the commotion, the president came outside. “Ah Theodore, it is good to see you,” he said. “How are you, Mr. President,” Roosevelt replied. “This is simply bully.” Taking hold of Roosevelt’s shoulders, Taft implored him to drop the formal title, but Roosevelt refused: “You must be Mr. President,” he insisted, “and I am Theodore.” Taft took Roosevelt’s arm and led him to a wicker table on the veranda overlooking the water.
But despite Taft’s efforts to revive their former cordiality, the atmosphere remained “strained,” Archie Butt lamented. When the butler took drink orders, Roosevelt, who rarely drank anything stronger than wine, blurted out that “he needed rather than wanted a Scotch and soda.” Assuming that the president and the Colonel would wish to talk in private, Butt was informed by Lodge that Roosevelt did not want “to be left alone with the President.” Taft tried to set Roosevelt at ease, assuring him that he would “do all in his power” to help pass the direct primary bill in New York. When Nellie and Helen Taft joined the group, Roosevelt, aware of Nellie’s condition, refrained from directing any questions to her. To alleviate the awkwardness, Taft asked Roosevelt to share stories about his recent encounters with the European kings and queens. Roosevelt happily obliged, regaling the little group with an hour of anecdotes until it was time to leave.
As Roosevelt and Lodge prepared to depart, Lodge proposed that they agree upon a statement for the swarm of two hundred journalists anxiously waiting for them at the gate. If the president did not object, Roosevelt suggested, he would simply say it had been “a most delightful afternoon.” Taft readily agreed. “With nothing on which to hang a story,” Archie Butt later observed, the reporters used their imaginations to concoct a compelling tale. “From beginning to end it was a love feast,” one account ran; the warmth of their meeting was proof “that their friendship is of the stuff that endures,” said another. “Just Like Old Times,” the New York Times reported, fancifully adding that “for a full minute,” the two old friends stood “with hands upon each other’s shoulders, while evident delight shone in every line of their smile.” The continuing “peals of laughter” and “slaps on the back,” the Times concluded, made it abundantly clear that “rumors of coolness between them” were unfounded. Both men knew that such a convivial encounter was far from the truth. The self-conscious meeting had painfully exposed the widening rupture in their once intimate friendship. The Times did, however, get one detail right: when Roosevelt was asked when he intended to return for a second visit, he replied, “I don’t know that I shall.”
UNPLEASANT NEWS GREETED ROOSEVELT WHEN he got back to Sagamore Hill. That afternoon, the boss-controlled New York Senate, “in swift and emphatic fashion,” had defeated the direct primary bill. “It is Mr. Roosevelt who is beaten,” declared the New York World, while the New York American exulted that “for the first time in seven years the triumphant career of Theodore Roosevelt has had a serious backset.” The Literary Digest predicted that “those who know the Colonel have little doubt” that such a “slap in the face” would propel him “back into the arena prepared for war.” The prognosticators proved correct. “They made the fight on me,” Roosevelt declared, “and I’ve got to vindicate myself.”
Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s path to achieving vindication pitted him directly against the Old Guard Republican bosses who controlled the state machine. Fearing that reactionary forces would dominate the state convention that fall, Lloyd Griscom urged Roosevelt to run for the post of temporary convention chair. More powerful than its name suggested, the temporary chairman would deliver the keynote speech, exert influence over the platform, and play an important role in nominating the party’s slate of candidates. A longtime acquaintance of Taft’s, Griscom shortly afterward informed the president that Roosevelt had agreed to run. “It did not occur to me that any one would oppose” Roosevelt’s candidacy, Taft later said. At Griscom’s request, he sent a telegram to Vice President James Sherman the next day. The conservative New Yorker had been the party’s choice, not Taft’s, for the second spot. Taft instructed Sherman by telegram to tell the party bosses that they must avoid division at all costs, urging them to hold “a full conference” with Roosevelt and make “reasonable concessions with reference to platform and candidates.”
