Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, ca. 1889.
WASHINGTON IS JUST A BIG village, but it is a very pleasant big village,” Theodore Roosevelt reported in the 1890s. Accustomed to the clamor of New York, “where everything throbs with the chase for the almighty dollar,” Roosevelt must have been amazed to find that in the nation’s capital, “pleasure takes precedence over work.” Government officials enjoyed unhurried breakfasts, arriving at their desks between nine and ten, often leaving the office by four. Even Roosevelt, with his singular disciplined drive, managed to quit work early four or five afternoons each week for a game of tennis or jog through Rock Creek Park before heading off to a dinner party.
To illustrate the marked atmospheric contrast between the two cities, the writer Frank Carpenter observed that in New York, “a streetcar will not wait for you if you are not just at its stopping point. It goes on and you must stand there until the next car comes along. In Washington people a block away signal the cars by waving their hands or their umbrellas. Then they walk to the car at a leisurely pace, while the drivers wait patiently and the horses rest.” While the capital might lack “the spirit of intense energy” that animated New York, Carpenter concluded that Washington, with its broad, clean streets and fine marble buildings (and its shanties generally hidden from view), offered “the pleasanter place in which to live.”
Roosevelt and Taft apparently met within days of Taft’s arrival in town, possibly through their mutual friendship with Congressman Benjamin Butterworth. “Common views and sympathies,” Taft recalled, made them immediate allies, particularly in the cause of “Civil Service reform.” Roosevelt had been chagrined to find that many influential senators, congressmen, and cabinet officials “hated the whole reform and everything concerned with it and everybody who championed it.” For sixty years, politicians in both parties had been complicit in a spoils system where officials (postal carriers, typists, stenographers, and clerks) were appointed, promoted, or fired according to their politics rather than their merit. Uprooting that system would prove a far more strenuous endeavor than Roosevelt had realized when he accepted the post of civil service commissioner.
In William Howard Taft, however, Roosevelt recognized a staunch comrade, a steadfast advocate of advancement due not to cronyism but to competence. Indeed, Taft had been willing to resign his post as revenue collector rather than bow to demands that he fire the best men in his department due to their political affiliations. This experience had given Taft some intimation of the hardships his new friend would face. “It will be a long, hard, discouraging struggle,” Taft acknowledged during Roosevelt’s tenure as commissioner, “but the right must win.”
In the mornings, Roosevelt and Taft would often walk together to work. Although a streetcar stopped at nearby Farragut Square, they preferred to go on foot, as did most Washingtonians of the time. “One of the first observations that a New-Yorker makes on coming to Washington,” theNew York Times recorded, “is the difference in the way people walk. Here they usually walk slowly, deliberately always, and one rarely sees the rushing, hurrying, preoccupied walking that lends so much life to New York streets.” The two friends soon became familiar figures as they strolled along Connecticut Avenue. More than half a foot shorter and 70 pounds lighter than Taft, Roosevelt busily scanned “everything and everybody” as he pursued a lively conversation. Taft trudged more ponderously, focused intently upon his companion. Taft reached the Justice Department first, which stood one block from the White House, opposite the northern front of the Treasury Department. Roosevelt continued ten blocks east to his destination, Judiciary Square, where the Civil Service Commission was housed.
Increasingly, they relied upon one another for advice and camaraderie, often meeting for leisurely lunches. Roosevelt did most of the talking, finding scant pleasure in his food, while Taft relished generous portions. Whether “absorbed in work or play,” one reporter observed, Roosevelt “would eat hay and not know it,” whereas Taft savored his meals with care. Profound differences in manner and metabolism never diminished the delight they found in each other’s company.
“Externally Taft is everything Roosevelt is not,” commented the journalist William Allen White. “Roosevelt’s mental processes are quick, intuitive and sure,” while “Taft grapples a proposition, wrestles with it without resting and without fatigue until it is settled or solved.” Taft had no interest in hunting, boxing, or playing polo, no affinity for the often violent contests of strength and endurance, those manifestations of male prowess that so obsessed Roosevelt. His one passion was for the game of golf, which Roosevelt found excruciatingly dull and slow. Nonetheless, White concluded, the two had no sooner become acquainted than “they established one of those strong friendships that may be established only by men whose exteriors form such antipathetical sutures that they unite by a spiritual affinity.”
From the outset, each man recognized the rare character and unique talent of the other. “Mr. Taft,” a Boston American reporter expounded, “is the kind of man you would expect to find in the president’s office of a bank if you went in to start an account. His appearance would give you confidence in the bank. You would say to yourself, ‘This man will not let the bank fail if he can possibly help it.’ ” His kind and ingenuous nature was instantly apparent, inspiring the trust and amity of all he encountered. “If the boat were sinking, and he could swim and you couldn’t, you’d hand him your $50,000—if you had it—saying, ‘Give this to my wife,’ and she’d get it.”
“One loves him at first sight,” Roosevelt acknowledged of Taft. “He has nothing to overcome when he meets people. I realize that I have always got to overcome a little something before I get to the heart of people. . . . I almost envy a man possessing a personality like Taft’s.” Taft, Roosevelt said, “can get along with some men that I can’t get along with.” While Roosevelt had difficulty suppressing his contempt and irritation toward men he did not like, Taft’s “good nature, his indifference to self, his apparently infinite patience, enables him to get along with men, however cold or acerb or crotchety.”
A reporter well acquainted with both men noted that Taft possessed “a capacity, indeed, for personal intimacy which a self-centered man like Roosevelt never could have.” Perhaps, he suggested, “Roosevelt could see that sweetness of character in Mr. Taft and he could admire it, as we so often admire the faculties we do not possess.” Taft felt a similar wonder at Roosevelt’s aggressive self-confidence. His friend’s talent for publicity, delight in confrontation, and rousing rhetorical manner were gifts he would never share.
ROOSEVELT WOULD NEED ALL THESE attributes and more if he hoped to win his war against the entrenched spoils system. “Each party profited by the offices when in power,” Roosevelt explained, “and when in opposition each party insincerely denounced its opponents for doing exactly what it itself had done and intended again to do.” Although long aware that corruption was endemic in the country’s political and judicial systems, Roosevelt was sustained by his sometimes overweening belief in the rectitude of his cause and the prospect of a rousing struggle. “For the last few years politics with me has been largely a balancing of evils,” he explained to a friend, “and I am delighted to go in on a side where I have no doubt whatever, and feel absolutely certain that my efforts are wholly for the good; and you can guarantee I intend to hew to the line, and let the chips fly where they will.”
