CHAPTER THREE

The Judge and the Politician

Will Taft, rising Cincinnati attorney, in the early 1880s.

FOR WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT, LAW school fortified his life’s ambition to become a judge, fixing upon him “a judicial habit of thought and action” that marked the rest of his life as he moved from the bench to the far less congenial world of politics. For Theodore Roosevelt, the study of law merely facilitated his diverse ventures as historian, assemblyman, rancher, civil service commissioner, police commissioner, assistant secretary of the Navy, soldier, governor, and vice president. Each experience would eventually contribute vitally to a memorable presidency.

Cincinnati Law School, where Taft matriculated in 1878, was among the oldest in the country. Situated at that time in the Mercantile Library Building at the city center, it remained an “old style” institution untouched by the modern case method of instruction introduced at Harvard earlier in the decade. While Taft might easily have gained admission to Harvard or Yale, he chose to return to his hometown, to be enveloped by the warmth of his close-knit family. His brothers Charley and Peter were practicing law in his father’s firm; Harry was a student at Yale; Horace a senior at Woodward High; and Fanny was still a girl at thirteen. Furthermore, Will’s best friend and Yale classmate, Howard Hollister, entered Cincinnati Law in the same class.

For two hours every day, Taft and sixty-six fellow students listened to professors expound broad legal principles derived from standard texts. The curriculum, far less demanding than his courses at Yale, allowed students to work as well as study. Although most law students gained their first practical experience apprenticing in law offices, Taft decided he could learn “more about the workings of the law” as a court reporter for Murat Halstead’s local newspaper, the Cincinnati Commercial. Once his morning lectures were completed, he began his rounds to the police court, the probate court, the district court, and the superior court. At each venue, he took notes, listed the cases on the various dockets each day, and wrote up short accounts of the half-dozen most compelling cases.

Readers of “The Courts” column followed the cases of a husband suing for divorce after discovering his wife had two husbands; a buxom woman ensnared by a livery-stable keeper who failed to reveal that he suffered from a contagious private disease; a husband alleging that his wife had“struck and scratched him in a vicious manner” and had so ill-treated their children that their lives were endangered. He chronicled criminal trials for larceny, domestic abuse, and assault and battery and followed malpractice suits, contested wills, bastardy cases, contract disputes, and mortgage foreclosures. He wrote in a clear, straightforward style, emphasizing the facts of the cases without embellishment. Usually, he managed to complete these accounts before dinner, allowing him time to relax in the evenings.

In his early twenties, Will found himself the center of a lively set of young friends, enjoying to the fullest the wealth of social activities Cincinnati provided. With a population of 250,000, the “Queen City” had come of age in the 1870s, boasting an array of cultural events that included classical music, opera festivals, theatrical performances, literary societies, and art exhibits. “Washington will remain our political and New York our commercial capital,” Murat Halstead predicted in 1878, but cosmopolitan Cincinnati would become “the social center and musical metropolis of America.”

Will Taft cut quite a figure in this bustling society: “large, handsome and fair, with the build of a Hercules and the sunny disposition of an innocent child,” one local newspaper described him. Women were drawn by his open engaging manner and he, in turn, was completely at ease conversing with them. He listened sympathetically to their concerns, valued their intelligence, and displayed an unself-conscious candor. At dancing parties he sparkled, surprisingly light on his feet. He and his compatriots enjoyed picnics on the Ohio River, sledding parties, debutante balls, nights at the theatre, whist parties, tennis matches, baseball games, and songfests at the beer gardens in “Over-the-Rhine,” the German section.

With growing apprehension, Alphonso observed his son’s diversions, convinced that without the structured environment that had compelled diligence at Yale, Will was simply marking time. Tensions between father and son only grew when Will went to work in his father’s office in the summer of 1879 between his first two years in law school. In late June, Will departed for several days to visit one of his college friends in Cleveland. In his absence, a woman sought legal help in a small case involving the destruction of $300 worth of property. Seeing this as “a capital opportunity” for Will to handle a jury trial with several witnesses to be sworn, Alphonso sent him a letter requesting his immediate return. “I had the case laid over to next Saturday so that you might prepare & try it,” he told his son. “I shall be sorry to have you lose it.”

The next day, Alphonso wrote again, venting his irritation. Will should disregard the previous letter, for he had “agreed on a settlement of the case . . . a thing which you cd. have done if you had been here, & carried a nice little fee for yourself.” Alphonso’s exasperation and disappointment were clear. “This gratifying your fondness for society is fruitless,” he admonished. “I like to have you enjoy yourself, so far as it can be consistent with your success in life. But you will have to be on alert for business, and for influence among men, if you would hope to accomplish success.” Alphonso had not exhausted his censure, for yet a third letter followed the next day. “I do not think you shd make arrangements for a second visit at Cleveland, or for anything, but close application to study and business. There is no day in wk. you will not have as much as you are able to do. You must acquire a mastery of the German Language, as well as of the law and you should be forming valuable business acquaintance, if not political. I do not think that you have accomplished as much this past year as you ought, with your opportunities. You must not feel that you have time enough to while a way with every friend who comes.”

Alphonso worried too much. Will finished law school in good standing. Then, heeding his father’s advice, he shuttered himself in the law office for the month leading up to the bar examination, combing the shelves of standard legal tomes. Will informed his friends that “he would not be seen in public again until after the tests.” He easily passed and was admitted to the bar. His solid work as a court reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial had, meanwhile, earned Halstead’s esteem and a full-time job offer at a salary of $1,500 a year. Although his calling was to the law rather than journalism, he remained on the newspaper staff through the summer and fall of 1879. There, his coverage of a dramatic embezzlement trial against Cy Hoffman, a Democratic auditor for the city, led to an unexpected opportunity.

Counsel for the defendant in the Hoffman case was the criminal attorney Thomas C. Campbell, head of a political ring said to have dug “its talons deep in the judiciary.” Campbell reputedly owned court officers, regularly bribed witnesses and juries, and “was able to secure any verdict” he desired. The Hoffman case took “a sensational turn” when Miller Outcault, the assistant prosecuting attorney, charged that his chief prosecutor, Samuel Drew, had conspired with the unscrupulous Campbell to fix the jury and assure Hoffman’s acquittal.

For the idealistic young Taft, the picture of judicial corruption was deeply disturbing. He later acknowledged that he “fell in” with Miller Outcault, providing reports that aided his efforts to expose both the chief prosecutor and the disreputable attorney. The Cincinnati Commercial stories about the dramatic proceedings created widespread interest in the case. Large crowds packed the courthouse, spectators “standing upon the railing, desks and chairs” as day after day, Outcault leveled a “nasty torrent of abuse” against both Campbell and his boss. After two weeks of “the bitterest invective” from all parties in this singular “three-cornered fight,” the judge was compelled to dismiss prosecutor Drew from the case. Proceedings were suspended until the district court sustained the judge’s action. The jury finally received the case but could not reach an agreement; a mistrial was declared.

When Outcault replaced Drew as prosecuting attorney, he offered the post of assistant prosecuting attorney to Will Taft, who had just passed his twenty-third birthday. Nellie Taft later declared that “the experience he had in the rough-and-ready practice in criminal trials, in preparing cases for trial, in examining witnesses, in making arguments to the court and in summing up to the jury, was the most valuable experience he could possibly have in fitting him for trial work at the bar.” He prepared indictments for grand juries; he took depositions, interviewed witnesses, and independently conducted a number of criminal trials, including a dramatic murder case. After only four months on the job, Will opened the prosecution’s case in the state’s second attempt to put the city auditor Cy Hoffman behind bars. Once again, the celebrated criminal defense lawyer Tom Campbell defended Hoffman; once again Campbell secured a hung jury, and suspicions of jury tampering abounded.

Considering the marked contrast of disposition between Taft and Roosevelt, Henry Pringle speculates that “a Theodore Roosevelt might have won renown, glory and headlines in this post of assistant district attorney.” He might have publicly pledged to root out the corrupt dealings between officers of the court and the city’s political machine, but Will Taft “was no showman, nor was he, to the same extent, personally or politically ambitious.” He valued the post solely as a vital contribution to his legal education. “He was on his legs day after day before judge and jury,” Horace recalled, and consequently “became so expert in regard to the laws of evidence as to surprise the older lawyers when he mounted the bench.”

Although he harbored no political ambitions for himself, Taft took an active role in local Republican politics. During his father’s race for governor, he canvassed the city in search of delegates to the state convention and remained involved from that point forward. “I attended all the primaries and all the conventions,” he later recalled, “and attempted to do what I could to secure respectable nominees for the party, especially for judicial places.” He worked in his ward to defeat disreputable machine candidates “by hustling around among good people to get them out.” He never hesitated to attack “the gang methods” whenever he witnessed corruption at the polls, but while attacking their methods, he always stayed “on good terms” with all the various factions. His amiability and reluctance to hold a grudge made him, in the estimation of Republican congressman Benjamin Butterworth, “the most popular young man in Hamilton County.”

Beneath Will’s benign nature, however, lay a sharp temper, especially where his family’s honor was concerned. A weekly tabloid published an anonymous letter ridiculing Alphonso, along with the insidious suggestion that Louise Taft herself had authored the attack. Determined to seek revenge for this slander against both his parents, Will sought out the tabloid’s editor, Lester A. Rose. Charley cautioned restraint since Rose “was known to be a bruiser of considerable physical courage and great endurance.” Undaunted, Will confronted Rose on a street corner and administered what the newspapers termed a “terrible beating.” He reportedly “lifted him up and dashed him to the pavement,” executing continuous blows and hammering the man’s head against the ground until Rose promised to leave town that very night. The story of the thrashing made news across the country. “The feeling among all classes of citizens,” observed the Bismarck Tribune, “is that Mr. Taft did a public service and ought to have a medal.”