Not until the following day did Taft learn that the Old Guard had decided to run its own candidate. Sherman attempted to enlist Taft’s support behind an alternative candidate, such as Elihu Root. “Don’t you know,” Sherman cautioned, “that [Roosevelt] will make a speech against you and the Administration, and will carry the convention and prevent an endorsement, and take the machinery out of the hands of your friends?” When asked where he would “stand in such a fight,” Taft momentarily wavered. Instead of using his influence to prevent opposition to Roosevelt, he simply said he should not be dragged into the battle. During the formal meeting of the Republican State Committee the next day, the bosses proposed the vice president as their candidate for temporary chair. With this clever move, they insinuated that Sherman had the backing of the administration. Griscom, who had not expected the vote that day, was taken aback. As a result, the panel chose Sherman by a 20–15 vote.
When Roosevelt received the news at the Outlook office, “he fumed and refused to believe the report.” Later that afternoon, he issued a statement openly aligning himself with the progressive faction against the machine. “He was glad,” he wrote, that the “State leaders had taken the course they did because it showed that he had tried to bring about harmony, and having failed to do so, he was now able to go in and fight for all he was worth.” Indeed, he threatened he would take the fight to the floor of the convention, where the delegates had the power to overturn the committee choice. Bravado notwithstanding, Roosevelt was distressed by the newspaper reports. “Old Guard Is Jubilant,” blared the New York Times. “The prestige of the former President has received several hard knocks” in the weeks since his return, the Times added, but this was “the heaviest blow yet.”
When reports spread that Taft had conspired with the party bosses to bring about his defeat, Roosevelt was incensed. Apparently, several committee members had changed their votes after being erroneously told that Taft had endorsed Sherman’s candidacy. As word reached the president that Roosevelt was planning to make a statement charging him “with treachery,” Taft was beside himself. Unable to sleep, he would wander downstairs each morning at 5 a.m. to glean the latest from the newspapers. “No one knows just what Mr. Roosevelt is going to do,” Archie Butt observed, “and everyone about Beverly seems to be sitting over a volcano except the news paper men—and they, of course, fatten on what kills other people.”
Though reluctant to respond to newspaper stories, Taft finally decided to issue a formal statement flatly denying that he had “ever expressed a wish to defeat Mr. Roosevelt” or “taken the slightest step to do so.” On the contrary, he had sent the telegram to the New York leaders urging “the necessity for the fullest conference with Mr. Roosevelt.” He was “indignant” to find that his request had been ignored. The Washington Herald reported that Roosevelt “was very glad to see President Taft’s statement.”
“As the waters of excitement recede,” Butt reported to his sister-in-law, Clara, “it is evident that the last few days have left their permanent mark on the President. He looks ten years older.” Taft admitted that he was “profoundly grieved” to learn that Roosevelt had thought, even for a moment, that he was capable of such treachery. “His whole attitude toward me since his return has been unfriendly,” he told Archie, complaining that if Roosevelt felt disappointed, “the proper thing for him to have done was to give me the opportunity to explain my position and to thrash it out as we had done many times in the past.” Archie Butt himself was equally disconsolate, fearing that the incident had further diminished the chances for reconciliation. “They are now apart,” he lamented, “and how they will keep from wrecking the country between them I scarcely see.”
LATE THAT SUMMER, COLONEL ROOSEVELT boarded a private railroad car secured by The Outlook to begin a three-week speaking tour through sixteen states, including Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota. As he headed west for his first public appearances since returning from Africa, one political question was on everyone’s mind: “On which side will the Colonel now align himself? What changes have taken place in his philosophy?” A resounding answer came on August 31, in Osawatomie, Kansas, as Roosevelt spoke at a ceremony dedicating the John Brown Memorial Park. The festive occasion, which brought more than 30,000 people, resembled that of “a county fair,” with fireworks, a drum and fife corps, vendor booths, and food stands. Climbing onto a kitchen table that doubled as a speaking platform, Roosevelt delivered the most radical speech he had ever made, placing him ipso facto in “the front rank” of the insurgent forces. Entitled “The New Nationalism,” the speech had gone through several drafts, with language and ideas provided by Gifford Pinchot, William Allen White, and The New Republic editor Herbert Croly, whose recent book, The Promise of American Life, had attracted Roosevelt’s attention.