For Roosevelt, civil service reform presented a historic opening to ensure that “the fellow with no pull should have an even chance with his rival who came backed; that the farmer’s lad and the mechanic’s son who had no one to speak for them should have the same show in competing for the public service as the son of wealth and social prestige.” Allowing party officials to ensconce unqualified friends and kinsmen in public positions, he argued, was not merely “undemocratic”; it ensured inefficient public service that impacted the poor and vulnerable most of all. The smug axiom “To the victor belongs the spoils” was a “cynical battle-cry” he denounced as “so nakedly vicious” that no honorable man could condone it.
Roosevelt’s crusade prompted immediate attention from reporters in Washington. Although he was only one of three commissioners, he soon became the public face of the Civil Service Commission. “Yes, TR is a breezy young fellow,” a New York Sun correspondent commented with patronizing approbation, “and we do not find fault with him because he fancies that he knows it all. The quality of self-confidence is not bad in youth. We rather like to see it, for it indicates usually the possession or the motive power which makes a man aggressive and enterprising. He works more vigorously if he is sure that he is nearer right than other people, and has no misgivings as to his ability to accomplish his ends. The self distrustful, self-critical young man, who is always looking for direction from somebody else, and in whom what the old phrenologists used to call the bump of approbativeness is out of proper proportion, is pretty sure to be left behind in the race.”
From the start, Roosevelt understood that public opinion was the single most effective prod for recalcitrant party leaders in the cabinet and the Congress. “Until he began to roar,” his biographer Henry Pringle maintained, “the merit system had been a subject that interested a small fraction of the intelligent minority” whom powerful politicians could safely afford to ignore. In order “to secure proper administration of the laws,” the task before Roosevelt was nothing less than “to change the average citizen’s mental attitude toward the question.” In order to battle this entrenched spoils system, it was necessary to instill something of his own sense of outrage into the people, to popularize the reformist cause and foment change from the bottom up.
In his campaign to muster publicity and elicit indignation, Theodore Roosevelt adapted techniques that had served him well in the New York State Assembly, and developed new tactics he would perfect in the years ahead. For his opening salvo, he launched an on-the-spot investigation into the New York Customs House, where rumors indicated that clerks were leaking examination questions to favored party candidates for a fee of $50. When he determined the identity of the guilty clerks, Roosevelt issued a scathing report demanding their dismissal and prosecution. Headlines and editorials broadcast his message across the country, serving notice that civil service law was “going to be enforced, without fear or favor.”
Roosevelt’s investigation into the New York Customs House furnished evidence that despite the new regulations prohibiting mandatory contributions to the party in power by government employees, party leaders were still demanding “so-called voluntary contributions” from low-level clerks and stenographers as the price for retaining their positions. An identical tithing system had incensed Taft in Ohio, prompting party officials to claim “he was wrecking the party by the course he followed.” Cannily appealing to the sympathy and sentiment of his audience, Roosevelt observed that “to a poor clerk just able to get along the loss of three per cent of his salary may mean just the difference between having and not having a winter overcoat for himself, a warm dress for his wife or a Christmas tree for his children.”
Straightaway, it was evident to Roosevelt that the corruption he had observed in New York was rampant nationwide, a blight far exceeding the resources of his own staff. To conduct the investigations necessary to expose illegal practices across the country, he cultivated a network of progressive journalists and editors “to point out infractions of the law in their localities.” Recognizing that the foundation of his unwelcome campaign of reform depended on sound information, Roosevelt took especial care to confirm the accuracy of the reports he received.
From Lucius Burrie Swift, editor and publisher of the crusading Civil Service Chronicle, he learned that the Indianapolis postmaster, William Wallace, a good friend of President Harrison’s, had made a number of irregular appointments that violated civil service standards. “Give me all the facts you can,” Roosevelt implored Swift. “I have to be sure that every recommendation I make of any kind or sort can be backed by the most satisfactory evidence. It would be irritating if it were not amusing to see the eagerness with which so many of the people here in power watch to catch me tripping in any recommendation, and their desire to find me making some recommendation, whether for removal or indictment, which I cannot sustain.” Initially, Wallace’s indignant response generated headlines, but the charges were ultimately verified. “We stirred things up well,” Roosevelt gloated to his friend Lodge, “but I think we have administered a galvanic shock that will reinforce [Wallace’s] virtue for the future.” His hopes were realized. In fact, the newspaper exposure did chasten the Indianapolis postmaster; within two years, his administration was deemed“a model of fairness and justice.”
Buoyed by this early success, Roosevelt turned his spotlight on Milwaukee, where informants claimed that Postmaster George Paul was systematically manipulating examination scores in order to appoint favored party members. Evidence in hand, Roosevelt issued a blistering public report and demanded Paul’s removal from office. “If he is not dismissed, as we recommend, it will be a black eye for the Commission,” Roosevelt told Lodge, “and practically an announcement that hereafter no man need fear dismissal for violating the law; for if Paul has not violated it, then it can by no possibility be violated.” Roosevelt’s report and the ensuing publicity infuriated President Harrison’s postmaster general, John Wanamaker. He charged that Roosevelt was over-stepping his authority, intruding on matters that were the province of his own department. A wealthy contributor to Harrison’s campaign fund, Wanamaker fully adhered to the time-honored spoils system and harbored contempt for civil service reformers. Wanamaker appealed to the president, who forged a weak compromise by accepting Paul’s resignation. “It was a golden chance to take a good stand,” Roosevelt lamented, “and it has been lost.”
The apparent rebuff from President Harrison did not deter Roosevelt from initiating another, more controversial investigation into violations and irregularities in the Baltimore Post Office. On the basis of information supplied by Charles Bonaparte, a civil service reformer who would one day become a member of his own cabinet, Roosevelt charged officials with using postal appointments as “a bribery chest.” Wanamaker countered by conducting his own investigation, submitting the results to a committee in the House of Representatives. Wanamaker’s report absolved the employees of any wrongdoing and accused Roosevelt of pursuing an inquisition both “unfair and partial in the extreme.” Roosevelt countered by publishing an open letter to Postmaster General Wanamaker, whom he called the “head devil” of the spoilsmen, demanding that he renounce the“gross impertinence and impropriety” of his statements.
