CHAPTER 31
The Residuary Legatee

MR. HENNESSY	I don’t know whether th’ administhration is a success or not.
MR. DOOLEY	Me friends differ.
MR. HENNESSY	Rosenfelt says it is.
MR. DOOLEY	Rockefeller says it isn’t.
MR. HENNESSY	But annyhow, whether ’tis a success or not, it’s been injyable.

THE FIRST DAY OF JUNE 1908 found Theodore Roosevelt alone in the White House, with only his youngest son for company. Edith and Ethel were cruising down the Potomac in search of sea breezes, Archie had transferred to Sagamore Hill, and his elder children were gone, or half gone, along their respective roads to independence. “Until Quentin goes to bed the house is entirely lively,” he wrote to Ted. “After that the rooms seem big and lonely and full of echoes. The carpets and curtains are all away, as the heat of summer has begun.”

His office time was devoted largely to persuading as many still uncommitted delegates as possible to vote for Taft at the Republican National Convention, now little more than two weeks off. In doing so, he had to make fanatic Rooseveltians understand that he would not accept a draft himself, on any size of silver plate—difficult for them to believe, and depressing for him to reiterate, since the certainty that he would be elected if nominated was no less than that of Quentin growing taller.

“Q,” as schoolmates called him, was an always cheerful, straight-A student with a love of long words, chopping them up patriarchally and grinning when he succeeded without stuttering. (“The Republican presidents have been most u-n-i-f-o-r-m-l-y good—but the Democrats have been, without e-x-c-e-p-t-i-o-n, terrible.” Some of the words were misapplied, or wholly invented; Q never let deliberation impede his eloquence.) He was ten and a half years old now, and Roosevelt noticed, with some sadness, that he was no longer interested in being read to. The White House Gang, an elite cadre of Washington’s most subversive small boys, accepted Q as their leader—not because he was the son of the President, but because with his big head, cyclonic energy, and moral decisiveness he simply was Theodore Roosevelt in their imitative world, just as placid, plump-cheeked Charles “Taffy” Taft, unquestioningly accepting Q’s orders, acted as Secretary of War in all confrontations with foreign powers, notably the District of Columbia Police Department.

As an honorary member of the Gang, which operated out of the White House attic, the President was capable of considerable mischief himself. But when Q’s guerrilla activities threatened national security, he did not hesitate to exercise his authority as Commander-in-Chief. One such occasion was the Battle of the Guidon, waged on the South Lawn between two divisions of the Gang, respectively led by Q and Taffy.

The property office of the War Department having condemned a moth-eaten silk artillery pennant, Company Q decided to fight Company T for possession of it. Whichever side held the colors for three minutes (Q, like his father, was an obsessive clock-watcher) would win the privilege of dictating Gang activities for the rest of the afternoon. Taffy (like his father a capable deployer of military matériel) staked the guidon about five feet from the nozzle of a hose, the strategic significance of which Q did not at first appreciate.

During the ensuing battle, Taffy, by far the largest combatant, maintained his grasp of the flagstaff and ordered an aide, Edward “Slats” Stead, to spin a concealed tap. Q and his force of three men were blasted head over heels in the resultant gush of water. Enraged, Q issued a counterorder (“Keep it up! Keep it up! I’m going to sinister this, immejitly!”) and disappeared. Suddenly, the gush lost its force. As the spray cleared, Q was revealed in possession of a fire ax, with which he had sliced the hose into several sections. His triumph was forestalled by a stentorian shout from the West Wing, and the President came charging through the Rose Garden, coattails flying.

TR	(panting heavily) Too late! Too late, by George! Quentin!—I mean Georgie Washington—come here with your i-n-c-r-i-m-i-n-a-t-i-n-g hatchet! In the heat of battle, many acts, which would not be c-o-u-n-t-e-n-a-n-c-e-d at other times, may be excusable—or at least, subject to sym-pa-thet-ic in-ter-pre-ta-tion; of course you understand that, boys?
Q	Sure. You mean that’s the reason why I did it? I did it, because something had to be done, immejit-ly—
TR	That’s e-x-a-c-t-l-y it! The point is always to do something quickly, because if you don’t, the other fellow will.