At his father’s urging, Will began stumping for Republican candidates in his county. “I want him to accustom himself to speaking from the beginning,” Alphonso told Delia Torrey, explaining that as a lawyer, “he is to make speaking a business, & he should do it well.” Will was sick with anxiety before his maiden political speech, aghast to see his name, the Hon. William H. Taft, plastered on posters throughout the city. “Don’t allow yourself to be discouraged,” his father urged him. “It is a great undertaking, but it is the best thing that can happen to you. . . . It will be worth a fortune to you if you can conquer the difficulties & speak well in public. I know it is hard work to get adequate preparation. . . . You will find it difficult to commit literally a long speech. I do not attempt it. You will have your memory helped by notes of the points.” Will followed his father’s advice, and the speech, which he delivered three times in three different venues, went well. “He finds the farmers make attentive listeners, and he is not embarrassed,” Louise noted. “There is every prospect that he will be a first class speaker,” Alphonso wishfully predicted, “and a first class lawyer, too.”

In January 1882, Taft’s popularity with the discordant factions of the Republican Party led Congressman Butterworth to recommend him to President Chester Arthur as Collector of Internal Revenue for the Cincinnati District. The sitting collector, affiliated with a coalition considered unfriendly to the president, had been dismissed. His removal threatened to escalate political strife unless a replacement was found who could mollify all sides. “If you will appoint Will Taft to this important position, everybody will be satisfied,” Butterworth told President Arthur. Taft’s mother opposed the idea. “I did not wish Will to go into politics,” she said. “I wished him to engage in nothing not in the line of his profession.” His father, too, questioned the appointment, fearing that Taft was “too young” to lead a staff of more than a hundred employees in the task ofcollecting over $10 million from the sales of whiskey and tobacco.

Taft later acknowledged that he was offered the post, making him the youngest collector in the country, predominantly because he “had no political enemies.” It is likely that this decision to interrupt his emerging legal career was less a function of ambition than of desire to satisfy Congressman Butterworth and President Arthur. Indeed, this unwillingness to disappoint others would continue to shape the course of his professional life. While Taft possessed a highly developed social intelligence, he was less discerning of his own strengths and weaknesses.

Still, it did not take him long to realize that the work was decidedly ill-suited to his temperament. He detested the prominence of the position and could not bear the criticism that inevitably came with the job, acknowledging years later that he was too “thin-skinned” for “public life.” Moreover, his moderate reformist tendencies were at odds with the prevailing customs of the day. At a time when civil service reform was still in its infancy, when political patronage, rather than merit, filled the majority of positions, government employees were expected to contribute part of their salaries to the party in power. Horace recalled that when the local Republican Party circulated a subscription list demanding money from each of the department employees, Taft made a contribution in his own name “but announced that he would not look at the subscriptions made by any of his employees.” Ruffled party members charged that “he was wrecking the party by the course he followed.”

Taft’s troubles multiplied during a bitter contest for the congressional nomination in the Second District between Governor Tom Young and Amor Smith. Young sent a letter to Taft demanding the removal of a number of men in the Revenue Department who he claimed were allied with his opponent. Taft refused, resenting the “bulldozer” tone of the letter. The half-dozen men whose removal the governor demanded, he countered, “are among the best men in this District in the energy, skill and faithfulness with which they discharge their duties. If removed they must be simply and solely removed because they would prefer Amor Smith’s nomination to yours.” As for Young’s implied threat to involve President Arthur in the situation, Taft argued that “the popularity of the present Administration in this county has been strengthened by the fidelity with which we have tried to follow the President’s moderate course in National Affairs in regard to Civil Service.”

In a letter to his father, Taft defiantly declared: “I would much rather resign and let some one else do Tom Young’s service and dirty work.” In an effort to avoid public dissension, he decided to write to the president directly. “The men whose removal he seeks,” Taft told the president, “are such men as practical and conscientious politicians delight to find, men of political power and of ability to discharge their official duties.” He promised President Arthur that these employees supported the administration; they simply preferred Smith to Young. Although Governor Young eventually backed down, the disagreeable conflict intensified Taft’s desire to resume the practice of law. “I long to get out of politics,” he told his father in October 1882, “and get down to business.” A month later, after less than a year on the job, he journeyed to Washington and asked the president to accept his resignation. “I am mighty glad he is going to resign,” Horace told his mother. With clear admiration for his older brother, he added: “I’ll bet one thing & that is they won’t get a man in that place very soon who knows more about the law & business of the office than he does or who abstains more carefully from the dirty parts of politics. Will makes fun of me for being so radical theoretical & impractical in my opinions but when it comes to the point I think he is a thorough Civil Service Reformer in practice.”

Palpably relieved to be free of political discord, Taft penned a long letter to his father, who was then enjoying a pleasant stint in Vienna as the American foreign minister to Austria-Hungary at the behest of President Arthur. Will happily reported his intent to go into partnership with his father’s former law partner, Major Harlan Page Lloyd, a widely respected figure in Cincinnati. “It is the opening of what I hope will be my life’s work,” he said. “Of course I shall have to work hard but that will agree with me and I shall have that sweetest of all pleasures the feeling of something accomplished, something done in the life that I have marked out for myself.” It was a rare moment of insight into his own feelings and desires. Alphonso was gratified to hear that his son was leaving politics “to work at the law, with all his might,” he told Charley. “That is his destiny.”

By early 1883, Taft was settled in his new job. Charley’s wife Annie believed that since leaving the politically embroiled revenue department Will looked “younger by several years.” In January, Taft wrote his sister Fanny with evident satisfaction: “I wish you could look in on me now, seated in my cozy library with a cheerful soft coal fire and lots of easy chairs with the familiar old pictures looking down on me from every wall.” That summer, he planned to take his first trip abroad to visit his parents. “I hope you will make yourselves comfortable and elegant even if it is a little expensive,” he teased them. “You’re off on a lark and we are willing to extend your allowance a little to insure your having a good time.” But after three months in Europe he was “glad to get home” and resume his law practice. “Will is working well & seems very happy,” Major Lloyd reported to Alphonso.

Will and Horace roomed together on the west side of Broadway when Horace, after graduating from Yale, also returned to Cincinnati to study law. Tall, spare, with a refreshing sense of humor, Horace relished politics more than his brother did and would become a fervent advocate for reform. Horace “makes friends wherever he goes,” Will reported to his sister, “because his honest good nature and straight forward character shines out of him.”

Will also confided in Fanny his hope that his own law practice would “grow large enough in some years to warrant my making an ass of myself in regard to some girl.” By his twenty-fifth birthday, however, he confessed that he was “no nearer matrimony than I was when I first went into society. In the loneliness that I sometimes feel stealing over me, the temptation in that direction is strong but with no object to satisfy the feeling, the thought passes like many other castles in the air.”

If Will felt he lacked the proper foundation to marry, he was certainly entertaining eligible candidates. When the Opera Festival came to Cincinnati during the first week in February, Taft reported to his mother and sister that he was planning to take a different girl each evening: Nellie Herron on Monday night, Edith Harrison on Tuesday, Miss Lawson on Wednesday, Miss Tomlin on Thursday, Alice Keys on Saturday afternoon, and Agnes Davis on Saturday night. “I see Father shake his head when he reads this list and hear him say that a thorough knowledge of the law is not obtained in that way.”

THE REVIVAL OF TAFT’S LEGAL career reignited a clash with his old nemesis: Tom Campbell. A wave of ghastly murders in 1883, including a husband and wife killed for the $30 their bodies would be worth to a dissection class at the medical school, had created panic throughout Cincinnati. And amid this widespread anxiety, a particularly vicious killing of a liveryman on Christmas Eve of 1883 set in motion “a series of events that shook the foundation of Cincinnati.”

The prosecution charged that seventeen-year-old William Berner and an accomplice had robbed and killed their employer, William Kirk, by beating him savagely on the head with a blacksmith’s hammer and club. They hid the body in a covered wagon, fled with $345, and enjoyed a night of revelry in numerous saloons. When the victim’s body was discovered, the pockets of his jacket “were filled with Christmas presents he was taking home to his family.” Evidence implicated Berner, who confessed six times to six different people, detailing the planning and execution of the“cold-blooded butchery.” Before the trial commenced, Berner, in order to avoid hanging, agreed “to plead guilty to murder in the second degree.” The prosecution refused, certain that the evidence for first-degree murder “was absolute and unquestioned,” and that the heinous nature of the crime deserved punishment by death.

Tom Campbell was enticed to defend Berner with the hefty fee of $5,000, offered by the father of the accused young man. It proved a sage investment; with the powerfully connected Campbell leading the defense, the jury delivered a shocking verdict. After deliberating but twenty-four hours, they rejected both the first- and second-degree murder charges, finding Berner guilty only of murder in the third degree. Cincinnati residents were stunned and outraged, convinced that the father of the murderer had purchased the verdict through a cunning lawyer who had corrupted the jury. While not the first miscarriage of justice that Cincinnati had witnessed, it was certainly the most infamous.

“The people of Cincinnati are abundantly warned that the law furnishes no protection to life,” declared the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. “Justice,” the New York Times reported, “was poisoned at its source. The peace and safety of society were betrayed by the agency chosen to defend them. It is a terrible fact . . . that money outweighs human life and that the land of the law is palsied by bribes.” A number of papers grimly noted that the lower courts in too many cities across the country had “become the mere agents of unscrupulous attorneys, who dictate acquittals or convictions at will. So scandalous and notorious has it become that lawyers now openly boast that they own this or that court.”

A mass meeting was held at the Music Hall on March 29, 1884, to protest both the verdict and the corrupting influence of the Campbell organization. Speakers addressed the crowd, and a committee was formed to revise the rules governing the selection of juries. The proceedings were repeatedly interrupted by outbursts of “Hang the jury!,” “Hang Tom Campbell!,” “Hang Berner!,” and a large “boisterous element remained” after the meeting adjourned.