The escalating hostility between Roosevelt and Wanamaker delighted the press. “It is war, open, avowed, and to the knife,” The Washington Post reported. The New York Times could “not remember an instance in the history of our Government” when one member of a president’s administration made “statements so damaging to the character of another officer of the Government of still higher rank.”
Critics assailed Roosevelt’s tactics, recommending that he “put a padlock on his restless and uncontrollable jaws.” The Washington Post claimed that he spoke “like a person suffering from an overdose of nerve tonic,” expressing their scorn with savage clarity: “He came into official life with a blare of trumpets and a beating of gongs, blared and beat by himself. He immediately announced himself the one man competent to take charge of the entire business of the Government. To his mind every department of the Government was under the management of incompetent and bad men. He said to himself, to his barber, to his laundryman, and to all others who would listen to his incoherent gibberish: ‘I am Roosevelt; stop work and look at me.’ For a short time he had clear sailing. As he sailed he took in wind. As he took in wind he became more puffed up. As he became more puffed up he became insolent, arrogant, and more conceited.”
As Roosevelt continued to commandeer center stage, relationships with his fellow commissioners, once quite amicable, grew increasingly contentious. He complained to Lodge that Charles Lyman was “utterly useless . . . utterly out of place as a Commissioner,” and that Hugh S.Thompson, though an “excellent” fellow, lacked the fortitude to pursue enemies of civil service with the necessary zeal. He much preferred to proceed unilaterally. “My two colleagues are now away and I have all the work of the Civil Service Commission to myself,” he told his sister Bamie. “I like it; it is more satisfactory than having a divided responsibility; and it enables me to take more decided steps.”
More troubling than friction within the commission was Roosevelt’s deteriorating relationship with President Harrison. “I have been continuing my civil service fight, battling with everybody,” he groused to Bamie, “the little gray man in the White House looking on with cold and hesitating disapproval.” Never once throughout his service in the Harrison administration was Roosevelt invited to dine at the White House. Despite the president’s “high regard” for the young commissioner’s abilities, he was often irked by Roosevelt’s uncompromising, aggressive temperament. “Roosevelt seemed to feel,” Harrison remarked, “that everything ought to be done before sundown.” Rumors abounded that Roosevelt would be removed. With most of the influential newspapers supporting him, however, and with public indignation about violations of the civil service law at an inflamed pitch, Harrison dared not take action.
Although Roosevelt’s impetuous offensives frayed personal relationships, his public triumph over Postmaster General Wanamaker was soon complete. After hearing testimony from both sides, the House committee concluded that incontrovertible evidence backed up every single charge of fraud and misconduct. “Mr. Roosevelt is a regular young Lochinvar,” the Boston Evening Times remarked. “He isn’t afraid of the newspapers, he isn’t afraid of losing his place, and he is always ready for a fight. He keeps civil-service reform before the people and as the case often is, his aggressiveness is a great factor in a good cause.”
TO HER GREAT SURPRISE, EDITH Roosevelt found that she thoroughly enjoyed Washington. Through her husband’s friendship with Massachusetts congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, she entered a circle of literary-minded men and women whose engaging conversations centered on the books, art, and music that she loved. “Cabot has been a real comfort to her,” Theodore reported to Bamie. “He is one of the few men I know who is as well read as she is in English literature, and she delights to talk with him.” Edith also developed a close relationship with Nannie Lodge, a charming woman guided by a quick mind and a warm heart. Both women loved poetry and could recite Shakespeare “almost by heart.” The Lodges and the Roosevelts lived close enough to easily frequent each other’s homes. “You know, old fellow,” Roosevelt confided to Lodge, “you and Nannie are more to me than any one else but my own immediate family.”
Together with the Lodges, Theodore and Edith were frequent guests at the Lafayette Square town house of the historian Henry Adams. The distinguished group that congregated there included the Lincoln biographer John Hay and his wife, Clara; Senator Don Cameron with his exquisite wife, Elizabeth; the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens; and the Winthrop Chanlers. Adams felt an immediate fondness for Edith, who struck him as especially “sympathetic.” His encouragement and admiration put her quickly at ease in the group’s discussions of literature, drama, and poetry.“Her taste in books and judgment of their merit qua literature were always far more reliable than were Theodore’s,” noted a town house regular.
“Edith is really enjoying Washington,” Roosevelt reported to Bamie. “One night we dined at Cabots to meet the Willy Endicotts; another night I gave a dinner to some historical friends; last evening we went to the theatre, and a supper afterwards with John Hay. . . . Of course Hay was charming, as he always is; and Edith enjoyed it all as much as I did.” She had even developed a small taste for talk of political events, so long as she could rely on her inner circle for company and conversation. At a breakfast hosted by Secretary of State James Blaine, she was delighted to find herself seated between Elizabeth Cameron and Clara Hay. Her deepening friendships did much to assuage Edith’s dread anxiety of Washington’s social world. New Year’s Day entailed an exhausting series of calls on the wives of government officials, but she was heartened by the company of Nannie Lodge. “Nannie has been a dear about sending me her carriage & this afternoon I have found courage to go out & pay hundreds of calls.”
While Edith made an effort to overcome her natural reserve, her husband happily immersed himself in the social whirl of the nation’s capital. The Roosevelts hosted casual dinners that made an enduring impression on their circle of friends. “Sunday-evening suppers where the food was of the plainest and the company of the best,” Margaret Chanler recalled. “Theodore would keep us all spellbound with tales of his adventures in the West. There was a vital radiance about the man—a glowing, unfeigned cordiality towards those he liked that was irresistible.” Edith was “more difficult of access. . . . Just as the camera is focused, she steps aside to avoid the click of the shutter.” Despite this elusive quality, “one felt in her a great strength of character, and ineluctable will power.”
During those first years in Washington, the Roosevelts successfully established themselves among the city’s social and intellectual elite. “Edith and I meet just the people we like to see,” Theodore told Bamie. “We dine out three or four times a week, and have people to dinner once or twice; so that we hail the two or three evenings when we are alone at home, and can talk and read. . . . The people we meet are mostly those who stand high in the political world, and who are therefore interested in the same subjects that interest us; while there are enough who are men of letters or of science to give a pleasant and needed variety.”