Charles Evans Hughes, whose candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination had never recovered from Roosevelt’s surprise attack in January, could vouch for this advice, along with Senator Foraker, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and President Marroquín of Colombia. But the President was not finished with his son:

TR	You may be wrong—you were here—but you have, at least, i-n-i-t-i-a-t-e-d action. When the action is wrong, you must admit it, and correct it by some further action—
Q	(looking at the severed hose) I don’t see how this can be corrected.
TR	Only by an entirely new garden-hose. It was Government property, still is, but also, is no longer. You cannot imagine the difficulties involved, and the things required to be done, in order to replace it. It will even cost money, part of that which I am earning—or was earning, when interrupted by a despatch regarding the progress of this war, and left hurriedly for the field—
Q	Well, of course you’re right; but we’ve learned our lesson, you know—
TR	We? Don’t you mean yourself? And what have you learned?
Q	Not to cut up garden-hoses.
TR	And not to use fire-axes on anything but a fire—
Q	(with a touch of wistfulness) We’re not so likely to have a fire.
TR	Not with all this water around! You escape, Quentin, only because of the extenuating circumstances arising out of the heat of battle.

With that, he turned on his heel and marched back to the Executive Office.

To adults, as well as Gang members, Q was a freakish duplication of his father, right down to the juvenile asthma and queer, prudish chivalry. (When classmates giggled at a girl’s up-folded dress, he yanked it down, trembling with anger.) He had the same physical courage, clarity of perception, and ability to concentrate totally on any task at hand. Yet, more than any of the other Roosevelt children except Alice—who in any case had a different mother—he had a large personality of his own. Henry Adams found him fascinating, as had Mark Hanna.

Q was imaginative enough to withdraw, periodically, into daydreams that seemed to elevate him in an almost physical sense. He loved heights, and the eagle’s-eye perception that height endows. The famous MacMillan Commission models of Washington thrilled him. “Look down on the White House, as if you were a god! How small it looks.… You could drop a pebble on it and crush it, together with the p-i-g-m-y President and the State-War-Navy Department, too, by mistake!”

The last two words were an indication of Quentin Roosevelt’s essentially kindly nature. Like his father, he had an aggressive urge to hurl bolts from above. Unlike his father, he thought about the consequences.

TO THE RATHER less aggressive Kermit Roosevelt, the President wrote, “I have two first-rate maps of the part of Africa we are to go to.”

For some time he had been thinking of taking Kermit, who had just graduated from Groton, on a hunting trip after William Howard Taft (or William Jennings Bryan?) succeeded to the Presidency. He knew himself well enough to know that he would want to reassume control of the government (if necessary, at the head of a company of cavalry), within weeks of either man’s inauguration. The stability of the country, and of his own blood pressure, might best be preserved if he withdrew to an environment as remote as possible from Washington. Newfoundland and Alaska had been presented as possibilities; but during the last few months, after a dinner with the African explorer Carl Akeley, Roosevelt had become obsessed with the idea of conducting a marathon nine-month safari through British East Africa and the uplands of the Nile.

He tried hard to pretend to Edith, when she came back from her cruise, that the trip was merely a pipe dream that could easily blow away. But to Kermit, he gave a more concrete impression:

I think I shall get a double-barrelled 450 cordite, but shall expect to use almost all the time my Springfield and my 45-70 Winchester. I shall want you to have a first-class rifle, perhaps one of the powerful new model 40 or 45 caliber Winchesters. Then it may be that it would be a good thing to have a 12-bore shotgun that could be used with solid ball.… It is no child’s play going after lion, elephant, rhino and buffalo.

AS HE WROTE, the Republican herd of delegates, now overwhelmingly pledged to Taft, began to converge like slow wildebeests on Chicago. ROOSEVELT STAMPEDE STOPPED ran a gratifying headline in the Washington Evening Star. The body copy, however, allowed that anything could still happen when they met head-to-head.

“I know that the President does not want the nomination and will not accept it,” Congressman Charles B. Landis of Indiana was quoted as saying. “Of course, if the convention should nominate him and then adjourn, he would have to take it.”

The ironic secret—which would have provoked the herd to a horizon-filling rout, if carried on any breeze—was that Taft did not want the nomination either. As always, when strong people around him felt strongly (Roosevelt, Mrs. Taft, Charles P. Taft, even young Taffy), he went along. His heart alone protested. A few days before the convention, he said to Senator Cullom, “If your friend Chief Justice Fuller should retire, and the President should send me a commission as Chief Justice, I would take it now.”

The hour was too late for such fantasies. At latest count, Taft had 563 delegates, Knox 68, and Hughes 54. One estimate of Taft’s strength went even higher, to more than six hundred delegates. There was no question as to whose popularity, whose policies, whose rhetoric, whose patronage, and whose mastery of press relations had pumped up this formidable total. Reluctant or not, Taft could hardly avoid being seen as the inevitable successor of an irresistible party leader. The giant airship that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was readying for flight at Friedrichshafen, Germany, was no more shaped, stressed, powered, and dirigible.