After some excited deliberation, they thronged to the jail, determined to find Berner and deliver by lynching the justice denied by the court. Gathering strength on every corner, the crowd grew to nearly 1,000 by the time it reached the jail. There the mob divided into three groups. The first division stormed the courthouse, ran through the tunnel leading to the jail, and managed to break through the heavy iron doors at the end of the tunnel. The second group shattered the south windows and demolished the chapel on the way to the rotunda. With a heavy ram, the third group battered down the iron entrance to the jail and raced up a winding stairway to reach the cells. But Berner was nowhere to be found; for his safety, he had already been transferred to another jail. In their fury, the mob set the courthouse ablaze.

Order was finally restored with the arrival of the police and the state militia, but in the course of the struggle, forty-five men were killed and more than a hundred injured. Many thousands of dollars of property was lost. The New York Times declared it “the bloodiest affair that ever occurred in Cincinnati.”

A few weeks later, a grand jury brought an indictment against Tom Campbell for bribing several of the jurors. Taft rightly surmised that it would be impossible “to obtain testimony because the only witnesses of Campbell’s rascalities are men who were as deeply implicated in them as he was.” Campbell chose for his counsel Joseph Foraker, a rising political ally, and was acquitted by a jury unable to reach a verdict. Taft complained to his father that Foraker had “conducted the defense in a most shystering and ungentlemanly way.” In the future, he pledged, “I shall do everything I can against Foraker in every political fight.”

The Cincinnati Bar Association, meanwhile, decided to create a committee to prepare sufficient evidence for a disbarment suit against Campbell in the district court. Taft was chosen by the senior members of the bar to serve as junior counsel for the nine-person committee. This appointment, Horace noted years later, “was an extraordinary honor, considering his youth, and was not to be accounted for by smiling good nature.” Alphonso worried about the consequences of a direct collision with Campbell and the insidious forces behind him, fearing even for his son’s physical safety. Will, however, relished the chance to confront the man who had “thrown the bar of Hamilton County into disrepute.” He stridently announced to his father that it was time “for men to have backbone and drive away the scourge that has been such an infliction on this community for so many years. Those who tamely cower in the face of attack I have no use for. I have gone into this thing fully realizing the dangerous enemy we have to encounter.”

The committee presented its findings before the district court in July 1884, and a trial date was set for November. Horace proudly recalled that his brother was instrumental in building the case for senior members of the committee. Will had traveled throughout Ohio compiling evidence and interviewing witnesses to document a pattern of disreputable behavior that had persisted for years. While his law practice suffered and his father feared that Campbell’s stranglehold on the judicial system would make “a thankless task” of all his endeavors, Will found the work exhilarating.

The intensity of his pursuit drained young Taft of any remnant of zeal for political campaigning. “I find that the Campbell case has robbed politics of any interest for me,” he told his father at the start of the 1884 presidential race between Republican James Blaine and Democrat Grover Cleveland. “If I can assist to get rid of Campbell, I think that I shall have accomplished a much greater good than by yelling myself hoarse for Blaine.”

As the election neared, however, he succumbed to pressure from Congressman Butterworth and agreed to serve as chief supervisor of elections in the city. He was charged with organizing forces to man the polling places, where intimidation and fraud were rampant, repeat voters numbered in the thousands, and hundreds of men “voted the cemetery.” Taft had done his job well. Republicans carried the city and the state, though Cleveland won the presidential election. “Your son Will did splendid service in the campaign,” Butterworth informed Alphonso. “He is a magnificent fellow. If he has a flaw in him I don’t know where it is. He is not only brainy, but brave, honorable and honest.” Despite such accolades, the political world held little appeal for Taft. “This is my last election experience I hope for some years to come,” he told his mother.

Campbell’s disbarment trial opened before three district court judges on November 6, 1884, two days after the election. “The investigation,” Taft explained to his father, would undertake “to prove acts at the different periods of [Campbell’s] professional career to show a consistent course of unprofessional conduct down to the present time.” Taft sat beside the senior attorneys who argued the case, providing documents, facts, and affidavits. The trial continued through December, with closing arguments slated for January 5, 1885.

On that crucial day, the senior attorney scheduled to present the prosecution’s closing summary fell ill, and William Taft was selected to take his place, “suddenly emerging from obscurity,” as Henry Pringle notes, “to play the part of a leading actor.” He took the floor for four hours and ten minutes, revealing an absolute mastery of the complex case. Point by point, Taft enumerated the charges against Campbell, reviewing the evidence presented over the previous twenty days. Emphasizing that the members of the Cincinnati Bar Association were “actuated by no other motive than a desire that the profession should be purged of a man whose success in this community threatens every institution of justice that is dear to us or necessary to good governance,” Taft offered a powerful concluding summary: “We have presented the case which we think calls for the action of your Honors in saying that the profession must be kept pure. We deny nothing to Mr. Campbell except integrity, and we say that that is the essential, the indispensable quality of a member of the Bar.”

On the final day, Campbell took the stand, delivering an impassioned and eloquent plea on his own behalf. “There was not a vindictive word uttered, and one looked in vain for any of the characteristics or manner of speech of the Thos. C. Campbell of one year ago,” the Commercial Gazette reported. “Tears were welling in his eyes, and there was a look of keen mental suffering upon his face,” as he described the pain and humiliation endured “from the first filing of these charges to the present moment.” He ascribed the “smoke of suspicion” that shadowed him largely to his active engagement in bitter political wranglings through the years in which “he had blindly made enemies who had multiplied.” He acknowledged that “the public had been worked up to the highest pitch of feeling” during the Berner case and that his decision to defend Berner had cost him greatly. He closed with a sentimental flourish, directly impugning Taft as the assassin of his character: “Mr. Taft has said that the relators deny me nothing save integrity. That is like saying, let me wound you just once with a rapier, and I will be merciful and thrust you not through the arm or the leg, but through the heart. Integrity is to a man what chastity is to a woman. When that is gone, all is gone.”

Taft anxiously waited week after week while the three judges deliberated. He believed both the reputation of the legal profession and the confidence of the public in the judicial system were at stake. Congressman Butterworth warned that “Tom Campbell controls one of the Judges absolutely and one of the others partially.” Nonetheless, few were prepared for the stunning verdict, delivered on February 3, 1885, that exonerated Campbell of all charges save a minor one which merited no suspension from the bar. “It was disastrous and disgraceful,” Taft reported to his father. “I am glad to say that this is the universal opinion.” Indeed, Butterworth observed that “whatever may be said of the full, clear, complete, technical legal certainty, the moral proof is absolutely overwhelming that Campbell and his ring represent the social, moral, political, legal rot of Cincinnati.”

“I am very glad now that I spoke,” Taft told his father. “The labor was very great and it is discouraging to have such an ending,” he avowed, but “the Public generally and the Bar are disposed to think that we tried the case as well as it could be tried.” From his faraway perch in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he had been appointed a second ministerial job, Alphonso agreed. “I was very much pleased with your argument,” he assured his son. “I think you must have a great majority of the community on your side; and you will find it will be remembered in your favor. You must not allow yourself to be discouraged by the folly and perverseness if not wickedness of men who have by some accident come into a little brief Authority.”

As the weeks went by, Taft managed to recover a measure of optimism. “It is the beginning of an era of reform,” he excitedly told his father. “The trial of his case has shorn [Campbell] of that veneer of respectability. . . . Everybody knows he was guilty. He and the Court have gone down together.” He also reported a curious shift in his own perception of the matter and the man: “I can hardly explain to you the change in my feeling in regard to him. I have no personal animus toward him. He is no more to me than one of the thieves or bunks men whom I know. He hates me with a perfect hatred but I am indifferent to his feeling toward me.”

Taft’s satisfaction with his own performance in the case was certainly justified. And in an ironic turn of events, his involvement also aided his judicial ambitions. Taft’s unlikely benefactor would be Campbell’s ally, Joseph Foraker, who, much to Taft’s disgust, became the Republican gubernatorial nominee several months after the trial. “I should not bow my head in tears,” Taft confessed, “if the Democratic candidate defeated him.” Despite Taft’s grave reservations about the “double-faced Campbell man,” Foraker won the election and was returned to the governor’s office two years later.

In May 1887, during Foraker’s second term, a vacancy arose in the Ohio Superior Court when Judge Judson Harmon decided to retire with fourteen months left on his elected term. To Taft’s astonishment, Foraker offered to appoint him to fill the temporary vacancy until he could run for a full term. Considering Taft’s manifest antipathy toward Foraker, Foraker’s choice of a young man who was not yet thirty remains an enigma. In a memoir written after Taft became president, Foraker’s wife, Julia, claims that an “instant sympathy” had developed between the two men when Taft, a cub reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial, covered cases over which her husband presided. “Foraker liked Taft’s smile, liked his agreeable manner, liked his type of mind,” she wrote. Foraker also recalled his own prescient respect for the young man after Taft had risen to eminence. Despite his youth, Foraker avowed, he “knew him well enough to know that he had a strong intellectual endowment, a keen, logical, analytical, legal mind, and that all the essential foundations for a good Judge had been well and securely laid.”

Taft would surely have denied this “instant sympathy” with a man he roundly disliked. It is more likely that in appointing a young lawyer with Taft’s reputation for honesty and sincerity, Foraker sought to mollify reformers who called for the restoration of integrity on the Ohio bench. TheWeekly Law Bulletin praised the appointment, noting that despite a mere seven years before the bar, Taft was “a very bright young man, who already enjoys great popularity and personal respect.” In a letter to Foraker, Taft acknowledged his profound appreciation. “Considering the opportunity so honorable a position offers to a man of my age and circumstances, my debt to you is very great,” he wrote. “The responsibility you assume for me in making this appointment will always be a strong incentive to an industrious and conscientious discharge of my duties.”

To Taft, who would become the youngest judge in the state of Ohio, this appointment represented “the welcome beginning of just the career he wanted.” His work as court reporter, prosecuting attorney, litigator, and counsel for the Bar Association had prepared him well, giving him an intimate acquaintance with varied aspects of the law. The golden chance to sit on the superior court represented the establishment of a judicial career that would eventually lead, after a painful detour as president, to his ultimate destination—chief justice of the United States.