“The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage,” Roosevelt proclaimed. Such an approach, he explained, “regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property.” While he still stood for “the square deal,” he now recognized that “fair play under the present rules of the game” was not enough; the rules themselves had to be “changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.”
For this generation, Roosevelt maintained, “the struggle for freedom” demanded a fight for popular rule against the special interests. Though “every special interest is entitled to justice,” he declared, “not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office.” To drive these “special interests out of politics,” he called for the direct primary and for laws forbidding corporations from directly funding political objectives. “Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered—not gambling in stocks,” Roosevelt further contended, calling for both an income tax and an inheritance tax on large fortunes. Finally, he pressed for new laws regulating child labor and women’s work, enforcing better working conditions, and providing vocational training. “No matter how honest and decent we are in our private lives,” he concluded, “if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration of the law, we cannot go forward as a nation.”
As the crowd thundered its approval, Kansas governor Walter S. Stubbs jumped on the table. “My friends,” he exclaimed, “we have just heard one of the greatest pronouncements for human welfare ever made. This is one of the big moments in the history of the United States!” Seated amid the emotional crowd, Gifford Pinchot was overjoyed, later declaring to Roosevelt that he was “the leader to whom all look.” Headlines in progressive papers trumpeted Roosevelt’s “Advanced Insurgent Stand,” suggesting that the insurgent movement would now be “materially strengthened.” During the remainder of his western tour, Roosevelt was repeatedly greeted with “frenzied applause” and “overpowering demonstrations of affection and devotion.” No man in the present generation, one reporter suggested, “has ever been honored with so magnificent a tribute.”
Whereas westerners ecstatically embraced Roosevelt’s new radical stance, easterners reacted with “consternation and horror.” The New York Sun called the New Nationalism doctrine “more nearly revolutionary than anything that ever proceeded from the lips of any American who has held high office in our Government.” Conservative commentators warned against “this new Napoleon,” who threatened to destroy the constitutional separation of powers. Steering clear of such incendiary labels, moderate and even some liberal Republicans criticized Roosevelt for making only “slight mention” of the president during his strenuous tour, regarding “his silence” as a “most adroit form of attack,” ultimately designed to diminish Taft and raise his own prospects for 1912.
Reading reports of Roosevelt’s speeches, Taft was genuinely disturbed. “He is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House,” he told his brother Charley, “and has proposed a program which it is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Federal Constitution. He has attacked the Supreme Court which came like a bolt out of a clear sky, and which has aroused great indignation throughout the country on the part of conservatives.” Writing in a similar vein to Horace, he reported that Roosevelt’s “wild ideas” had “frightened every lawyer” and startled every decent “conservative” in the East. Horace was saddened to see lines being drawn that positioned his brother “on the other side of the fence” from moderate progressives, making it seem as if he were defending the Old Guard and expounding the “kind of politics” he had always fought against. While Taft’s positions had not materially changed since his days as a cabinet officer, Horace worried that many “good men fighting against machine politics” now regarded him as a member of the opposition.
Taft believed that with each “riotous reception” Roosevelt received, “his reasons for thinking I would not do as a candidate in 1912” had multiplied. “His present mental condition,” he told Horace, “rejects me entirely and I think he occupies his leisure time in finding reasons why he is justified in not supporting me.” He had heard from several sources, he told Charley, that Roosevelt was still angry over the fact that “I dared to include you in the same class with him as assisting me in my canvass for the presidency. I venture to think that swell-headedness could go no further than this.” Gossipmongers exacerbated Taft’s concerns, reporting letters they had seen in which Roosevelt described him as utterly unfit for the presidency, suggesting that he must be challenged for the nomination.