Rudyard Kipling, whom Theodore had first met at the Cosmos Club in New York, was a guest on a number of occasions. Kipling later described that first encounter when he “curled up” on a chair across from Roosevelt “and listened and wondered until the universe seemed to be spinning around and Theodore was the spinner.” If Roosevelt initially resented Kipling’s “tendency to criticise America,” he nonetheless recognized the author’s “genius” and found the man himself “very entertaining.”
Roosevelt sometimes worried that his political career suffered as he devoted time and attention to his social pursuits. After two years, his war on the spoils system had produced singular successes but little systemic change. While he had managed to reduce the practice of forcing salary contributions from government clerks, he had not “succeeded in stopping political assessments outright.” He had “harassed the wrong-doers” who manipulated examination results without eliminating the endemic corruption that fueled the practice.
If Roosevelt fretted that his gains had been modest, he had accomplished more than any of his predecessors in the Civil Service Commission. Through his dramatic investigations of unscrupulous officials, his alliances with reformist journalists and immense skill in generating publicity, he had alerted Americans to the flagrant iniquities of the spoils system. The process Roosevelt had set in motion by shining the light of publicity on these practices would prove crucial in any attempt to create a system of government based upon good work rather than political influence.
TAFT EMBARKED UPON HIS TENURE in Washington with a very different style of leadership; meticulous habits and an affable disposition helped him build accord among colleagues and superiors at every level, including the executive.
Recalling their time together in Washington, Roosevelt wryly conceded Taft’s success in gaining Harrison’s cooperation while he so “got on Harrison’s nerves,” that his very presence set the president’s “fingers drumming on the desk before him as though it were a piano.” Roosevelt marveled that despite Taft’s ability to foster cooperation among all manner of men, “he was always a man of highest ideals.”
William Howard Taft’s stolid demeanor prevented the sort of aggressive, confident debut in Washington that Roosevelt had enjoyed. He confessed to his father that his first oral argument before the Supreme Court had left him despondent. “I did not find myself as fluent on my feet as I had hoped to,” he explained. “I forgot a great many things I had intended to say.” He worried that his deliberate speaking style would fail to capture the justices’ attention. “They seem to think when I begin to talk that that is a good chance to read all the letters that have been waiting for some time, to eat lunch, and devote their attention to correcting proof, and other matters that have been delayed until my speech,” he grumbled. While the solicitor general’s position might offer great “opportunities for professional experience,” he doubted his own ability to capitalize on those opportunities. “I find it quite embarrassing to change from the easy position of sitting on the bench to the very different one of standing on your legs before it,” he told one friend, “and I do not find myself at home as I hoped to do in presenting one side of a case at Court.” Called to make a quick business trip home, he was delighted to spend “a few days in Cincinnati, which it seems to me I left ten years ago, such a change has come over my mode of life.”
“Don’t be discouraged,” his father counseled. “I have no doubt that you will soon come to understand them & their ways perfectly, & that they will be as anxious to hear what you have to say, as you will to say it.” His mother also tried to assuage his anxieties. “Members waste their eloquence in the House and the Senate on empty benches or disorderly parties who never listen,” she reminded him. Taft assured his parents that he remained steadfastly “philosophical,” stoically framing his lack of immediate success as “the strongest reason for . . . having this experience and improving it.” Indeed, he acknowledged, “the very fact that I find it difficult, and not particularly agreeable is evidence that the medicine is good for me.”
His second appearance before the Court gave him “somewhat more satisfaction” and made him feel “more at home.” Unfortunately, his speaking style, at least in his own estimation, seemed to exert “the same soporific power” on the justices. He refused to be discouraged, declaring he would “gain a good deal of practice in addressing a lot of mummies and experience in not being overcome by circumstances.”
The sudden death of his predecessor the previous January had left him with a “rather overwhelming” workload; nearly a dozen unfinished cases had to be argued before the Court that spring of 1891. Midnight often found him still methodically reading through briefs, looking up precedents, drafting opinions, and editing proofs in his home library. His hard work secured victories in his first eleven cases. But even then, he could not share Roosevelt’s sanguine outlook. “Each time a case of mine is now decided, I look for defeat,” he anxiously wrote. “It is my turn. It ought to come, and doubtless will.” In fact, of seventeen cases argued in his first year, Taft was gratified to find he had won fifteen. “So,” he told his father, “you see that Fortune has been good to me on the whole.” Although reluctant to proclaim his own accomplishments, he concluded that“the year’s experience has been valuable.” He no longer considered “the inattention of the judges” a personal affront. “Everyone suffers the same way,” he realized. “It is the custom of the Bench.” As he mastered his initial insecurities, Taft appreciated that his position had opened an entirely“new field of federal practice, law and decisions, with which I had no familiarity before.”
Perhaps even more central to his success, Taft had “made some very valuable acquaintances” in his year’s time. “It would be difficult for the Department of Justice to be organized with officers who are pleasanter to get along with than it has been since I have been here,” he happily reported. “The Attorney General [William Miller] is a very satisfactory man to work under. . . . I like him very much, and am conscious that he has been in every way considerate of me.”
While Roosevelt reveled in any opportunity to exercise sole power in the absence of his fellow commissioners, Taft took no pleasure in suddenly assuming the role of attorney general. “The novelty of it wore off in just about a day,” he admitted, “and no man will be happier than I shall be when he returns to his desk.” In the following months, as Attorney General Miller suffered recurring intestinal attacks, Taft became more comfortable wielding authority. But he was careful not to overstep or compromise his relationship with Miller. “The first duty of a subordinate,” he strongly believed, “is courteous respect to his superior officer.”
Taft’s regard for the attorney general went beyond mere professional courtesy. On one occasion, Miller fell ill while his wife was out of town and Taft proposed that he stay overnight: “I shall sleep in a room next to his,” he related to Nellie. “I know what it is to be attacked in the stomach at night all alone, and even though I could probably do no good the fact of the presence of a friend is reassuring.”
Taft’s kind and ingenuous nature defined not only his bond with Miller but a growing intimacy with President Harrison, one of Miller’s closest friends. Visiting the attorney general’s household, Taft often found the president himself relaxing in the parlor. In the course of their conversations, Harrison in turn found Taft so amiable that he issued an open invitation to call on him at the White House “every evening if convenient.” Louise was delighted to learn of the proffered hospitality, regarding the unusual invitation “as not only a great compliment, but as a great privilege.”