WHEN THEODORE ROOSEVELT TOOK UP the study of law, he was not sure where it would lead, nor whether he even wanted to be a lawyer. Foremost, he was about to be married and had a responsibility, despite the inheritance his father left him, to support his wife and family. Within two weeks of entering Columbia Law School on October 6, 1880, he acknowledged that he had his “hands full attending to various affairs.” While mornings were spent in school, his afternoons and evenings were devoted to wedding arrangements. The marriage was scheduled to take place at Chestnut Hill on October 27, his twenty-second birthday. “It almost frightens me, in spite of my own happiness,” he revealed in his diary, “to think that perhaps I may not make her happy; but I shall try so hard; and if ever a man love woman I love her.”

The wedding was celebrated at noon on a balmy autumn day at the Unitarian church in Brookline before a large crowd, including Theodore’s childhood friend Edith Carow. After a sumptuous reception at the Lee mansion, the young couple spent the night in a hotel suite and then headed to Oyster Bay. They remained two weeks at the family’s country home, where their every need was attended to by a cook, maid, and groom. “Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about,” Roosevelt asserted in his diary, then proceeded to detail idyllic days spent driving their buggy, roaming through the woods and fields, playing “equally matched” lawn tennis, and reading poetry before blazing fires at night.

On November 17, Roosevelt resumed his law school classes. He set forth shortly after 7:30 a.m. from his mother’s house on 57th Street, where he and Alice would spend the winter, to begin the three-mile walk to the four-story law building on Great Jones Street at the corner of Lafayette Place. At Columbia, as at Harvard, he stood out as “an energetic questioner of the lectures,” his intensity provoking a mixture of resentment and admiration in his classmates. Though the pleasure he took in his studies is amply expressed in his journal, he was troubled that “some of the teaching of the law books and of the classroom seemed to me to be against justice.” He noted critically that “we are concerned with [the] question of what law is, not what it ought to be.” Nevertheless, more than 1,000 pages of handwritten notes during his two years of study testify to his diligence, and he impressed professors with his amazingly deft grasp of materials.

During his first year in law school, Roosevelt assumed several positions formerly held by his father on the boards of charitable organizations. Hopeful this philanthropic work might prove fulfilling, he found himself ill-suited to follow in his father’s footsteps. “I tried faithfully to do what father had done,” he confessed to his reporter friend, Jacob Riis, “but I did it poorly. . . . [I] joined this and that committee. Father had done good work on so many; but in the end I found out that we have each to work in his own way to do our best.” Despite his relative youth, Roosevelt demonstrated a confidence and clear-minded assessment of his own interests and capabilities, making him far more successful than Taft in refusing endeavors he found uncongenial.

During this hectic phase of his life, Roosevelt even managed to try his hand as an author. As a senior at Harvard, he had embarked on a project that would become his first published work, The Naval War of 1812. His interest in the war had been sparked by a volume in the Porcellian Club library by the reigning British authority on the subject, William James. Angered by the biased, boastful approach of the author, who appeared “afflicted with a hatred toward the Americans,” Roosevelt searched out American historians of the war, only to find their accounts equally distorted by jingoism.

With the goal of writing an impartial history, he began research into the official papers and records on both sides of the conflict. By the spring semester of his first year at Columbia, he noted: “I spend most of my spare time in the Astor Library on my ‘Naval History.’ ” In the reading room—“a wonderfully open two-story-high hall surrounded by gilded balconies and books arranged in double-height alcoves”—he pored over official letters, logbooks, original contracts, and muster rolls.

With the same inordinate concentration he gave to law lectures in the mornings, Theodore spent his afternoons at the library compiling figures to compare warring ships in terms of tonnage and guns, and researching the number of officers and men on each side as the war began and ended. He concluded that in most of the battles at sea, the American fleets overpowered the British, but that American historians, desiring to embellish the valor of the commanders, minimized the difference; British historians retaliated with even greater exaggerations. With his fierce utilization of every waking moment, Roosevelt stole time to write both before and after a full round of social engagements, including formal balls, nights at the theatre, large receptions, and more intimate parties. “We’re dining out in twenty minutes,” Alice light-heartedly complained, “and Teedy’s drawing little ships!”

On May 12, 1881, the day after classes ended, Theodore and Alice sailed off on their delayed honeymoon to Europe. His diary tells of joyous days crowded with visits to castles, cathedrals, and museums, with sailing excursions on inland rivers and carriage rides through the Alps. “Alice is the best traveling companion I have ever known,” Theodore marveled. “Altogether it would be difficult to imagine any two people enjoying a trip more.” But when they reached Zermatt, Theodore pursued a solo adventure: the irresistible challenge of climbing the dangerous Matterhorn. “I was anxious to go up it,” he acknowledged to Bamie, “because it is reputed very difficult and a man who has been up it can fairly claim to have taken his degree as, at any rate, a subordinate kind of mountaineer.” In the company of two guides, finding the climb “very laborious” but with “enough peril to make it exciting,” he reached the summit.

Roosevelt managed to work on his naval history throughout the trip, lugging his books and papers from country to country. “You would be amused to see me writing it here,” he told Bamie. “I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me. I wonder if I won’t find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell.”

Returning home from Europe, he resumed his law courses in early October. “Am working fairly at my law,” he reported a few weeks later, “and hardest of all at my book.” In early December, he delivered a 500-page manuscript to Putnam’s. Recalling this maiden literary voyage, Roosevelt acknowledged years later that some of the chapters “were so dry that they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.” Nonetheless, uniformly favorable reviews hailed his accomplishment, noting flashes of the muscular tone and vigor that would mark his mature prose. “The volume is an excellent one in every respect,” noted the reviewer for the New York Times, “and shows in so young an author the best promise for a good historian—fearlessness of statement, caution, endeavor to be impartial, and a brisk and interesting way of telling events.”

It was an auspicious beginning. He learned early on the rewards attendant upon painstaking research and the meticulous deployment of facts. The boldness with which he challenged entrenched opinion was refreshing to critics, although one reviewer remarked that his running criticisms of the British authority suggested “a comparison with those zealous sailors who ‘overloaded their carronades so as to very much destroy the effect of their fire.’ ”

In the years ahead, even as he turned his prodigious energies and talents to the world of politics, Theodore Roosevelt never stopped writing. Though he may never have realized his dream of writing a book that would rank “in the very first class,” he produced a substantial body of excellent work, forty books in all, in addition to hundreds of magazine articles and book reviews. He covered an astonishing range of subjects, including narratives of hunting expeditions, meditations and natural histories on wolves, the grizzly bear, and the black-tailed deer, biographies of public figures, literary essays, commentaries on war and peace, and sketches of birds. His four-volume history of the American frontier would win high praise from the eminent historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who termed it “the first really satisfactory history of the field . . . a wonderful story, most entertainingly told.”

Roosevelt’s many-sided writings would prove an invaluable resource during his presidency, passionately linking him with hunters, naturalists, bird lovers, historians, biographers, conservationists, educators, sailors, soldiers, and sportsmen. “Everything was of interest to him,” marveled the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, “people of today, people of yesterday, animals, minerals, stones, stars, the past, the future.”

THE ROAD THAT WOULD LEAD Roosevelt into public life began at Morton Hall, the “barn-like room over a saloon” at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue that served as the Republican headquarters for the Twenty-first District. That district encompassed both the elegant neighborhoods along Madison Avenue and the more populous tenement sections on the West Side of Manhattan. While Roosevelt had found philanthropic administration ill-suited to his restless temperament, he longed to honor his father and family through his own efforts “to help the cause of better government in New York.” When he began inquiring about the local Republican organization, he was warned by his privileged circle that district politics were “low,” the province of “saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors, and the like,” men who “would be rough and brutal and unpleasant to deal with.” Their caution did nothing to deter Roosevelt. “I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class,” he observed, “and that the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class.”

In addition to attending the monthly meetings, Roosevelt stopped by in the evenings at the smoke-filled room with its benches, cuspidors, and poker tables that functioned as a club room. “I went around there often enough to have the men get accustomed to me and to have me get accustomed to them,” he explained, “so that we began to speak the same language, and so that each could begin to live down in the other’s mind what Bret Harte has called ‘the defective moral quality of being a stranger.’ ”

To the machine politicians who represented the tenement population, Roosevelt initially appeared very much an alien. “He looked like a dude, side-whiskers an’ all, y’ know,” one of them commented. Over time, however, as he had done at Harvard, he won over his comrades with the warmth, unabashed intensity, and pluck of his personality. He grew particularly close to Joe Murray, the thickset, red-haired Irish boss with “a fine head, a fighter’s chin, and twinkling eyes,” the man whom Roosevelt later credited with launching his political career. “He was by nature as straight a man, as fearless and as stanchly loyal, as any one whom I have ever met,” Roosevelt wrote in his Autobiography.

When Murray determined that the incumbent Republican assemblyman for the Twenty-first District could not hold his seat in the fall elections in 1881, having recently been linked to corruption, he surprised his compatriots by nominating the twenty-three-year-old Roosevelt, unknown to anyone in Morton Hall eight months earlier. The shrewd boss calculated that victory over the Democratic candidate would be assured if the Republican machine mustered its regular totals while Roosevelt mobilized the college-educated men and “the swells” who rarely voted in local elections. Murray’s instincts proved correct. On November 1, a list of eminent New Yorkers, including future Secretary of War Elihu Root and Columbia law professor Theodore W. Dwight, heartily endorsed Roosevelt as a man “of high character . . . conspicuous for his honesty and integrity.” A week later, Theodore Roosevelt was elected as the youngest member of the New York State Assembly, launching an unprecedented political career, one that would culminate less than two decades later in his becoming the youngest president in the history of the United States.