Archie Butt watched and worried as Taft’s bitterness toward his predecessor grew; loyal to both men, Archie found the prospect of an open rupture heartbreaking. Taft sympathized with his aide’s dilemma, observing, “I know how it distresses you, Archie, to see Theodore and myself come to the parting of the ways.” Recognizing that it pained Archie to listen to conversations critical of Roosevelt, Taft greatly admired the “dignified silence” he maintained. “Your silence will never be misconstrued by me,” Taft promised. With each passing month, he had come to rely more and more on Archie. “He told me,” Archie recorded in September, “that he always loved to see me come and hated to see me go.” Archie’s reflections make clear that this feeling was reciprocated. “In many ways,” Archie wrote, “he is the best man I have ever known, too honest for the Presidency, possibly, and possibly too good-natured or too trusting or too something on which it is hard just now for a contemporary to put his finger, but on which the finger of the historian of our politics will be placed.”
Nellie, too, had grown increasingly dependent on Archie Butt. Though she had learned to communicate her thoughts and make her wishes known to family members, she remained incapable of conducting “a connected conversation with strangers.” When the British ambassador and his wife called on the president and first lady, Butt served as “the buffer” between Nellie and Mrs. Bryce, enabling the flow of conversation whenever Nellie came “to a standstill.” During a garden party when she “became separated” from the president, Butt again came to her rescue; being on her own, she told her son Robert, “was pretty awful,” until Archie escorted her back to the mansion. After a series of fainting spells, Nellie’s doctor advised her to reduce the rigorous schedule of musicales and garden parties she had planned for the 1910 social season. She refused, preferring, he interpreted, “to die in harness” rather than “remain in the background as an invalid.” Assessing the full social schedule planned for the coming winter and spring, Helen Taft decided to assist her mother at the White House rather than return to Bryn Mawr in the fall.
Within the family circle, Nellie became less anxious about her inability to articulate her thoughts. On the contrary, she tended to blurt out whatever came to her mind without the restraint she had characteristically exercised. During a luncheon conversation, for example, she suddenly mentioned Mabel Boardman, head of the American Red Cross and a longtime family friend. Speaking with excessive emphasis, she told her husband he would never marry Miss Boardman. If he became a widower, she predicted, he would desire “something young and prettier.”
Unsurprisingly, much of the first family’s conversation in the months following Roosevelt’s return centered on divining what he might do. After reading an account of Roosevelt’s opposition to Ballinger, Nellie offered a prescient comment to her husband: “I suppose you will have to fight Mr. Roosevelt for the nomination, and if you get it he will defeat you. But it can’t be helped. If possible you must not allow him to defeat you for the renomination. It does not make much difference about the reelection.” Taft agreed with Nellie’s assessment, surmising early on that Roosevelt would indeed challenge him in 1912. Numerous newspapers suggested that he should “step out of the way” for the former president, but he believed that “having once been nominated and elected,” he was under obligation to his supporters to run for renomination—even if he faced certain defeat, which he would accept “like a gentleman.”
RETURNING FROM HIS WESTERN TOUR in early September, Roosevelt had only two weeks to prepare for battle against Sherman and the Republican bosses at the state convention. The state party was “on the Eve of one of the bitterest factional fights” in a generation, and Roosevelt’s contest with Sherman for the temporary chair stood at the center of the proceedings. The great underlying issue, Boss William Barnes declared, is “whether the Republican Party is to remain the party of conservatism or be carried away with radicalism.”
Roosevelt felt that the conflict was beneath him. “Twenty years ago I should not have minded the fight in the least,” he told Lodge. “It would have been entirely suitable for my age and standing. But it is not the kind of fight into which an ex-President should be required to go.” Nonetheless, he confessed, “I could not help myself.” Lloyd Griscom admitted to Roosevelt that he was having trouble rounding up votes for him among “good honest” party loyalists, who sympathized with his opposition to the bosses but were upset with his seeming hostility toward the president. A meeting with Taft to demonstrate they were “on good terms,” Griscom advised, would be helpful. Roosevelt readily agreed, recognizing that a show of unity might “turn the scale” in a contest as close as this promised to be.