Furthermore, Taft was happy to note that by year’s end he had “come into exceedingly pleasant relations with the Supreme Court,” the bench he one day ardently hoped to join. He developed a genuine friendship with Justice John Harlan and, at Harlan’s request, agreed to write a short sketch of his life for publication in a commemorative history of the Supreme Court. “It has been a work of considerable labor, because it involved an examination of a great many cases,” Taft related to his father. “However, Judge Harlan has been very kind to me, and I feel as if anything I could do for him was only repaying the friendly interest he has taken in me.” Indeed, the trust and affection generated by Taft’s good nature made him welcome in the city’s most eminent company. He became a regular whenever the attorney general hosted dinners for members of the Supreme Court.
Taft was equally popular among his subordinates and immediate colleagues, quickly earning the confidence and friendship of the assistant attorneys general. His administrative skills enabled him to organize the department’s functions in a manner that expedited everyone’s work. Under his predecessors, business had been “scattered over the Department,” but Taft had methodically taken control of the docket. “Every paper that comes to the Department with reference to Supreme Court business comes to me,” he proudly explained to his father. “I have a general idea of all the cases that are to be argued in the Supreme Court.” Taft’s dedication earned him great esteem in the capital, and word spread that he was “the heaviest weight intellectually of any men in the Department of Justice.”
For Nellie, life in Washington settled into a gratifying routine. She had been in town only six weeks when she received her first invitation to a White House dinner for the Supreme Court. “There were fifty at the table,” Taft reported to his father, “and it made a very brilliant assemblage.” The company included a number of senators and congressmen from the judiciary committees of both Houses, as well as the justices themselves. Nellie’s seatmate was “exceedingly conversational and pleasant, and Nellie had a good time,” Taft continued, immersing himself in the details of this social landscape. “You may tell Mother that Nellie’s dress which she got in Paris she had made over in New York, and that it is exceedingly becoming to her.” News of the festivities elicited great excitement in Cincinnati. “Do write me details,” Nellie’s friend Agnes Davis implored. “I feel so proud of our Cin. friends.”
Nellie was back at the White House for the traditional reception on New Year’s Day 1891, where the Marine Band’s performance must have evoked memories of her first visit as a young girl. “In the East Room,” The Washington Post reported, “the electric lights were used for the first time, the twelve great crystal suns set in the center of as many medallions on the ceiling gleaming with white light.” In the Red Parlor and the Blue Room, government officials and their wives mingled until the invited guests moved into the private dining room for lunch. “She had a very pleasant time,” Taft told his father, “and met a great many people—all the diplomats, and most of the prominent officials.” Later that afternoon, she stood in the receiving line at a party hosted by the attorney general and his wife. Days later, the Tafts attended a reception hosted by Vice President Levi Morton for the president and the cabinet. Nellie and her husband had established a place in the bright constellation of Washington that she had yearned for since childhood.
The house on Dupont Circle was large enough to accommodate guests, allowing Nellie to entertain her parents, her sister Maria, Taft’s brothers and sisters-in-law, and a number of her old friends from home. “Tom Mack is with us now,” Taft reported in January 1891, “and he and Nellie go every day to the Senate and House to hear the debates. They have been quite interesting during the past few days.” Finally, Nellie Herron Taft was privy to the intellectual and political discourse at the summit of Washington’s society.
The Roosevelts and Tafts were frequent guests at the home of Ohio congressman Bellamy Storer and his wealthy wife, Maria Longworth. Nellie and Edith both shopped at the Center Market, considered a Washington institution. On market day, the two women joined “throngs of buyers of all classes of society, fashionable women of the West End, accompanied by negro servants, mingling with people of less opulent sections.” They made the rounds of the carts, selecting fresh fruits and vegetables, fish, chicken and other meats. “The true Washingtonian,” the historian Constance Green wrote, “regarded marketing in person as much a part of well-ordered living as making calls or serving hot chocolate to morning visitors.”
Curiously, despite a constant proximity, the bond between these two impressive women “never ripened into intimacy.” In fact, Nellie later confessed to her younger son that “I don’t like Mrs. Roosevelt at all. I never did.”
DURING HIS SECOND YEAR AS solicitor general, Taft extended his string of victories in three celebrated cases. In the first, he successfully defended the constitutionality of the McKinley tariff, which raised duties on imports competing with American products. His second case, in which he convinced the Supreme Court to sustain Speaker Thomas Reed’s new method of counting a quorum, had profound implications for partisan politics in the legislative process. Reed’s procedure ended the old practice that demanded a voice vote rather than a simple tally of “those who were actually present in the room” to establish a quorum. This traditional method, in place since the first Congress, had enabled the minority party to prevent the transaction of business by simply hiding in the cloakrooms and refusing to answer the roll call. Reed’s new rule, unanimously affirmed by the Court, greatly increased the power of the Speaker, allowing him to push through sweeping legislation.
Taft’s most resounding triumph involved a dispute between Great Britain and the United States over fishing rights in the Bering Sea. Initially, the international attention focused on the case disconcerted Taft. “I suppose I ought to feel that it is a great privilege to take part in it,” he confessed, “but I look forward with considerable trepidation to making an argument orally before that court in a case which will be so conspicuous.” If Taft had gained confidence in the quality of his preparation, he remained uneasy about his oratorical skills. In such an important case, the work was customarily divided between the attorney general and the solicitor general. But another episode of Miller’s chronic illness left Taft responsible for the entire brief, a task he welcomed: “I do not object to this, at all, because I like the work,” he told his father. In the end, his conscientious planning and competent presentation yielded a unanimous ruling in the government’s favor. His three significant victories, announced at the same time, made headlines across the country.
Taft’s pleasure in his success as solicitor general was magnified by the joy he knew it would bring to his father. In 1890, the elder Tafts had moved to California, hoping the climate would improve Alphonso’s diseased lungs. For a time, it seemed his health had improved, but he soon began to suffer from a range of ailments, including asthma and bladder infections. “Your letters are what we live upon here,” Alphonso told his son. “Your success has been wonderful.” Despite his exhaustion at the end of each working day in Washington, Will took the time to write to his father, describing his cases in detail. “I am greatly exhilarated by your letters,” returned Alphonso wistfully. “They carry back 14 years when I was able to act a man’s part & enjoy life as it passed.”