On January 2, 1882, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in, along with 127 other assemblymen. “My first days in the Legislature were much like those of a boy in a strange school,” he recalled. “My fellow legislators and I eyed one another with mutual distrust. . . . The Legislature was Democratic. I was a Republican from the ‘silk-stocking’ district.” Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. “He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult,” Hunt recalled. “He pulled off his coat; he was dressed in full dress, he had been to dinner somewhere.” With hair parted in the middle, eyeglasses suspended by a silk cord, and elegant gloves, he cut a unique figure.

For the first six weeks, according to Hunt, Theodore Roosevelt was uncharacteristically taciturn. “He was like Moses in the Wilderness,” but all the while watching and learning. One night in his private diary, Roosevelt delineated “an analysis of the character of each man in that Legislature.” His initial reactions to the other assemblymen revealed that he was still far from overcoming Harte’s “defective moral quality of being a stranger.” His Republican colleagues, he wrote, were “bad enough; but over half the democrats, including almost all of the City Irish, are vicious, stupid looking scoundrels with apparently not a redeeming trait.” The men who belonged to the New York City Tammany Hall Democratic machine, furthermore, seemed “totally unable to speak with even an approximation to good grammar; not one of them can string three intelligible sentences together to save his neck.”

Clearly, the Tammany men were as contemptuous of and antagonistic to Roosevelt as he was of them. Tammany lieutenant John McManus, a practical joker nearly twice Roosevelt’s size, let it be known that he intended to toss the young upstart in a blanket. Outwardly uncowed, a belligerent Roosevelt confronted McManus: “By God! If you try anything like that, I’ll kick you, I’ll bite you, I’ll kick you in the balls. I’ll do anything to you—you’d better let me alone.” And he did.

The more serious altercation took place at Hurst’s Roadhouse, a popular gathering place for assemblymen and reporters six miles out of Albany. Late one winter afternoon Roosevelt entered Hurst’s and was greeted by three jeering bullies, who raucously mocked his appearance and lack of a winter coat. “Why don’t your mother buy you an overcoat? Won’t Mama’s boy catch cold?” A reporter present noted that Roosevelt ignored them until it was clear they would not let up. Finally, he confronted the three. “You—little dude,” taunted one, while his companion took a swipe at Roosevelt. “But, quick as lightning, Roosevelt slipped his glasses into his side pocket, and in another second he had laid out two of the trio on the floor. The third quit cold.” The story soon made the rounds in the statehouse, along with the significant fact that once the men got off the floor, Roosevelt invited them to join him in a glass of ale.

The lively natures displayed by young Taft and Roosevelt remained with them throughout their lives. The aftermath of their anger, however, was handled very differently. “When Taft gives way to his,” one reporter observed, “it is to inflict a merciless lashing upon its victim, for whom thereafter he has no use whatever. With Roosevelt it is a case of powder and spark; there is a vivid flash and a deafening roar, but when the smoke has blown away, that is the end.”

Roosevelt quickly determined that his colleagues could be divided into three groups: a small circle of “very good men,” fellow reformers like Isaac Hunt, William O’Neil, and Mike Costello, anxious to fight against corrupt political machines, made up the first; the second group, the majority, “were neither very good nor very bad, but went one way or the other, according to the strength of the various conflicting influences acting around, behind, and upon them”; finally, the “very bad men” in both parties, ever susceptible to bribery, made up a rough third of the assembly and were essentially owned by various business interests. Good legislation could be passed only if the conscience of the public was awakened, exerting pressure on the passive majority. Immediately, Roosevelt understood that the most effective means of circumventing the machines and transforming popular sentiment was to establish a good rapport with the press corps.

About thirty reporters from across the state covered the legislature in Albany, where a rigid hierarchy governed their assigned seats. In front-row box seats, facing the assemblymen, sat George F. Spinney of the New York Times, Hugh Hastings of the Albany Express, H. Calkins of the New York World, and A. W. Lyman of the New York Sun. Reporters for the New York Herald, the New York Tribune, and the Brooklyn Times sat in the second and third rows. Journalists representing smaller papers were consigned to the bleachers in the back of the chamber. Roosevelt’s expansive demeanor, manic energies, and often original, always articulate and quotable statements made him a favorite among the journalists. A mutually productive alliance was forged between these journalists and Roosevelt that would boost his political career at every stage.

The New York Times reporter George Spinney took an immediate liking to Roosevelt, calling him a “good-hearted man,” with “a good, honest laugh.” Spinney, who would later become editor and publisher of the Times, was considered then one of the best reporters in the state, lauded for the “vigor, thoroughness and intelligence of his daily dispatches” from Albany. Spinney marveled at the speed with which the rookie assemblyman mastered every aspect of the state legislature. “He grew like a beanstalk,” he recalled in a conversation with Assemblyman Hunt forty years later. “He would just stand a man up against the wall and interview him and ask: ‘How do you do this in your district and county’ and ‘What is this thing and that thing.’ He went right to the bottom of the whole thing. He knew more about State politics at the end of that first session than ninety percent of them did.”

Isaac Hunt himself, described by a contemporary as “a mighty tree that stood out in the forest,” had never encountered anyone like Roosevelt. “He would go away Friday afternoon,” Hunt remembered, “and Monday he would throw out new things he never had before, just like a child that you see grow from day to day, that is the way he grew. He increased in stature and strength materially all the time.” In that first session, Hunt wrote, “I thought I knew more than he did . . . but before we got through, he grew right away from me.”

Brooklyn Eagle reporter William C. Hudson, who resided at the same hotel as Roosevelt, was boggled by the young legislator’s early morning routine. “It was Roosevelt’s habit to come into the breakfast room with a rush, copies of all the morning papers he could lay his hands on under his arm, and, seating himself, to go through those papers with a rapidity that would have excited the jealousy of the most rapid exchange editor. He threw each paper, as he finished it, on the floor, unfolded, until at the end there was, on either side of him, a pile of loose papers as high as the table for the servants to clear away. And all this time he would be taking part in the running conversation of the table. Had anyone supposed that this inspection of the papers was superficial, he would have been sadly mistaken. Roosevelt saw everything, grasped the sense of everything, and formed an opinion on everything which he was eager to maintain at any risk.”

Roosevelt’s prodigious learning curve was tested after only two months in Albany, when he took a leading role in the battle to impeach a corrupt state supreme court judge, Theodore Westbrook. The battle pitted Roosevelt against a similar insidious alliance to the one Taft had uncovered in the Campbell debacle in Cincinnati. In December 1881, shortly before Roosevelt was sworn in, the New York Times had published a nine-column piece condemning Judge Westbrook’s collusion with the notorious Wall Street financier Jay Gould in an elaborate scheme to gain control of the elevated railway system in New York. “We went after him with yards of space,” recalled Spinney, who conducted several phases of the investigation.

Over the years, the swashbuckling Gould had amassed railroads, steamship lines, telegraph companies, and newspapers in a series of well-planned raids, stitching together an empire that stretched from coast to coast. In 1881, he moved to appropriate the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, one of the first outfits to engineer and develop a steam-powered rapid-transit system for the city. A burdensome lawsuit devised by Gould’s accomplices was brought against the company, forcing it into receivership. Judge Westbrook, who had been Gould’s legal counsel, was selected to preside over the bankrupt company. Holding court in Gould’s private offices, Westbrook issued a series of onerous rulings calculated to panic stockholders into throwing their shares on the market, depressing the stock to almost nothing. At that point, the Gould syndicate began buying. Once Gould had gained control of the valuable property, Judge Westbrook mysteriously decreed the company solvent, and the stock rose sharply. This simple, perfidious maneuver cost thousands of innocent stockholders their life savings.

The comprehensive account of this stock-jobbing scheme created a stir in the newspaper world. At issue, the Brooklyn Eagle proclaimed, were not simply the transgressions of a justice who “prostituted” himself, but the fact that the “State Government in all its branches” has prostrated itself before the robber barons. “These things show where the wealth of the country is going; they show that the farmer, the artisan, and the merchant are sweating their lives out to enrich a little coterie of blooded knaves who regard their fellowmen as the spider does the fly or the wolf the sheep.” If the charges were substantiated, the Auburn (New York) Advertiser argued, nothing less than Westbrook’s impeachment would restore the “dignity and respect” of the state supreme court. “Officials should be taught that they are the servants of the people,” chided the Times, “not of rings and cliques.” All agreed that Westbrook could not “remain silent under the severe arraignment of the Times.”

In fact, that is precisely what Westbrook did; his strategic silence on these charges had nearly extinguished interest in the entire matter when Theodore Roosevelt picked up the case in March 1882. Isaac Hunt had prompted Roosevelt’s involvement after a second, unrelated article appeared in the New York Herald accusing Judge Westbrook of a flagrant abuse of power and conflict of interest. He had appointed receivers for defunct insurance companies and granted excessive fees to select lawyers (including his cousin and son) who handled the cases. Hunt suggested that Roosevelt introduce a resolution to investigate Judge Westbrook. Roosevelt agreed to consider the action “but would not take it up until he was sure there was evidence sufficient to warrant such a resolution.”

Recalling the Westbrook article in the New York Times three months earlier (as he seemed to remember anything he had read), Roosevelt approached the city editor, Henry Loewenthal, and asked to examine the corroborating evidence behind the December exposé. The editor later described “an energetic young man” who “questioned and cross-questioned him” throughout the entire night. George Spinney, who had worked for Loewenthal before becoming the Albany correspondent, heard that “the presses in the basement were finishing that day’s edition in the early morning hours, when the young Assemblyman emerged with an armful of ammunition” that included an incriminating letter in which Judge Westbrook told Gould, “I am willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion to serve your vast interests.”