Griscom arranged a luncheon in New Haven, where Taft was attending a meeting of the Yale Corporation. After a general conversation with Griscom and Taft’s newly appointed private secretary, Charles Norton, Taft and Roosevelt were left alone. Roosevelt later said he “made a point of being as pleasant as possible,” but Taft saw beneath the mask, later divulging to Archie that he felt Roosevelt was “not genial and quite offish.” Taft recognized immediately that Roosevelt was strategically waiting to bring up the New York situation so he could later claim that the president“had spoken first.” His calculation worked. As the meeting drew to a close, Taft volunteered that he hoped Roosevelt would beat the bosses and was glad to offer his assistance.
Unlike Taft, his secretary was willing to engage in the political game, creating what Roosevelt considered a “very irritating experience.” Norton, “a little too slick for genuine wisdom,” told the newspapermen that the Colonel had requested the meeting to stave off trouble in New York and needed the president’s backing. Roosevelt’s opponents jumped on the story as a signal that he was worried about his chances at the convention. At once, Roosevelt put out a statement “emphatically” denying that he had sought the meeting or asked anything of Taft. At Roosevelt’s bidding, Griscom followed up with a statement declaring that the meeting was his idea. Regardless of these attempts to reformulate the story, Roosevelt complained to Lodge, a general perception remained that he had come “to beg for assistance”—for this, he blamed Taft as well as Norton. As a result, Archie Butt lamented, Roosevelt and Taft grew “farther apart than ever.”
The auditorium at the Saratoga town hall was jammed with 7,000 men and women on September 27 when Roosevelt came down the aisle. His appearance provoked a round of “riotous cheers” as delegates and spectators “shrieked and yelled and waved their hats and bonnets.” When Vice President Sherman arrived shortly afterward, “the scene was repeated,” setting the stage for a divisive public battle. The Old Guard had selected Colonel Abraham Gruber, “a little roly-poly” man, to deliver the attack against Roosevelt. Unable to make his way through the crowd, Gruber was “practically lifted over the heads of the army of humans and passed up to the platform.” Labeling Roosevelt “an enemy of the nation” and a threat to “public safety,” Gruber’s mean-spirited diatribe provoked such deafening “catcalls” that he could not continue until Roosevelt jumped up, shouting, “I ask a full hearing for Col. Gruber.”
Roosevelt’s supporters were anxious when the balloting began, but he emerged victorious, receiving 567 votes against Sherman’s 445. In a conciliatory speech intended to unify Republicans, Roosevelt listed the accomplishments of the last Congress, giving credit to Republican lawmakers and “to our able, upright, and distinguished Pres. William Howard Taft.” Once installed as temporary chair, Roosevelt mustered the votes to get his fellow progressive Henry Stimson the nomination for governor and to pass a fairly progressive platform, including a plank calling for direct primaries. Parts of the platform disturbed him—including the endorsement of Taft in 1912 and approval of the tariff—but he believed that he had come out as well as possible.
While Roosevelt was at Saratoga, Taft was hosting a four-day sleepover for the members of his cabinet at the White House. Having spent the summer in Beverly, the president wanted to catch up on each department’s work and make plans for his annual message. “The house party has been a great success,” he reported to Nellie. “We have had a jolly time on the one hand, and we have been very hard working on the other.” Normally, the unique situation of a cabinet house party would have attracted considerable newspaper attention, but all eyes—including those of the president and his cabinet—were directed to Saratoga and Roosevelt’s fight against the Old Guard. “Bulletins were brought to the President as they arrived,” Archie reported, and everyone “spent most of the day hearing and discussing the news from New York.” On the day the platform was approved, Taft wrote to Nellie in Beverly, commenting, “I hope you saw the proceedings of the Saratoga Convention and the very satisfactory resolutions endorsing your husband. Roosevelt made a speech praising me also, which must have gone a little hard with him, but which indicated that he found it necessary.” Overall, Taft’s White House party was a distinct success, as evinced by a gracious note that George Wickersham wrote to Nellie: “We had a delicious table and nothing was lacking but the actual presence of its mistress to make the White House a perfect place of abode. It was a charming idea of the President to invite the Cabinet to stay there with him. It has served to draw us more together and to unite us absolutely in an enthusiastic love and admiration of our Chief.”