In November 1890, Charley Taft traveled to the west coast to spend a week with their father. “The morning is his best time,” he reported to Will. “But the afternoon tires him out with pain and suffering. He is ready to go to bed at eight o’clock. His power of enduring suffering is wonderful. I could see traces of pain on his features during the afternoons, when he sits in his chair, but he never complained at all.” Louise confirmed Charley’s report. “Except when he is actually suffering his happy temperament surmounts all discouragements preserving a cheerfulness equal to Mark Tapley’s,” she explained, alluding to the irrepressible servant in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit who sought out all manner of obstacles to surmount and miseries to transcend, and yet maintained a joyful aplomb. While Alphonso’s body deteriorated, his mind remained sufficiently lucid to find pleasure when his wife read to him. “What a resource is a cultivated mind!” Louise told her son. “What can people do when old and sick without intellectual resources. I can always entertain him.”
Nothing mattered more to Alphonso in his last days, Charley reported, than the accomplishments of his boys—and Will’s foremost. “Can you not in your long summer vacation of next year come & see us?” Alphonso beseeched Will. “Think of it, & the fate of one old man who has to be across the continent from the best children in the world.”
In early May 1891, Will received word that his father had begun to hemorrhage internally and little time remained. He left work immediately and traveled by train to California. Though doctors had given up any hope for recovery by the time Will arrived, the chance to be with his father at the end was a gift that Theodore had been denied. “His vitality is fighting with death,” Will recounted to Nellie ten days later. “Each day might end his life and yet he has breathed on.” No longer able to take nourishment, Alphonso had lost some 75 pounds; still, his body clung to life. Only Will could persuade him to take anything to drink: “He seems to trust me. After I had given him some brandy he looked up at me in the sweetest way and said to me ‘Will I love you beyond expression.’ ”
A few mornings later, before Will had risen, Alphonso asked the nurse to fetch his “noble boy.” Agonizingly short of breath, he struggled to tell his son that “he ought to have avoided this by suicide.” Three days later, with Will by his side, Alphonso Taft died. He was eighty years old.
The funeral was held in the old Taft home on Mt. Auburn. In Washington, the Justice Department flag was flown at half-mast, though Taft rejected the attorney general’s proposal to close the department on the day of the funeral. Appreciative of the honor, Taft nonetheless insisted he did not want the general public to be inconvenienced.
All four sons returned to Cincinnati for the funeral. Taft worried that Charley and Annie, who had recently lost their twelve-year-old son David to typhoid fever, could scarcely absorb this new grief. “I trust you may never have this experience to go through,” Charley had written Will. “It takes one’s heart right out of a person.” For the rest of the Taft children, life was proceeding more smoothly. Harry’s law business was growing and Julia had given birth to a son. Horace’s school was beginning to prosper and he had fallen in love with Winifred Thompson, a teacher in New Haven. Fanny was happily settled in California, having married her father’s doctor, William Edwards. And Nellie had returned from Washington pregnant with her second child.
After the funeral, Nellie remained in Cincinnati with her family to await the birth of the baby. Taft returned alone to Washington, well aware that he made a “ludicrous” picture as he raced to catch the train at the Cincinnati station without the benefit of his wife’s management. Apparently, Taft had forgotten to safety-pin his drawers to his trousers, and as he began to run, his drawers “began to work themselves clear down into the legs of the trousers and [his] legs were thus shackled so as to prevent any rapidity of movement.” To close this comic vignette, just as the train departed the platform, he somehow managed to climb aboard.
Taft returned to a city that was gradually emptying as women and children escaped the insufferable summer heat and humidity, leaving the men behind. With Edith and the children at Sagamore Hill, Theodore and his British diplomat friend, Cecil Spring Rice, roomed together. “Springy and I have had a pleasant time,” Roosevelt told Bamie. “He is a good fellow; and really cultivated; in the evenings he reads Homer and Dante in the originals! I wish I could. . . . Of course I miss Edith and the children frightfully. But it is pleasant to be engaged in a work which I know to be useful and in which I believe with all my heart.” In July, they moved into Lodge’s vacant house while Cabot and Nannie were abroad. “We are just as comfortable as possible,” Roosevelt informed Lodge, “and are excellently taken care of by nice black Martha; and we think very gratefully of our absent host and hostess.”
On August 1, 1891, Nellie gave birth to a daughter, Helen. Twelve days later, Edith gave birth to Ethel. “I see that I got ahead of Mrs. Roosevelt and feel quite proud,” Nellie remarked to Will.
Without the domestic order imposed by the presence of wives and children, the men who worked through the long Washington summer established an intimate camaraderie. With Springy’s “nervous and fidgety” assistance, Theodore hosted several dinners, proudly reporting to Lodge that no guest had yet died. In Nellie’s absence, he invited Will to one of these bachelor meals. On this occasion, the invitation to Taft revealed an affectionate and casual humor: “Can you dine with me, in the most frugal manner Friday night at 8 o’clock. . . . No dress suit—I haven’t got any.”
At the time of their dinner, Roosevelt was wrestling with the headlong deterioration of his brother Elliott’s mental health, a situation that echoed Taft’s painful experience with his brother Peter. Elliott had gone to work for his Uncle Gracie’s real estate firm, but heavy drinking and mental instability prevented him from contributing to the enterprise. At twenty-three, he had married the socialite Anna Hall. She bore him three children—Eleanor, Elliott Junior, and Hall—but the responsibilities of fatherhood never slowed his drinking. “It is a perfect nightmare about Elliott,” Theodore had informed Bamie. “Elliott must be put under some good man, and then sent off on a sea voyage, or made to do whatever else he is told. Half measures simply put off the day, make the case more hopeless, and render the chance of public scandal.”
The disgrace Roosevelt feared surfaced that summer. One of Elliott’s maids, Katy Mann, threatened to file suit against him, claiming that he was the father of her newborn child. Theodore initially counseled against giving in to blackmail, but changed his mind when the family determined the likely truth of her story. “He is evidently a maniac, morally no less than Mentally,” Theodore gravely declared to Bamie. “How glad I am I got his authorization to compromise the Katy Mann affair!” When negotiations stalled and Theodore learned new details of Elliott’s increasingly violent behavior at home, he secured Anna Hall’s consent to have him institutionalized. His petition to declare his brother legally insane made headlines the very week of his dinner with Taft. ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT DEMENTED BY EXCESSES, proclaimed the New York Herald. Two days later, Elliott retaliated in an open letter to the Herald “emphatically” denying he was “a lunatic or that any steps have been taken to adjudge him one.” Theodore was beside himself. “The horror about Elliott broods over me like a nightmare,” he told his sister.