Helen Taft’s embarrassment about her husband’s debt to the President was correspondingly acute. She wished he could be a candidate in his own right, and resented everything Roosevelt had done to help him, while dreading that her husband might yet suffer the indignity of having that support withdrawn.

On Tuesday, 16 June, the Convention opened at the Chicago Coliseum, where Theodore Roosevelt had been so triumphantly nominated four years before. Taft remained in Washington, headquartered in his office at the War Department, while the President worked in the West Wing, just a few dozen yards away. Both offices kept in constant telegraphic touch with floor managers in Chicago, and with each other by telephone and messenger.

At first, these communications were frequent, as a dispute about the use of injunctions in strike situations threatened the integrity of the party platform. But after Roosevelt and Taft agreed on a compromise plank, not at all to the satisfaction of the American Federation of Labor, the two power centers spoke less and less. Almost imperceptibly, a sense of separation began to develop between them.

The proceedings in the Coliseum were routine through Wednesday afternoon, when Henry Cabot Lodge, speaking as permanent chairman, described Theodore Roosevelt as “the best abused and most popular man in the United States today.” This remark touched off a forty-nine-minute demonstration, nineteen minutes longer than the historic bedlam that had followed William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896. Twelve thousand throats, including that of an ecstatic Alice Longworth, joined in roars of“Four more years! Four more years!” The enormous hall, notorious for its muffled acoustics, seemed unable to hold any more noise. Lodge’s black gavel rose and fell as if it were the only soundless thing. Toy bears bobbed and bowed to further shouts: “We want Teddy! We want Teddy!”

As soon as his voice became audible, Lodge moved to forestall what looked like an incipient stampede. “That man is no friend to Theodore Roosevelt, and does not cherish his name and fame, who now from any motive, seeks to urge him as a candidate for the great office which he has finally declined.” Lodge could not help sounding oracular. But his reproof calmed the convention for the rest of the session.

Joseph Bucklin Bishop, the professional journalist, sycophant, and anti-Semite whom Roosevelt had appointed Secretary of the Panama Canal Commission, happened to be in Washington the following morning. He visited the Executive Office around eleven o’clock and found the President in the midst of yet another attempt to control fanatic third-termers in Chicago. Roosevelt never minded being observed at work, so Bishop stayed to watch and record as telegrams flashed back and forth.

The action in Chicago seemed to be off the floor, while speakers began to drone the nominations of Taft and his six rivals: Knox, Fairbanks, Foraker, Cannon, LaFollette, and Hughes. Private messages urged Roosevelt to issue another disclaimer, lest he be added to the list. He saw no reason for a man of honor to repeat himself, but was worried enough to ask for advice. Bishop persuaded him that the precautionary letter he had already issued was explicit enough.

At 1:30, the President took lunch on the South Portico with Edith, Ethel, and Quentin. Bishop and another guest joined them. The grounds were already lush with premature summer, after the loveliest spring Roosevelt could recall in Washington. Only the linden trees remained in scented bloom. Nine hundred contentious Republicans determining who might sit here in a year’s time could have been a million miles away, except for further telegrams of appeal, and further, increasingly annoyed presidential refusals.

Bishop remained at the White House until around 4:00, then crossed over to the War Department to see his boss. Taft sat calmly with Mrs. Taft—not so calm—while Taffy kept scuttling in from an anteroom with slips from Chicago. Each arrived promptly enough to describe the progress of the speeches almost cheer by cheer. When at last Taft’s name was announced, the telegrams tabulated the loudness and length of the ensuing ovation.

“I only want it to last more than forty-nine minutes,” Helen Taft said.

She was denied her wish. The demonstration was over in less than half an hour. Oratory resumed for other candidates. Then, during a tribute to LaFollette, the President of the United States was mentioned. Taffy came in with a wire saying that the convention had “exploded.” Senator Lodge was trying, and failing, to restore order; a huge American flag with Roosevelt’s face on it had been unfurled on the platform. Mrs. Taft turned white, and sat in silence. Taft tapped the arm of his chair, whistling softly. Further wires reported that the flag was being circulated round the floor, amid even greater uproar. But Lodge, determined to restore order, was proceeding with the roll call of states. After about twenty-two minutes, the hubbub abated, Georgia’s declaration was heard, and the convention calmed. By 5:22 P.M., the delegates had registered their choice. Taft was nominated for President of the United States by a vote of 702 to 68 for Knox, 67 for Hughes, 58 for Cannon, 40 for Fairbanks, 25 for LaFollette, and a paltry 16 for Foraker. By motion of Senator Penrose, the nomination was made unanimous, and the color returned to Helen Taft’s high cheekbones.