Taft’s surmise that necessity, not desire, had compelled both Roosevelt’s speech and his acceptance of the tariff plank proved correct. Throughout his long career, Roosevelt had accepted the need for compromise. Though unhappy about the tariff plank, he believed he “should have lost everything” had he demanded its elimination. Hard-line insurgents fiercely disagreed with Roosevelt’s flexibility. Gifford Pinchot refused to back the ticket, considering endorsement of the tariff offensive and objecting to Roosevelt’s characterization of Taft as upright. Roosevelt fired back at progressive ideologues, defending Taft’s honor even while questioning his leadership. “I think it absurd to say that Taft is not upright,” though he may be a failed leader. To complaints by William Kent, a Republican congressman from California, that Stimson “was not radical enough,” Roosevelt countered: “Among all men who are prominent here, Harry Stimson is the only man who is anywhere near as radical as I am.” In a letter to his son Theodore Junior, Roosevelt poured out his frustrations: on the one hand, he pointed out, the traditional elements of the Republican Party—club members, big business, and Wall Street—“have been nearly insane over me.” Yet, at the same time, “the wild-eyed radicals do not support us because they think we have not gone far enough. I am really sorry to say that good Gifford Pinchot has practically taken his place among the latter,” he noted, finally recognizing the rigidity of Pinchot’s views.
A week after the convention, Roosevelt reconnected with Ray Baker, inviting him to lunch at Oyster Bay. “I had one of the freest talks with him I ever had,” Baker recorded in his journal. “Much of our talk covered the Saratoga fight. I told him frankly that I had thought that a defeat there on the platform would have been better for him than an organization victory.” Appealing to Baker as “a reasonable exponent of the extreme left wing of the party,” Roosevelt defended his actions and “spoke exultantly” of Stimson’s candidacy. When the discussion turned to Taft, he made it clear that “they had wholly parted company,” fixating again on the letter Taft had written after his election, thanking both Charley and himself in equal measure! His pride clearly wounded, he proceeded to describe the humiliating reports that followed his meeting with Taft in New Haven. “It happened once: but never again! Never again!” When Baker asked if he intended to be a candidate in 1912, he answered frankly, “I don’t know.” At the present, he maintained that he was “not seeking a nomination,” but “circumstances might force me to be a candidate.”
After another conversation at the Outlook office two days later, Baker told Roosevelt that his words on the tariff lacked his “usual moral punch,” that he “would have stood higher with the country” if he had fought against the tariff plank. “He took it all in very good part,” Baker wrote, considering this ability to endure criticism “one of his finest characteristics.” Nevertheless, the reporter was beginning to believe that Roosevelt would ultimately fail in his attempt to play “the old game” of serving “both party & principle.” The tide was simply moving too fast for someone “trying to be both radical & conservative.”
As summer turned to fall, Roosevelt spent his days and nights on the campaign trail, trying to keep the Republican Party unified for the midterm elections. He stumped for both progressives and conservatives—for Beveridge in Indiana, then Henry Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts. He traveled first to Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas, and then to Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa. “I am being nearly worked to death,” he admitted to Bamie in early October. “I only hope I can last until election day.” In mid-October, he returned to his native state for the final push. Rallying huge audiences, his charismatic self had become the central issue of the campaign, leaving Henry Stimson in his shadow.
As the election neared, Republican prospects across the country darkened. After more than a decade of Republican rule, the people were frustrated by the cost of living, tired of high tariffs, and resentful of machine politics. When Democrats won an “unprecedented” victory in the October state elections in Maine, commentators predicted the midterms would result in a Democratic landslide.
“If Mr. Roosevelt can save New York while neighboring States are captured by the opposition,” the Springfield Republican declared, “his own national leadership and influence will take on a finality unapproached even in his own career.” If he triumphs, the New York Times agreed, “it will be practically impossible to prevent his seizing the nomination to the Presidency in 1912.”