In the end, Elliott agreed to seek a cure for his alcoholism and the family withdrew their petition to declare him insane. The treatment failed, as did several other interventions. Two years later, suffering from delusions, Elliott “jumped out of the parlor window of his house, had a seizure and died.” Just as the Tafts had sought solace in memories of the time when Peter was “the sunniest” child in the family, so Theodore found “great comfort” in the realization that he no longer had to dwell on his brother’s degradation: “I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now,” he reflected. “He is just the gallant, generous, manly boy and young man whom everyone loved.”
While Theodore rarely talked with anyone about his private sorrows, the public nature of the struggle, combined with Taft’s empathetic nature raises the possibility that he was able to discuss some portion of the situation with his friend. In a letter to Bamie, Roosevelt spoke of another dinner party in his home that included Taft, “of whom we are really fond.” At such gatherings, one observer noted, Taft’s “merry blue eyes, his heavy mop of dark-brown hair, and the cherubic look of his big face, conspired with his soft, sibilant, self-deprecatory voice” and booming laugh to make him an ideal companion.
WILLIAM TAFT’S WIDESPREAD POPULARITY IN Washington would prove an invaluable resource when he sought one of nine new circuit court judgeships created by Congress to relieve congestion in the courts. At thirty-four, Taft was young for the prestigious appointment, the second highest in the nation’s judicial system. The reduction in pay from his salary as solicitor general mattered little to Taft when he considered that a seat on the Sixth District’s court of appeals would put him “in the line of promotion” for the Supreme Court. His old friend Howard Hollister and Yale classmate Rufus Smith both worked tirelessly to build support for the appointment. They “have stirred up matters in my behalf in Cincinnati,” he gratefully observed, “so that a great number of letters have come from the leading members of the bar there.”
The affinity Taft had developed with Attorney General Miller and Justice Harlan served him well when the two men wholeheartedly endorsed him for the post. In a joint interview with the president, Harlan called Taft “the man whom . . . of all others, you should appoint”; Miller agreed, telling Harrison that he believed Taft possessed “in an eminent degree the judicial faculty” and that his “age was such as to secure to the people of the circuit a great many years of hard work.” Justice Henry Billings Brown affirmed that he “would be very glad” if Taft received the appointment. Despite such resounding, prestigious endorsements, Taft remained “entirely philosophical” about his chances, aware that the number of qualified candidates was “legion.” The Sixth District covered Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, and Kentucky, each state offering a favorite son to compete for the position. Indeed, the flood of applicants to the new judicial posts necessitated a nine-month selection process, stretching from March until December. Though Alphonso Taft had been thrilled by the possibility of his son’s appointment, he did not live to hear who had received the coveted post.
As the Tafts awaited a decision, Nellie endeavored to discourage Will from actively pursuing the post. She had finally secured the life she had long desired and dreaded a return to the staid, tranquil existence in Cincinnati. Just as she had objected to his superior court appointment years earlier, fearing he would be “settled for good,” she now resisted a promotion that would keep him “fixed in a groove for the rest of his life” among colleagues “almost twice his age.” Since her life was now completely bound to his, she insisted that she should weigh in on the decision.
Taft was disheartened to find his wife “very much opposed” to a course of action he ardently desired. After five years of marriage, his love for her transcended the passion of courtship days. “It seems to me now,” he told her, “as if more completely than ever, we have become one.” He was alarmed by her warning: “If you get your heart’s desire My darling it will put an end to all the opportunities you now have of being thrown with bigwigs.” And he was disquieted when she spoke of her great affection for Washington and her qualms that outside her family there was “hardly a soul” in Cincinnati she cared to see. “You will regard my failure to get the Circuit Judgeship as only another stroke of good luck and perhaps you may be right, though I can not think so,” he acknowledged. “In any event my Darling, we can be happy as long as we live, if we only love each other and the children that come to us.”
Such assurances notwithstanding, the long delay as President Harrison made up his mind was as tense for Nellie as it was for Will. Though the prospect ran counter to her own desires, she realized how deeply her husband was invested in the appointment. Each week a different rumor surfaced heralding a different name for the post, though Will remained the top candidate. “I hate that you should be disappointed,” Nellie cautioned him. “It would be very easy for the Pres. to change his mind, even if it had been made up.” The years of their marriage had only served to intensify her own devotion to Will. While she had left him craving the slightest expression of affection during their courtship days, her letters during their recent summer separation were filled with tenderness.
“I am not a bit happy without you,” she confessed. “I love you ever and ever so much.” Every day they were apart, she penned a letter to him and was disappointed when he missed a day in replying, reminding him that “when we were first married you often wrote twice a day.” She felt his anxiety acutely, commingled with her own reluctance to embrace his hopes.
Perhaps the satisfaction she had found in motherhood had given Nellie a measure of equanimity as she faced an uncertain future. She wrote at length about the doings of their children. When Robert was a year old, she noted that he was “simply crazy about people—will go to any one and even run into their rooms if he sees the door open. The moment he sees anyone he knows, he sets up a shout at the top of his voice, which makes him a great favorite.” She declared him “the dearest child that ever was,” happily noting his devotion toward baby Helen as well as herself.
Nevertheless, her husband remained the primary focus of her love and concern. His eating habits and lack of exercise were constant sources of worry for her. When colleagues praised him, Nellie reveled in the accolades. “I seem to care much more that people should like and appreciate you than that they should care about me,” she admitted. And whatever the situation, she never stopped giving him clever and frank counsel. “Don’t make your brief too long, dearest,” she admonished on one occasion. “The court will appreciate it much more if they don’t grow weary over reading it. Many a good thing is spoiled by there being too much of it.”