AFTERWARD, WHEN CONGRESSMAN James S. Sherman of New York had been announced for Vice President, there were the usual sotto voce recriminations among those cheated of glory. Charles Evans Hughes huffed, through his wealth of beard, that he had gotten a 2:00 A.M.telegram from a White House intermediary, asking him in the names of both Roosevelt and Taft to accept the vice-presidential nomination, along with a substantial cash bonus. He had of course refused. LaFollette complained about the President’s secret manipulation of the entire proceedings: “No administration in the history of this government ever gave a more flagrant example of political control of delegates than was brazenly flaunted in the face of the public at the Convention of 1908.”

LaFollette was especially disturbed by Taft’s choice of “Sunny Jim” Sherman, a big, bluff conservative widely seen as a stooge for Speaker Cannon. All observers were agreed, however, that the Republican ticket, at five hundred pounds and counting, was the heaviest package ever offered to American voters.

“THERE IS A LITTLE hole in my stomach,” Q remarked to his father on the day after the convention, “when I think of leaving the White House.”

Roosevelt maintained a cheerful attitude over Taft’s huge win, but when writing to intimates, such as Nannie Lodge, he could not avoid imparting a similar wistfulness. “Four more years” had been so urgently, so almost compellingly, offered him, not once but day after day—years in which he could without doubt accomplish the most far-reaching reforms since Reconstruction. Declining that opportunity had, as always with him, been a matter of moral compulsion:

It was absolutely necessary that any stampede for me should be prevented, and that I should not be nominated.… If I had accepted, my power for useful service would have forever been lessened, because nothing could have prevented the wide diffusion of the impression that I had not really meant what I had said, that my actions did not really square with the highest and finest code of ethics—and if there is any value whatever in my career, as far as my countrymen are concerned, it consists in their belief that I have been both an efficient public man, and at the same time, a disinterested public servant.

Ray Stannard Baker stopped by to see the President that evening, and found him in a rare reflective mood: “Well, I’m through now. I’ve done my work.”

They talked until midnight. Baker suggested that the American people might not be through with him, and might be clamoring for his return to the White House in four years’ time.

“No, revolutions don’t go backwards,” Roosevelt said. He seemed tired, and his voice had a note of sad finality. “New issues are coming up. I see them. People are going to discuss economic issues more and more: the tariff, currency, banks. They are hard questions, and I am not deeply interested in them: my problems are moral problems, and my teaching has been plain morality.”

He stayed in Washington only long enough to accept Taft’s resignation as Secretary of War, along with his profuse thanks and vows of obligation. They agreed that Luke Wright, a former Ambassador to Japan and coauthor of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, should be given charge of the War Department. As to other members of the Cabinet, Taft said, in the flood of his gratitude, that he saw no reason why they should not continue to serve if he was elected President.

The President, delighted, relayed this information to all concerned. “He and I view public questions exactly alike,” he wrote George Otto Trevelyan. “In fact, I think it is very rare that two public men have ever been so much at one in all the essentials of their public beliefs.”

On 20 June, he left town for Oyster Bay. Taft headed in the opposite direction to work on his acceptance speech in Hot Springs, Virginia.

FOUR DAYS LATER, Grover Cleveland died. On 10 July, delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, nominated William Jennings Bryan for President. While doing so, they proved that their lungs were more leathery than those of Roosevelt’s puny claque in Chicago, as they cheered the Commoner for an hour and twenty-eight minutes.

Edith was not impressed. She had met Bryan at the Governors’ Conference and decided that American voters had been right in rejecting him for the presidency twice already. “A trifle too fat and oily for the fastidious,” she wrote her sister-in-law.

Oily or not, Bryan was by no means unattractive to voters. He was an orator of legendary eloquence, unlike Taft, whose platform manner was awkward and gaffe-prone. (The Grand Army of the Republic had not appreciated his reminder, on Memorial Day, that General Grant had had a drinking problem.) Bryan, a genuine man of the people, was able to empathize with his audiences “one on one,” whereas Taft the judge manqué always sounded as if he was handing down majority opinions.