On March 29, 1882, Roosevelt rose from his seat in the assembly. Noting that the newspaper charges made against Westbrook in relation to the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company had “never been explained or fairly refuted,” he offered a resolution empowering the Judiciary Committee to begin an investigation. This bold action created a sensation in the chamber. “By Jove!” Hunt recalled. “It was like the bursting of a bombshell.” Supporters of Westbrook and Gould quickly rallied, demanding a debate that automatically tabled the motion and threatened its indefinite postponement. The next day an editorial in the New York Times praised Roosevelt’s resolution: “Mr. Roosevelt correctly states that these charges have never been explained or fairly rebutted. . . . Those who believe that Judge Westbrook has been unjustly assailed ought to welcome so good a chance of vindicating his character.”

A week later, Spinney recalled, “Roosevelt suddenly interrupted the hum-drum routine, with the demand that all business be laid aside and his resolution of investigation be taken up.” The move was “so unexpected and so sudden that dilatory tactics were out of the question.” When Roosevelt began to speak, “the House, for almost the only time during the session grew silent.” Though Roosevelt was not then an accomplished speaker, he delivered his speech “slowly and clearly and his voice filled the chamber, abominable as were its acoustics. A frequent gesture of his determination was the resounding blow of his right fist as he smacked it in the palm of his left hand.”

“The men who were mainly concerned in this fraud,” Roosevelt began (alluding to Jay Gould, Russell Sage, and Cyrus Field), “were men whose financial dishonesty is a matter of common notoriety,” requiring of the judiciary extreme efforts to assure the appearance of probity. Instead, the judge answered petitions in the offices of one of the trio of investors and held court in the office of another who was “nothing but a wealthy shark.” To address one aspect of the case, Westbrook appointed a man who was employed by Jay Gould. Every decision was rendered to enable Gould and his conspirators to seize control of the railway at a baldly manipulated bargain price. “We have a right to demand that our judiciary should be kept beyond reproach,” Roosevelt ardently continued, “and we have a right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation.”

“Beyond a shadow of doubt,” Spinney believed, “a vote at that juncture would have insured the passage of his resolution.” But former Governor Thomas Alvord took the floor and filibustered until the scheduled adjournment at two o’clock in the afternoon. Speaking in “disjointed sentences and fragmentary thoughts,” Alvord advised the rookie assemblyman to find proof for his accusations rather than stoop to “slanderous utterances or newspaper stories,” because “human reputation and human characters were too sacred to be trifled with.”

Though Roosevelt was temporarily outmaneuvered by veteran opposition, “the day’s proceedings,” Spinney observed, “made the youngest member of the Assembly the most talked of man in the State.” That night, from his room at the Kenmore Hotel, Roosevelt wrote to Alice with no small gratification: “I have drawn blood by my speech against the Elevated Railway judges, and have come in for any amount both of praise and abuse from the newspapers. It is rather the hit of the season so far, and I think I have made a success of it. Letters and telegrams of congratulation come pouring in on me from all quarters. But the fight is severe still.”

Roosevelt’s speech to the assembly garnered widespread coverage, as he well knew it would. “Mr. Roosevelt has a most refreshing habit of calling men and things by their right names,” the Times editorialized, “and in these days of judicial, ecclesiastical and journalistic subserviency to the robber barons of the Street it needs some little courage in any public man to characterize them and their acts in fitting terms. There is a splendid career open for a young man of position, character and independence like Mr. Roosevelt.”

Not surprisingly, Jay Gould’s New York World castigated him in equal measure. “Before any official shall be subjected to the vexation and discredit of an investigation, some responsible person or association must prefer a charge accompanied with allegations of wrong-doing.” Yet in this instance, the World complained, “an inexperienced legislator gets up [from] his seat and recites in a somewhat intemperate speech sundry hearsay charges against Judge Westbrook based upon statements published in a newspaper.”

Roosevelt dismissed these attacks, according to Hunt, shedding criticism “like water poured on a duck’s back.” He held his ground, even when an old family friend gently insisted that while “it was a good thing to have made the ‘reform play,’ ” he should not “overplay” his hand. “I asked,” Roosevelt recalled, “if that meant I was to yield to the ring in politics. He answered somewhat impatiently that I was entirely mistaken (as in fact I was) about there being merely a political ring,” for the “inner circle” was, in truth, a miasma, an enormous knot of “big businessmen, and the politicians, lawyers, and judges who were in alliance with and to a certain extent dependent upon them, and that the successful man had to win his success by the backing of the same forces, whether in law, business, or politics.”

The day before the House adjourned for Easter recess, Roosevelt was again frustrated in his attempt to bring the issue to a vote. During the break, however, newspapers continued to headline the story. “By the time the Legislature came back again,” Hunt explained, “the Legislators had evidently heard from their home folks, because the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the investigation.” This first skirmish awakened Roosevelt to the massive persuasive capacity of the press to stir public resolve and exert pressure on otherwise unassailable insiders.

The investigation was entrusted to the Judiciary Committee which, over the course of seven weeks, conducted hearings in both New York and Albany. Despite an accumulation of damaging evidence, a majority declared that Judge Westbrook’s behavior, although indiscreet, did not warrant impeachment. Hunt later alleged that three decisive votes in favor of impeachment were lost in the middle of the night when the legislators were offered $2,500 each to sign the majority report. When the Judiciary Committee’s decision was announced, Hunt recalled, Roosevelt “was dancing and jumping about and full of fire and full of fury and full of fight.”

“Mr. Speak-ah! Mr. Speak-ah,” he called out, with a strident plea for his colleagues to accept the minority report calling for impeachment: “To you, members of the Legislature of the greatest commonwealth in this great Federal Union, I say you cannot by your votes clear the Judge. He stands condemned by his own acts in the eyes of all honest people. All you can do is to shame yourselves and give him a brief extension of his dishonored career. You cannot cleanse the leper. Beware lest you taint yourselves with his leprosy.”

Roosevelt’s dramatic exhortation brought “deathless silence” to the chamber, but the assembly nonetheless voted on May 31, 1882, to accept the majority report exonerating the judge. “It was apparent to those familiar with politics,” Spinney concluded, “that every wire that could be pulled in both the dominant political parties to prevent impeachment was stretched to the tautest.”

“The action of the Assembly last night in voting to exonerate Judge Westbrook is simply disgraceful,” declared the New York Herald. “We venture the assertion that the entire Bench and nine-tenths of the Bar of the State are convinced that Judge Westbrook ought to be impeached.” TheNew York Times titled its editorial “A Miscarriage of Justice”; the Brooklyn Eagle called the vote “an open avowal of contempt for public sentiment, for public intelligence and common honesty.” The Buffalo Express quoted from Roosevelt’s speech, and predicted that the young man’s indictment expressed “the general verdict.”

Though Roosevelt’s first joust at entrenched corruption had failed, he emerged as a champion of reform both within the assembly and in the court of public opinion. Hunt maintained that Roosevelt “won his spurs in that fight.” While he had been derided as “a society man and a dude” prior to the Westbrook debate, he was now “looked upon as a full-fledged man and worthy of anybody’s esteem.” When the session came to a close in early June, claimed Spinney, “Roosevelt’s name was known to every nook and corner of the State.”

“I ROSE LIKE A ROCKET,” Roosevelt remembered, proudly noting his reelection the following November with “an enormous majority” despite a Democratic sweep in the state elections. As a further sign of his swift and brilliant ascent, when the legislature convened in January 1883, his Republican colleagues selected him, the youngest member of the New York State Assembly, as their minority leader. Thereafter, he acknowledged, “I immediately proceeded to lose my perspective . . . I came an awful cropper, and had to pick myself up after learning by bitter experience the lesson that I was not all-important.”

“My head was swelled,” he conceded, looking back upon his self-indulgent behavior in the aftermath of such sudden fame. “I would listen to no argument, no advice.” In that second session, Hunt recalled, Roosevelt became “a perfect nuisance,” interrupting the business of the House in a manner “so explosive, and so radical and so indiscreet” that even fellow reformers worried that he was becoming “a damn fool.” When contesting an issue, “he yelled and pounded his desk,” firing back “with all the venom imaginary.” Without restraint he castigated the New York World “as a paper of limited circulation and unlimited scurrility”; he denounced the “rotten” Democratic Party, belittling the political lineage that ran “down the roll from Polk, the mendacious, through Pierce, the Copperhead, to Buchanan, who faced both ways.” His colorful language invariably made headlines, spurring him to progressively more outlandish outbursts. His antics kept his name in print, but he finally acknowledged that he was “absolutely deserted” and lamented that “every bit of influence I had was gone. The things I wanted to do I was powerless to accomplish.”

This grim, isolate reality prompted a radical reassessment: “I thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them.” Restraining his histrionic rhetoric and making overtures to his fellow legislators, Roosevelt was able to establish common grounds of agreement. “I turned in to help them, and they turned to and gave me a hand,” he reflected, “and so we were able to get things done.”

Roosevelt’s developing sensibilities did not initially embrace the cause of labor seeking greater protection against the abusive onslaughts of the flourishing industrial order. Rather, he regarded union leaders as “exceedingly unattractive persons,” and considered the majority of labor bills introduced in the legislature “foolish.” The reigning laissez-faire doctrine—inculcated at Harvard as well as Yale, and accepted categorically by those within his privileged circle—had “biased” him, he later acknowledged, “against all governmental schemes for the betterment of the social and industrial conditions of laborers.” With unexamined confidence, he voted against increasing the minimum wage to 25 cents an hour, spoke in opposition to a bill that would limit streetcar conductors to twelve-hour workdays, and fought against legislation to raise the salaries of New York’s policemen and firemen.

When the Cigar-Makers’ Union introduced a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses, Roosevelt presumed from the outset he would vote against it. He had always believed that tenement owners had an absolute right to do as they wished with their own property. As he examined more closely the conditions leading to the bill, however, he began to question his inherited resistance to social legislation.