REPUBLICANS HAD EXPECTED TO LOSE ground during the midterm elections, but when the votes were totaled on November 8, the strength of the Democratic victory “stunned Washington.” Democrats gained control of the House by a margin of nearly 60 votes, reduced the Republican majority in the Senate by ten seats, and elevated Democratic governors to power in twenty-six of the forty-eight states. In New Jersey, former university president Woodrow Wilson vanquished Republican Vivian Lewis by one of the widest margins in the state’s history. In New York, the entire state ticket lost, including Henry Stimson and his own congressman, Charles Cocks. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, Democrats Simeon Baldwin and Eugene Foss easily trounced their opponents. In Ohio, Democrat Judson Harmon handily defeated Warren Harding. “The Democratic party in November of 1910,” one historian has observed, “stood rehabilitated in the eyes of the country.”
Despite the clear national trend, journalists interpreted the New York result as a “crushing rebuke” to Theodore Roosevelt. Had he kept his initial vow of silence after returning from Africa, one commentator observed, “defeat would have come to his party but a great cry for him as the only compeller of victory would have been heard.” Instead, he had alienated the Old Guard at Saratoga, assumed personal control of the state party, and thrown his full weight behind the losing candidate, Henry Stimson. With the thrashing he took on his home turf, the New York Times declared, Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism has been pitched into its grave.” And beyond New York, there seemed “to be a fatal quality in his endorsement,” one editorial observed, for “nearly every man whom he lauded in different parts of the country has been defeated,” while the men he “singled out for vituperation” were “triumphantly elected.”
Sensing blood, Roosevelt’s opponents moved in for the kill. “The trail that Mr. Roosevelt has traveled for the last ten weeks can be traced by the battered wrecks of Republican hopes,” declared the New York World. This “tremendous overthrow,” proclaimed the New York Herald, “makes complete the defeat of his plans to make himself the next nominee for the Presidency and places upon a man once President a humiliation such as has never before been known by any one who has essayed the role of national leader of his party.” Theodore Roosevelt, the New York Evening Post editorialized, is seen as “the chief architect of disaster. He has demonstrated that there are thousands of Republicans who will not vote for him or his nominees or his novel doctrines.”
Roosevelt acknowledged that he had experienced “a smashing defeat” in New York, with troubling reverberations across the land. He recognized that he had lost support on all sides of the political spectrum: progressives claimed he had not been radical enough; conservatives charged he was too radical. Westerners condemned his failure to break with the administration, while easterners berated his unwillingness to endorse Taft. The time had come, he understood, for a new leader, “one who has aroused less envenomed hatred,” to take up the causes he had championed. “The American people,” he reluctantly admitted to William Allen White, “feel a little tired of me.”
The decisive routing and overwhelming negative press hit the proud former president hard. On the weekend after the election, the journalist Mark Sullivan called on Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill. When Sullivan rose to leave after a good talk, Roosevelt pleaded: “Don’t go. The time will come when only a few friends like you will come out to see me here.” Roosevelt was still “in a most depressed state of mind” when Lloyd Griscom stopped by weeks later. “All his old buoyancy was gone,” Griscom related to Archie Butt. “He really seemed to him to be a changed man.” Regardless of his falling-out with Roosevelt, Taft was deeply affected when Archie shared Griscom’s description of Roosevelt’s isolation at Oyster Bay. “The American people are strange in their attitudes toward their idols,” he mused. They lead them on and then “cut their legs from under them,” simply “to make their fall all the greater.” Given their former intimacy, he understood how hard it must be for Roosevelt “to feel everything slipping away from him, all the popularity, the power which he loved, and above all the ability to do what he thought was of real benefit to his country.”
As president and head of the Republican Party, Taft was, of course, more responsible than anyone else for the magnitude of the Republican loss. “It was not only a landslide,” he acknowledged, “but a tidal wave and holocaust all rolled into one general cataclysm.” As early as the previous January, he had predicted that the “whole drift” of public sentiment was turning toward the Democrats. “Sooner or later I fear we have got to turn the government over to this element and let it demonstrate its incapacity to govern the country,” he reflected, believing that only then would Republicans come back into power. When everyone in his inner circle “took a whack at the Colonel,” placing all the blame “for the national disaster” on him, Taft cut the conversation short. “Roosevelt did not help the ticket very much,” he said, “but I am inclined to think that even had he remained in Africa the result would have been the same.”