Democratic campaign planners felt that Taft’s biggest asset—his presidential backing—had counted more at the Republican Convention than it would on Election Day. By then, Roosevelt would be, ideologically, a spent force, and unless Taft built a big new political personality for himself, voters might well decide that twelve years of Republican continuity were enough.

Bryan, besides, had already had plenty of experience in leading his own party. Taft’s behavior after drafting his acceptance speech indicated a certain lack of confidence after years of submitting to Roosevelt’s will. Instead of heading straight home to Cincinnati to confer with his family and advisers, he took a detour to Oyster Bay, disastrously announcing that he needed “the President’s judgment and criticism.” Roosevelt received him at Sagamore Hill on 24 July, made a few changes to the speech, wished him well, and sent him on his way.

As Taft headed west, another visitor came to spend a few nights with the Roosevelts en famille, accompanied by Assistant Treasury Secretary Beekman Winthrop. Captain Archibald Butt, he of the glittering, much-befrogged soldierly presence at the Conservation Conference, had with astonishing speed become the President’s closest companion. Other military and naval aides had come and gone at the Roosevelt White House—among them an extraordinarily handsome West Pointer named Douglas MacArthur—but “Archie” combined personal charm and professional efficiency to such a degree that he was already indispensable.

Large, strong, plumpish, and always beautifully turned out, whether in dress blue or mufti, he was forty-two years old, unmarried, and devoted to his widowed mother, to whom he wrote almost daily. As a youth, he had been the Washington correspondent of a small group of Southern newspapers, and shown a distinct gift for social reporting. He had carried his writing habit into the Army, with vague thoughts of one day collecting and publishing extracts from his letters for publication. To such a natural scribe, appointment to the Roosevelt White House was a privilege worthy of St.-Simon. Mrs. Butt, a Georgian lady of unreconstructed views, was finding that her son was the best-informed gossip in the United States.

JULY 25, 1908

My dear Mother:
The greatest surprise to me so far has been the utmost simplicity of life at Sagamore Hill. I am constantly asking myself if this can really be the home of the President of the United States, and how is it possible for him to enforce such simplicity in his environment. It might be the home of a well-to-do farmer with literary tastes or the house of some college professor.…

There was no one at the house when we got there. Mrs. Roosevelt had been out to see some sick neighbor and the President was playing tennis. They both came in together, however, he in tennis garb and she in a simple white muslin with a large white hat of some cloth material, with flowers in it, a wabbly kind of hat which seemed to go with trees and water. He welcomed us with his characteristic handshake and she most graciously and kindly. The President was so keen for us to take a swim that he did not give us time to see our rooms before we were on the way to the beach.

I do not know when I have enjoyed anything so much. I could not help remarking how pretty and young Mrs. R. looked in her bathing suit. I did not admire his, however, for it was one of those one-piece garments and looked more like a suit of overalls than a bathing suit, and I presume he did not think it dignified for the President to wear one of those abbreviated armless suits which we all think are so becoming. I confess to liking to have as much skin surface in contact with the water as possible.

Dinner was at 8:00 and we hurried home to put on evening clothes. I had asked Mrs. R. if the President dressed for dinner and she said that he always wore his dinner jacket, but to wear anything I wanted, as the only rule they had at Oyster Bay was that they had no rules or regulations. I finally wore white trousers and white waistcoat with the dinner jacket and black tie. He said it was a costume he liked more than any other for summer and that he often wore it himself. He put Mrs. Winthrop on his right, and I sat on his left. There was no special formality, and the only deference which was paid to the President was the fact that all dishes were handed to him first, then to Mrs. Roosevelt, and after that to the guest of honor, and so on.

Miss Ethel was late in coming to dinner and everyone, including the President, rose. From the conversation which followed I learned that it had always been the rule to be on time for their meals, and this remark started the Roosevelt ball rolling. The President said that he thought that Ethel ought to try to be on time, too; that he preferred that no notice be taken of him when he came to his meals late, but that since Mrs. Roosevelt (with a deferential wave of the hand toward her) insisted upon this modicum of respect being paid to the President he always tried to be on time to his meals. Mrs. Roosevelt said that she did not insist upon the mark of respect being shown to the President but to their father, whereupon all laughed, and Ethel said that she would try to be on time to all her meals except breakfast.

I was very hungry and enjoyed my dinner, being helped twice to nearly everything. We had soup, fish, fried chicken, and corn on the cob, and jelly. There was nothing to drink but water. The President asked me if I would have something, but as it was not the custom I declined.