The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements “one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores” on the city of New York. Realizing that the only hope of eradicating a system that employed nearly 10,000 people lay in exposing the“actual character of the evils,” he conducted a personal inspection of the tenements, gaining entrance in the guise of a book agent peddling copies of Charles Dickens. Gompers made detailed notes of his observations and published comprehensive reports of his findings. He discovered that the capitalists who owned the tenement factories demanded grueling hours from their workers, mainly Jewish immigrants, and charged absurd rents for their filthy, ill-ventilated apartments.

In one tenement house, fifteen families crowded into three floors. Fathers, mothers, and children were at work stripping, drying, and wrapping cigars from six in the morning until midnight. In the yard, “a breeding ground of disease” with “no drain to a sewer,” lay large mounds of decaying tobacco. Another building housed ninety-eight people from twenty families, with several families living and working together in one room. Everywhere piles of tobacco and fetid tobacco scraps littered the floors, filling the air with an overwhelming stench. The hallways were so“dark and gloomy” that even at midday it seemed like night.

Roosevelt was shaken by these reports. He agreed to accompany Gompers on an inspection tour, pledging that “if the conditions described really existed he would do everything in his power to secure the passage of the bill.” He admitted that he was “a good deal shocked” at what he found. While a few of the tenements provided living space for the workers apart from the sweatshops, the “overwhelming majority” had no separate accommodation. He long remembered one tenement in which five adults and several children were confined to a single room for sleeping, eating, and making cigars. “The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food.” After two additional forays into this dark underworld, Roosevelt was “convinced beyond a shadow of doubt” that the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses “was an evil thing from every standpoint, social, industrial and hygienic.” Though the proposed bill was “a dangerous departure from the laissez-faire doctrine in which he thoroughly believed,” he championed its passage and joined a group of supporters urging Governor Grover Cleveland to sign it.

Once the bill became law in March 1883, the cigar makers straightaway brought suit, arguing their right to hold property, guaranteed by the state constitution, was violated by the new regulations. The case, In re Jacobs, eventually made its way to the New York Court of Appeals, where the justices declared that the law indeed deprived the cigar makers of their “fundamental rights of liberty . . . without due process of law.” Furthermore, the court argued, the legislation did not constitute a legitimate use of the state’s police power to regulate behavior detrimental to the public welfare, for tobacco was in no way “injurious to the public health.” On the contrary, it was “a disinfectant and a prophylactic.”

“It was this case,” Roosevelt later said, “which first waked me to . . . the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.” While the justices were well intentioned, they interpreted law solely from the vantage point of the propertied classes. “They knew nothing whatever of tenement house conditions,” he charged, “they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities.” In the years that followed, the court’s defense of free enterprise in this case would be repeatedly cited to block governmental regulation of industry. “It was,” Roosevelt observed, “one of the most serious setbacks which the cause of industrial and social progress and reform ever received.”

Roosevelt soon demonstrated his broadening perspective as a legislator in the fight for civil service reform. Members of the Democratic Party he had lately termed “rotten” now became his allies in the construction of a civil service bill that would, he said, “do for the City of New York what the Pendleton bill has done for the United States. Its aim is to take the civil service out of the political arena, where it now lies festering, a reproach and a hissing to all decent men, and the most terrible source of corruption.” Recognizing Roosevelt’s ability to galvanize the reform element in the assembly, Governor Grover Cleveland summoned him and promised that “he would deliver the Cleveland Democrats in the House” if Roosevelt would corral his own faction. The deal was struck and genuine civil service reform came to New York.

Easily winning a third term in November 1883, when the Republicans recaptured a majority in the assembly, Roosevelt announced he would run for Speaker. With the Republican bosses lined up against him, he calculated that his “only chance lay in arousing the people in the different districts.” Never one for half-measures, Theodore Roosevelt campaigned tirelessly. He sent out letters to potential supporters and personally visited dozens of assembly members, traveling by horse, train, or on foot to remote villages and towns. His open pursuit of the post dismayed his patrician circle of friends, who insisted that “the office should seek the man and not the man the office.” Roosevelt countered that “if Abraham Lincoln had not sought the Presidency he never would have been nominated.”

Though his spirited campaign failed to break the hold of the machine, Roosevelt’s attempt to run independent of patronage from the bosses reinforced his leadership of the burgeoning reform element. His autonomy, he later maintained, enabled him “to accomplish far more than [he] could have accomplished as Speaker.” Selected as chairman of the influential Committee on the Cities, Roosevelt promptly introduced a series of bills aimed at dismantling the dominion of the Tammany Hall machine. The primary measure would invest greater power in the mayor rather than the aldermen, who were solely “the creatures of the local ward bosses.” To enlist public backing in the struggle to reorganize city government, Roosevelt launched investigations into various city departments, reaping headlines with dramatic exposés of venality and abuse of the public trust. “I feel now as though I had the reins in my hand,” he assured Alice in January 1884.

Years later, George Spinney fondly recalled that despite the punishing work hours Roosevelt kept, he found time for festive dinners and shared pints of ale with reporters and colleagues where conversation and song stretched into the early morning hours. Spinney would never forget the“great night” when Roosevelt challenged him for the title of amateur boxing champion. With the entire assembly watching, Spinney, taller and heavier than Roosevelt, conceded after three rounds that “he’d had enough.” Amid general good cheer, Roosevelt was declared victor.

EVERY WEEKEND, ROOSEVELT HASTENED HOME to be with his wife, who was expecting their first child in mid-February 1884. A year earlier, Theodore and Alice had moved from his mother’s house to a comfortable brownstone on West 45th Street. In diary entries, Roosevelt extolled the pleasure of being “in my own lovely little home, with the sweetest and prettiest of all little wives—I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in my cozy little sitting room before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me.”

Confident that this baby would be the first of many, Theodore bought a spectacular piece of property on Oyster Bay and hired an architect to build a country home amid the fields and forests that had fostered his imagination and spurred his passion for nature. During their weekends together, the young couple spent hours poring over the architect’s designs for the spacious ten-bedroom house entirely skirted by a porch. He proposed to christen their nest “Leeholm,” in honor of Alice. “How I did hate to leave my bright, sunny little love,” Theodore lamented in early February after their weekend had drawn to a close. “I love you and long for you all the time, and oh so tenderly; doubly tenderly now, my sweetest little wife. I just long for Friday evening when I shall be with you again.”

During the winter months, Theodore decided to sublet his little brown-stone and move back to his family’s spacious home on West 57th Street. There, his mother, his unmarried sister Bamie, and a host of family servants could watch over Alice while he was in Albany. His sister Corinne, married two years earlier to Douglas Robinson and mother to a baby boy, had also returned to the family home for the winter season. Clearly, Alice would not lack loving support in Theodore’s absence.

On Monday afternoon, February 11, with the arrival of the baby imminent, Theodore left for Albany to attend to several city bills then in progress. Alice had assured him that while she “hated” to see him leave, she was “feeling well.” The doctor did not expect her labor to begin until Thursday at the earliest. In fact, her gravest concern lay with Mittie, who had suffered for several days with what appeared to the family a severe cold, but which the doctor suspected might be typhoid.

“I do love my dear Thee so much,” Alice told him. “I wish I could have my little new baby soon.” Twenty-four hours later, at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday evening, February 12, she gave birth to a healthy eight-and-three-quarter-pound girl. According to the handwritten account that Mittie’s sister Anna kept for the child to read when she grew up, Alice was thrilled that her baby was a little girl. A nurse took the newborn to be washed and dressed before returning her to her mother, who cradled and kissed her.

Roosevelt received the welcome news in a telegram from New York the following morning. Isaac Hunt would long recall the joyful scene in the assembly that morning when all present congratulated him on the news. “He was full of life and happiness.” Despite an ambivalent report that his mother was “only fairly well,” Theodore had no reason to suspect her condition was anything out of the ordinary.

The family at 57th Street, however, was rapidly becoming aware of considerable cause for worry. The attending doctor recognized the symptoms Alice was developing as signs of acute Bright’s disease, perhaps resulting from an infection that had inflamed her kidneys. Alice could easily have attributed the complications of the disease—back pain, vomiting, puffiness of the face, and distention of the body—to her advanced pregnancy. By the time the diagnosis was made, fluid had likely accumulated in Alice’s lungs, restricting her ability to breathe.

Mittie, meanwhile, slipped in and out of consciousness. The enervating advance of what was indeed acute typhoid racked Theodore’s mother with high fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and a worsening dehydration. As in many cases, the disease had progressed “somewhat insidiously,” with early symptoms of headache, lassitude, and feverishness that gave way to prostration, delirium, internal hemorrhage, and a “coma vigil” when less than a day of life remained.

A second telegram was dispatched to Albany, advising Theodore to come home at once. The thickening fog that stalled the progress of his train ride to New York mirrored his despair. For nearly two weeks, New Yorkers had endured a string of what the Times called “suicidal” days, “dark, foggy, depressing, and dismal.” Visibility was drastically diminished in the pervasive fog, which stalled traffic on the river and railways when signals became invisible. Ferryboats were unable to run; horses jostled one another on the streets; the elevated railway ran off its tracks. “There is,” the Times remarked, “something suggestive of death and decay in the dampness that fills the world, clings to the house door, drips from the fences, coats the streets with liquid nastiness, moistens one’s garments, and paints the sky lead-color.”

The fog that forced Theodore’s train to creep along also delayed the return of Corinne and Douglas Robinson from a brief visit to Baltimore. Elliott met them at the door. “There is a curse on this house!” he said. “Mother is dying, and Alice is dying, too.” It was nearly midnight when Theodore finally reached home. Racing up to the third floor, he found Alice in a state of semi-consciousness. He held her gently, refusing to leave her side, until he was informed that if he wished to see his mother one last time, he had better come downstairs. At three o’clock that morning, surrounded by her children, Mittie died. She was only forty-nine. Returning to the third floor, Theodore once more enfolded his wife in an embrace. By two o’clock that dismal St. Valentine’s Day afternoon, twenty-two-year-old Alice Lee Roosevelt was also dead. Roosevelt’s private diary for that day contains a single, desolate entry. Beneath a large X he wrote: “The light has gone out of my life.”