Three days after the election, Taft headed for Panama to monitor progress on the building of the Canal. “The warmth of the tropics is in our veins again,” Archie noted with delight. The balmy climate led Taft to express a similar release from anxiety: “What difference does it make to a man how Ohio went, when he can look at this scene and feel its warmth? Oh how it takes me back to the Philippines!” At every meal during the trip, Taft told nostalgic anecdotes of his time as governor general. “It is always back to the Philippines he likes to go when he reminisces,” Archie observed. “The scenes which he pictures” and the events he describes “seem more real than any of the more recent years here in Washington.”
While Taft was away, Roosevelt visited Washington to give a speech about his African safari to the National Geographic Society, inspect the collection of specimens he had sent to the Smithsonian, and meet with old friends. Though he knew the first lady was in New York, he stopped at the White House to pay his respects and leave his calling card. Greeted affectionately by the servants and employees, all of whose names he remembered, he expressed enthusiastic approval of the significant renovations Taft had made to the West Wing.
To accommodate the increased White House staff—which now numbered thirty clerks, in addition to the regular cadre of messengers and security guards—Congress had approved a budget of $40,000 to double the office space from six to twelve rooms. Positioned directly “in the center of the new addition” was a handsome new oval-shaped office for the president, replacing what had been a “severe rectangular room.” As the former president entered the new Oval Office, he was informed that he was standing on what had been the site of the tennis court, where he and his playmates had spent many happy hours. “Oh, yes,” he said wistfully, “the old tennis court.”
The shared sense of loss created by the midterm rout engendered a brief period of rapprochement between Roosevelt and Taft. At Archie Butt’s urging, Taft wrote to Roosevelt in November 1910, expressing his regret that he had missed his friend’s visit to Washington. If he were coming back for the Gridiron Dinner, he added, “it would gratify me very much if you would come to the White House and stay with me.” Roosevelt replied with more warmth than he had shown since his return. “You are a trump to ask me to come to the White House, and I should accept at once if I were going to the Gridiron dinner. But I am not going; I have repeatedly refused.” Even while declining the invitation, Roosevelt proceeded to ask Taft about Panama and share his concerns about the California legislature, which was about to pass anti-Japanese legislation.
Taft wrote back the next day detailing the progress on the Canal, which was scheduled for completion in July 1913, at which time both of them would be “private citizens,” able to go together to see the work begun by one and finished by the other. Roosevelt replied appreciatively, “I have always felt that the one thing for which I deserved most credit in my entire Administration was my action in seizing the psychological moment to get complete control of Panama. Incidentally, it was one of the things for which I was most attacked.” And Taft wrote yet again, sending an advance copy of his annual message and letting Roosevelt know that he had discussed the California situation with his cabinet. “I have read your Message with great interest,” Roosevelt replied. “There is nothing for me to say save in the way of agreement and commendation.”
This cordial exchange of letters continued through the winter. “I see signs of the clouds which have been hanging over the President and Colonel Roosevelt breaking up,” Archie happily observed, knowing that he was responsible for many small gestures that had helped to smooth “the rough edges.” On Christmas Day, he showed the president a mahogany settee in the Red Room which Edith Roosevelt had purchased for the White House during her husband’s first year as president. Sentimentally attached to the sofa because her children had “kneeled on it to look at the circus parades passing up and down Pennsylvania Avenue,” Edith had hoped to take it with her to Sagamore Hill. A government bureaucrat summarily denied her request on the ground that it belonged to the White House. Hearing the story from Archie, Taft had the old sofa shipped to Oyster Bay as a New Year’s gift, along with a letter, telling Edith he had purchased a substitute, thus making her old sofa his “to bestow by exchange.” Both Theodore and Edith were touched by the thoughtful act. If the small sofa “brings the two families closer together,” Archie remarked with his unerring emotional intelligence, “then it will indeed be worth preserving in a museum.”