“We often have something,” the President said, “so do not hesitate to take what you want. We are not the tipplers that our friends in Wall Street would make us out, but don’t mistake us for prohibitionists.” …

I forgot to mention the fact that the fried chicken was covered with white gravy, and oh, so good! The President said that his mother had always said it was the only way to serve fried chicken; that it gave the gravy time to soak into the meat, and that if the gravy was served separately he never took it.

Ted is now grown up and, while not handsome, has a keen face and is certainly clever and has a splendid sense of humour. Kermit is very attractive in manner and in appearance, and I have an idea that he is his mother’s favorite, though of course, she would deny it, just as you do when accused of favouring me over the others. Archie is the one who was so ill, and still looks very delicate. He is the pugnacious member, evidently, for he takes up the cudgel at every chance. Quentin is the youngest, and a large, bouncing youngster, who brought in his last-made kite to show his father, and who explained to me the merits of the newfangled kites for flying purposes, which controversy would not interest you in the least.

There, I have introduced you to the family, and will stop, as lunch is nearly ready, the first bell having been some ten minutes ago. By the way, the bell is a cow bell, just the kind you hear on cows in the cow lot, but sounds just as sweet as any other if one is hungry.

After lunch, the women retired to snooze, Ethel walked her dog, and the boys rowed out to spend the night on the Mayflower. Butt and Winthrop sat smoking on the porch with Roosevelt, gazing down the slope of Sagamore Hill to the Sound. There were no other houses to be seen anywhere, just a rich variety of trees lower down, and then nothing but water. The talk naturally drifted to Taft, his impending acceptance speech, and his prospects for election.

Roosevelt admitted to some worries on the last score. “If the people knew Taft there would be no doubt of his election. They know what he has done, but they don’t know the man. If they knew him they would know that he can be relied on to carry out the policies which I stand for. He is committed to them just the same as I am and has been made the mouthpiece for them as frequently as I.”

Butt said that Taft’s major problem was “the residuary legatee idea.” However, his legacy also included the President’s popularity.

“Yes,” Roosevelt said, “I think so.”

CAPTAIN BUTT STAYED at Sagamore Hill for four more days, enchanted by the Roosevelt family, while they in turn found him to be unflappable, tireless, well-bred, and discreet. Like the President, he was a heroic trencherman, and matched Roosevelt plate by oversized plate, from double helpings of peaches and cream for breakfast, followed by fried liver and bacon and hominy grits with salt and butter (“Why, Mr. President, this is a Southern breakfast”), through three-course lunches and meat dinners suppurating with fat. “You think me a large eater,” Butt wrote in his next letter home. “Well, I am small in comparison to him. But he has a tremendous body and really enjoys each mouthful. I never saw anyone with a more wholesome appetite, and then he complains of not losing flesh. I felt like asking him today: ‘How can you expect to?’ ”

Between meals, there was much strenuous activity. Butt discovered during a midsummer deluge (as Ambassador Jusserand had discovered during a February snowstorm) that Roosevelt considered tennis to be a game for all seasons. The sodden ball was smashed to and fro. Swimming and water-fighting, too, were by their nature compatible with rain. When heat built up in the woods, the President was impelled to seize an ax and get in fuel for the winter. “I think Mr. Roosevelt cuts down trees merely for the pleasure of hearing them fall,” Butt wrote. “Just as he swims and plays tennis merely for the pleasure of straining his muscles and shouting. Yet when he reads he has such powers of concentration that he hears no noise around him and is unable to say whether people have been in the room or not.”

The President’s strenuosity extended even to ghost stories. “I want ghosts who do things. I don’t care for the Henry James kind of ghosts. I want real sepulchral ghosts, the kind that knock you over and eat fire … none of your weak, shallow apparitions.”

Much of Roosevelt’s library time that weekend was devoted to books and maps about Africa. He talked about it continually. “You know how you feel when you have all but finished one job and are eager to get at another. Well, that is how I feel. I sometimes feel that I am no longer President, I am so anxious to get on this trip.” He hoped that by the time he came down the Nile, to meet up with Edith in Cairo, he would be “sufficiently forgotten” to return home “without being a target for the newspapers.”

Winthrop asked what quarry he feared the most in East Africa. The answer came promptly: “You can kill the lion by shooting him in any part of the body, but his alertness and agility make him the most dangerous to me.”