On December 16, 1891, the president announced his nominations for the nine new judgeships. His nomination of William Howard Taft for the Sixth District won widespread approbation. “The press notices have been as flattering as anyone could desire,” Harry wrote to his brother. The Washington Post called Taft “one of the most popular officials in public life,” citing a senior Ohio judge’s opinion that “no man could have been named who would be more acceptable to the bar of that circuit.” Horace teased that he could no longer afford to keep sending Will telegrams with each new success his brother achieved, but earnestly assured him that he was ideally suited for the post: “Aside from your especially liking the work and being fitted for it, there has always seemed to me a dignity about the office and a chance for fine service. . . . Somehow Father’s brave & conscientious career on the bench always pleased me more than any other part of his professional or public life.”
Taft viewed the return to his home city of Cincinnati with great high spirits. “One of the sweetest things connected with the appointment,” he wrote Howard Hollister, “is the pleasure I anticipate in coming back to our old associations,” to renew “the enthusiastic affection and intimacy which we had during our college days, and after. When we are in Cincinnati together, we must see as much of each other as possible.” Suppressing her disappointment, Nellie dutifully packed up the house on Dupont Circle and moved back with the children. Taft remained in Washington for three additional months as solicitor general until the Senate confirmed the nominations on March 17, 1892. “I feel so good over the confirmation and the prospect of seeing you and the babies that I could hurrah for joy,” he enthusiastically told Nellie.
Once established in his new post, Taft did not forget the kind support he had received in Washington. He wrote with warm appreciation to Attorney General Miller. “The two years which I have spent under you in Washington have been full of pleasure and profit to me. No man ever received more considerate treatment from another than I have from you. . . . Our relations have refined into affectionate friendship and I shall cherish the memory of it always. . . . I know to whom I owe my present appointment to the Bench. But for you, I should not have attained what has been my life’s ambition and I am deeply grateful.”
LIKE NELLIE, EDITH HAD BECOME accustomed to Washington and was loath to relinquish the “pleasant life” she had built, which seemed likely when the Democrat, Grover Cleveland, defeated Benjamin Harrison in 1892. Roosevelt handed in his resignation, but Cleveland did not immediately accept it. “Our places are still uncertain,” she told her sister Emily. She wished that her husband could be “elected by the people” to Congress, rather than dependent on presidential whim for his position and livelihood. She feared, however, this was “a dream never to be realized.” It was an anxious time for Theodore as well; they had stretched their finances during their stay in the capital, and his inheritance was dwindling. “He is now in one of his depressed conditions about the future,” Edith remarked, “and says the children will have reason to reproach him for not having insisted upon taking a money making profession.” Edith understood that such histrionics were essentially “nonsense,” a mere diversion from his true concerns. Theodore revealed his deeper troubles to Bamie, insisting that he had no permanent prospects in the political world, where he believed he “could do most.” With overdetermined fatalism, he consigned himself to more modest pursuits: “But I shall speedily turn back to my books and do my best with them; though I fear that only a very mild & moderate success awaits me.”
Decisions about the future were happily postponed when Cleveland asked Roosevelt to stay at his post for another year or two. News that “the moving spirit of the Commission” would remain was certain to be “received with joy by all reformers, and with equal dismay by spoilsmen throughout the country,” the New York Evening Post observed. “Through the Harrison Administration, he pursued the spoilsmen ‘with a sharp stick,’ although they belonged to his own party, and he will not be any easier with them now that he will have to deal with Democrats.”
In fact, despite the Democratic administration, the ensuing months brought contentment to the Roosevelts. Theodore got along better with Cleveland than he had with Harrison. Edith happily reported to Bamie that they had finally been invited to a White House dinner. “It was practically a family affair,” she noted, and she was “certainly glad to dine once at the White House.” Increasingly, however, Edith was occupied by the demands of her growing family. That spring of 1894, she gave birth to her fourth child, named Archibald Bulloch in honor of Theodore’s maternal relatives.
The pleasant routine of life in Washington was interrupted in the fall when Roosevelt was approached by the New York Republican bosses to run for mayor. In contrast to his earlier token run, this time the Republicans stood a good chance of winning in both the city and the state. Theodore was elated by the sudden turn of events, he told Lodge, which renewed his “hope of going on in the work and life for which I care far more than any other.” But Edith recoiled from the uncertainty, believing “they simply could not afford to take the chance,” and asking, “What if Theodore resigned his commissionership in order to run and then lost the election?” Furthermore, she was alarmed that a costly campaign might drain their already diminished resources when their growing family required more stability. And in addition, she hated to leave her good friends for“big, bustling New York.”
Edith did not argue with her husband; she simply withdrew “into one of her reserved and disapproving silences, that often, Bamie knew, had more of a disturbing effect on Theodore than anything she said.” Both Corinne and Bamie urged their brother to run. In the end, the weight of Edith’s opposition and the difficulty of funding the campaign led him to decline the offer. The bosses turned to William L. Strong, a reform-minded businessman, who ran and won on a fusion ticket of Republicans and anti-Tammany Democrats.
Contemplating his lost opportunity, Roosevelt fell into a profound depression. “The last four weeks, ever since I decided not to run, have been pretty bitter ones for me,” he admitted to Lodge. “I would literally have given my right arm to have made the race, win or lose. It was the one golden chance, which never returns; and I had no illusions about ever having another opportunity. . . . At the time, with Edith feeling as intensely as she did, I did not see how I could well go in; though I have grown to feel more and more that in this instance I should have gone counter to her wishes and made the race anyhow. It is not necessary to say to you that the fault was mine, not Edith’s; I should have realized that she could not see the matter as it really was, or realize my feelings.”
Edith was horrified when she fathomed the magnitude of her husband’s disappointment. “I cannot begin to describe how terribly I feel at having failed him at such an important time,” she confided to Bamie. “He never should have married me, and then would have been free to take his own course quite unbiased. I never realized for a minute how he felt over this, or that the mayoralty stood for so much to him . . . if I knew what I do now I should have thrown all my influence in the scale with Corinne’s and helped instead of hindering him. You say that I dislike to give my opinion. This is a lesson that will last my life, never to give it for it is utterly worthless when given—worse than that in this case for it has helped to spoil some years of a life which I would have given my own for.”
Both Edith’s fierce self-reproach and Theodore’s despondent conviction that he had botched his sole opportunity in life, his “one golden chance,” proved overwrought. Though his political path might be more circuitous, Roosevelt’s restless drive would hardly allow him to retire from public life. The following spring, he was on his way to New York to accept Mayor Strong’s offer to serve as police commissioner, a job that would utilize all his intrepid energies.