“Seldom, if ever, has New York society received such a shock,” observed the New York World when word spread that Roosevelt’s wife and mother had died in a single day. When the news of the twin deaths reached Albany, the assembly took an action “wholly unprecedented in the legislative annals of the State or country,” voting unanimously to adjourn until the following Monday evening in recognition of “the desolating blow” suffered by its revered colleague. One assemblyman after another rose to show Roosevelt that he had companions in grief. “It has never been my experience to stand in the presence of such a sorrow as this,” said one speaker. Isaac Hunt’s voice filled with affection as he spoke of his “particular friend.” He called upon his colleagues to appreciate “the uncertainty of human life” and use their remaining hours “to improve the opportunities of the present—to act well our part upon this stage of action.” Witnessing the overwhelming emotions in the chamber, one reporter stated that “no sadder meeting of the Legislature has ever been held.”

Theodore remained “in a dazed, stunned state” throughout the double funeral at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and the burial at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. “He does not know what he does or says,” observed his former tutor, Arthur Cutler. “I fear he sleeps little, for he walks a great deal in the night,” Corinne told Elliott, “and his eyes have that strained red look.”

Six years earlier, his father’s death had taught Theodore that frantic activity was the only way to keep sorrow at bay. “If I had very much time to think,” he had said then, “I should almost go crazy.” Now he determined to return to the assembly as soon as possible. “I shall come back to my work at once,” he told one friend. “There is now nothing left for me except to try to so live as not to dishonor the memory of those I loved who have gone before me.”

He returned “a changed man,” Hunt recalled. “From that time on there was a sadness about his face that he never had before.” When Hunt tried to console his friend, he soon discovered that Theodore “did not want anybody to sympathize with him. It was a grief that he had in his own soul.” He recorded his pain only in his private diary, and even there the account was spare: “We spent three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others. For joy or sorrow my life has now been lived out.”

Roosevelt’s inability to express and share his grief over the loss of his wife finally locked into an obsessive refusal to speak of her at all. As planned, he allowed the baby to be christened Alice, but in letters to his sister Bamie, with whom the child had gone to live, he referred to her simply as “Baby Lee.” “There can never be another Alice to me,” he confessed to a friend, “nor could I have another, not even her own child, bear her name.” Almost all his love letters to Alice from Harvard were destroyed, along with most of the pictures and mementoes of their courtship. To dwell on the loss, he believed, was “both weak and morbid.”

Roosevelt had at first been thrilled to realize that his baby shared her birthday with Abraham Lincoln, one whose high and profound character he considered without parallel. Yet the manner in which his hero had dealt with the death of his ten-year-old son Willie from a typhoid epidemic that swept Washington in 1862 could hardly have differed more from Roosevelt’s response to the loss of his wife and the needs of their child. Rather than dispose of all reminders and mementoes, Lincoln cherished every vestige of his son’s life: a painting by the child adorned his mantelpiece; he spent hours leafing through a scrapbook in which Willie had followed the various battles of the war; and he told countless stories about his son to visitors and friends. Believing that the dead continue only in the minds of the living, Lincoln willfully maintained an intense connection with his dead son. In starkest contrast to Lincoln’s fervent determination to consecrate a part of his daily life to his child is Roosevelt’s systematic suppression of his wife’s memory. Indeed, Roosevelt’s Autobiography, written three decades later, failed even to recognize that his first wife had ever lived. And years later, when his niece had lost her fiancé, he likewise advised her “to treat the past as past, the event as finished and out of her life. . . . Let her never speak one word of the matter, henceforth.”

UPON HIS RETURN TO ALBANY, Roosevelt immersed himself in the long hours of work. The routine of the daily sessions and the camaraderie of his fellow legislators worked to mitigate his misery, just as the circumscribed world of Harvard had offered refuge from the pain of his father’s death.“We are now holding evening sessions and I am glad we are,” he told Bamie; “indeed the more we work the better I like it.” In the weeks that followed, his Committee on the Cities conducted a series of dramatic investigations, and eventually nine reform bills were reported to the floor. He was able to secure passage of the most vital of these, including his bill to diminish the scope of the machine-controlled Board of Aldermen by centralizing responsibility in the hands of the mayor. The brilliant cartoonist Thomas Nast celebrated Roosevelt’s success in a Harper’s Weeklycaricature of the young Republican legislator holding out reform bills to receive the signature of Democratic governor Grover Cleveland. Entitled “Reform Without Bloodshed,” the cartoon juxtaposed the bipartisan “Law and Order” triumph in New York with the corruption warping Cincinnati’s legal system. Cincinnati’s woes were illustrated by headlines announcing the deadly riots and destruction in the wake of the shocking verdict in William Berner’s murder trial.

Yet Roosevelt was thwarted in other reform measures, according to William Hudson of the Brooklyn Eagle, because his bills were badly constructed. Cleveland felt compelled to veto them, certain they would embroil the state in “prolonged and expensive litigation.” Roosevelt was furious. “You must not veto those bills,” he told Cleveland. “I can’t have it, and I won’t have it.” The governor could not be dissuaded. “As debate is his strong point,” an editorialist observed of the young Roosevelt, “so parliamentary procedure is his weak one.” Too often, the critique concluded, he dives into legislative waters “without considering whether broken bottles or blue water are below him. With more attention to these necessary preliminaries and several years’ additional experience, he will be fitted for the larger field of national politics.”

That involvement in national politics, however, came sooner than even Roosevelt anticipated. During the weeks before the Republican Convention in June 1884, he had joined a group of reformers that included a new friend, Massachusetts state legislator Henry Cabot Lodge. The reformers backed the presidential candidacy of George F. Edmunds, an honorable but little-known senator from Vermont, over the two leading contenders, President Chester Arthur and James Blaine. While Arthur’s admirable performance as president in the wake of Garfield’s assassination had surprised reformers, Roosevelt could never forgive the man who had defeated his father for the collectorship. And Blaine, to his mind, was “by far the most objectionable, because his personal honesty, as well as his faithfulness as a public servant, are both open to question.”

At the convention, Roosevelt and the small band of reformers fought tirelessly to bring in votes for Edmunds, but in the end widespread popular support for Blaine carried the nomination. “Our defeat is an overwhelming rout,” Roosevelt admitted to Bamie. The choice of Blaine “speaks badly for the intelligence of the mass of my party,” he ruefully continued. “It may be that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.” Still, he concluded, “I am glad to have been present at the convention, and to have taken part in its proceedings; it was a historic scene.”

“Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life,” the twenty-six-year-old Roosevelt confided to a reporter friend during the Edmunds campaign, “and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over any success or defeat.” Despite an almost pathological reticence in his personal life, it seemed the recent devastating losses had put the vagaries of politics into perspective.

His three terms in the New York State Assembly had provided Roosevelt with considerable reason for pride and satisfaction in his accomplishments. He had led the fight against Judge Westbrook and been instrumental in the passage of both the cigar bill and civil service reform. He had steered landmark governmental reform bills through his committee and on the floor. Passion and pridefulness might have occasioned some arrogant foolishness, but his perceptiveness and diligence allowed him to develop broader, more effective strategies in the wake of these mistakes. His rigorous honesty and independence inspired adulation in young reformers, and old-timers began to treat him with grudging respect.

The assembly had proved a “great school” for Roosevelt. He had learned to cooperate with colleagues far removed from his patrician background, even those he had initially dismissed as “stupid looking scoundrels” and illiterate thugs. He had come a long way from the Harvard prig who found it necessary to ascertain if a prospective friend’s social standing was equal to the status of his own family. “We did not agree in all things,” he later said of his colleagues, “but we did in some, and those we pulled at together. That was my first lesson in real politics. . . . If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.”

Though he insisted that he would stay in public life only if he could remain true to his principles, his singular success in the rough-and-tumble world of the state assembly revealed a temperament supremely suited for politics, strife, and competition. He thrived in the cauldron, functioning best when dramatic moral issues were at stake. He fought with gusto against fraud and corruption, delivering speeches studded with bold and original turns of phrase. “Words with me are instruments,” Roosevelt said, and so they were—instruments to galvanize the emotions of the people in spirited battles for reform. “There is little use,” he liked to say, “for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.” When his critics fought back, he relished the fight, believing that “only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor,” would victory be won.

TAFT STEADFASTLY SHUNNED THE VERY spotlight Roosevelt craved. He preferred to fight his battles from the inside, trusting logic, reason, and the careful recitation of facts. A conciliator by nature, Taft was never comfortable when called upon to deliver partisan diatribes at political rallies. Though reluctant to stir controversy, or give avoidable offense, Taft was not ready to compromise his principles for approval or expediency. He had demonstrated quiet courage in his fight against Tom Campbell and his refusal to fire conscientious workers simply because of their political preferences.

William Taft’s amiable disposition and jovial countenance, evident from his earliest days, earned the goodwill and cooperation of family, friends, and colleagues alike. Within the family, Horace recalled, his brother often assumed the role of mediator. His keen perception and empathy allowed him to resolve the little conflicts that inevitably arose among parents and siblings. In his professional world, Taft’s skill in developing relationships proved vital to his ascent. He established a rapport with a diverse cadre of mentors, from Murat Halstead and Miller Outcault to Benjamin Butterworth, Major Lloyd, and finally, Joseph Foraker.

Always plagued by procrastination and insecurity, Taft struggled to turn this intuitive emotional intelligence inward to access his own desires and use that knowledge to steer his life and career accordingly. Had he been able accurately to analyze the root of his unhappiness in the collector’s office, he might have understood that his temperament was not suited for the turbulent world of politics. He detested political gamesmanship, found no pleasure in giving speeches, and chafed at public criticism. Yet, just as his desire to please Benjamin Butterworth had led him to take the collector’s job, so, in the years ahead, his anxiety to please Nellie Herron—the complex woman who would become his wife—would eventually lead him away from his beloved law into the often scathing vortex of political life.