Roosevelt moved on to discuss the King of Abyssinia, Albert Beveridge’s affectations, Shakespeare’s “compressed thought,” and the Book of Common Prayer, with interspersed witticisms that had his listeners roaring with laughter. “His humour is so elusive, his wit so dashing and his thoughts so incisive that I find he is the hardest man to quote that I have ever heard talk,” Butt wrote. “In conversation he is a perfect flying squirrel, and before you have grasped one pungent thought he goes off on another limb whistling for you to follow.”

Despite the President’s tendency to dominate every gathering, Butt gradually became aware of “a sort of feminine luminiferous ether” at Sagamore Hill “pervading everything and everybody.” Edith Roosevelt’s cool discipline held the big crowded house together, as it had the White House. She made no effort to cajole or criticize her children or guests, manipulating them simply by her own quiet example. Over breakfast on Sunday morning, she announced that she and the President were going to church, but expected no one to accompany them unless “conscience” so dictated. Captain Butt, who could take religion or leave it, could also take a hint.

Knowing them both to be Protestant, he ventured an anti-Catholic remark during the automobile ride to Christ Episcopal Church. Roosevelt gave him a quizzical look.

“Archie, when I discuss the Catholic Church, I am reminded that it is the only church which has ever turned an Eastern race into a Christian people. Is that not so?”

Forty small boys saluted as the President led the way into the little church on Shore Road. Captain Butt joined him and Mrs. Winthrop in the front family pew, while Edith, Ethel, and Kermit sat behind. Butt was intrigued to see that Roosevelt, a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, bowed his head in prayer, “just as all good Episcopalians do,” before the service started. He needed no prayer book, singing all the plainsong chants and the “Te Deum” by heart. He sang every hymn too, changing sometimes to a lower octave, somewhat surprising for a man whose speaking voice broke so often into falsetto. His only concession to the faith of his fathers, so far as Butt could see, was a refusal to bow his head during the Creed and again at the Gloria. “I came to the conclusion before the service was over that the President was at heart an Episcopalian, whatever his earlier training might have been.”

Asked afterward what his favorite hymns were, Roosevelt listed “How Firm a Foundation,” followed by “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “Jerusalem the Golden,” and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.”

He indulged in no sports that afternoon, explaining to Butt that although Sabbath observance meant little to him personally, it meant a lot to many Americans, and he felt an obligation, as President, to respect such common beliefs.

Butt’s last day at Sagamore Hill, Tuesday, 28 July, was the eve of William Howard Taft’s long-awaited acceptance speech in Cincinnati. Roosevelt again revealed that he was worried about his candidate. He sensed a general “lack of enthusiasm” for the Republican ticket, in contrast to Bryan’s gathering strength. The Commoner still impressed him.

“And he is not a charlatan, either: he is a splendid politician and a wonderful leader. He has met with nothing but defeat so far, and yet he is stronger today than ever and will be the hardest man to beat, whatever the papers may say to the contrary.”

President and aide sat that night on the porch in a flood of moonlight, talking about many things. Roosevelt confessed another fear, which he had entertained for the past year and a half: that of war with Japan. He did not think it would come soon, but he was sure it would one day.

“No one dreads war as I do, Archie.… The little I have seen of it, and I have seen only a little, leaves a horrible picture in my mind.”

The surest way to postpone it, he said, was to prepare for it as much as possible, and show evidence of a steely willingness to fight. That was why he had authorized the Great White Fleet to proceed across the Pacific, stopping en route at Yokohama.

TAFT’S SPEECH SEEMED to bear out Roosevelt’s belief that he intended “no backward step” from the policies of the current Administration. He pledged himself “to clinch what has already been accomplished at the White House,” and said that his chief work would be “to complete and perfect the machinery by which the President’s policies may be maintained.”

With that, he returned to Hot Springs to complete and perfect the machinery of his golf game, which to the consternation of Republican strategists interested him much more than politics.

Now began what the veteran Philadelphia Press reporter Henry L. Stoddard called “a silent boycott of T.R.” Roosevelt did not notice it at first, since he bombarded Taft with letters of advice almost daily, and received courteous, if not very forthcoming, replies. Only slowly, as August progressed, did he realize that no Cabinet officers were being summoned to Hot Springs. If Taft had meant what he said about wanting to work with them in future, he was not showing much present interest in their counsel. Neither was he sending for any of the President’s state or national lieutenants.

Roosevelt could only assume that Taft wished, quite understandably, to counteract the “residuary legatee” factor. Plump, lovable Will must know what he was doing. If not, the rather less lovable Mrs. Taft certainly did.

THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN of 1908 began in earnest after Labor Day. But earnestness did not translate into energy. Ideologically, the two main candidates were hampered by the fact that there was little difference between their respective platforms. The Republican Party was for the protective tariff, but not averse to reforming it; the Democratic Party wanted revision, but shrank from the idea of free trade. Both camps vowed a limited war on monopoly, called for more railroad regulation, and demanded fairer treatment for labor. Theodore Roosevelt may have been excluded physically from the campaign, but its very blandness was testimony to his de ipse domination of American politics: he could have written either platform himself.

He fretted, longing to get involved, as he had during his own campaign four years before. “For reasons which I am absolutely unable to fathom,” he wrote Elihu Root, “Taft does not arouse the enthusiasm which his record and personality warranted us in believing he ought to arouse.” A note of irritation, as of a patron taken too much for granted, colored his continuing advice to the candidate. He stopped just short of giving direct orders:

You should put yourself prominently and emphatically into this campaign. Also I hope to see everything done henceforth to give the impression that you are working steadily in the campaign. It seems absurd, but I am convinced that the prominence that has been given to your golf playing has not been wise, and from now on I hope that your people will do everything they can to prevent one word being sent out about either your fishing or your playing golf. The American people regard the campaign as a very serious business, and we want to be careful that your opponents do not get the chance to misrepresent you as not taking it with sufficient seriousness.

Without being so tactless as to refer to the widely published image of Taft, in midswing, trying to circumnavigate his own circumference, he warned him to stay away from candid press cameras: “I never let friends advertise my tennis, and never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear.”

He tried to coach Taft in the art of personality projection. “Let the audience see you smile always, because I feel that your nature shines out so transparently when you smile—you big, generous, high-minded fellow.” But back of the smile, there should be the aggression of a fighter for the right. “Hit at them; challenge Bryan on his record.”

As September progressed, with little noticeable change in traditional party loyalties, Roosevelt calmed down. Every vote for the status quo ante was a vote for continued GOP dominance of all three branches of government.

Only one discord, an unresolvable one, affected Republican harmony. It was that of Brownsville. The Senate Committee on Military Affairs may have upheld the President’s action, and Foraker may have been eliminated as a candidate, but the anger of black voters in such key states as Ohio and New York was potentially threatening to Taft. They did not have to give their support to Bryan to cripple his candidacy; if they were merely solid in refusing to vote at all, he could lose and lose.

Roosevelt got, if not consolation for the major mistake of his presidency, a certain grim satisfaction out of seeing Foraker totally humiliated on 17 September. William Randolph Hearst, stumping for the Independents Party, revealed the existence of letters between Foraker and Standard Oil’s John D. Archbold, going back over a period of years, that amounted to black-and-white proof of a senatorial purchase. Sums as large as fifty thousand dollars were itemized as “fees” and “payments” for vague legal services and “understandings” that clearly involved legislation.

Foraker, devastated, admitted the authenticity of the letters, but claimed that they related to law work only, which he had performed during intersessional times, and before such outside work was frowned upon by the Senate. At least one check—the largest—had been not a payment, but a loan from Standard Oil, to help a colleague buy a newspaper. Hearst had neglected to mention that Foraker had paid Archbold back within a month.

These qualifications, however, had little effect on public outrage. Foraker himself neglected to explain how $150,000 in corporate contributions toward the redecoration of his Washington mansion in no way related to his defense of corporations on Capitol Hill. He was, overnight, a dead man politically, and Roosevelt urged Taft to make the most of his demise. “I would have it understood in detail what is the exact fact, namely, that Mr. Foraker’s separation from you and from me has been due not in the least to a difference of opinion on the Negro question, which was merely a pretense.… Make a fight openly on the ground that you stood in the Republican party and before the people for the triumph over the forces which were typified by the purchase of a United States Senator to do the will of the Standard Oil Company.”

Taft, however, was not a fighter, either open or covert. Lacking aggression, all he wanted was to be loved. For the most part, this need served him well on the hustings. Audiences forgave his lackluster speaking style and warmed to his portly, always cheerful demeanor. When pressing flesh, he discharged none of Roosevelt’s galvanizing energy, but instead imparted an unthreatening, gentle glow. He was everybody’s favorite fat uncle from childhood, dispensing coins and lollipops.

Bryan’s brazen vocal cords were worked to the limit as he crisscrossed the country, meeting large and rapturous audiences wherever he went, and saying little to tax either his or their own mental abilities. But as James Bryce sympathetically observed, “That a man who talks so much should be able to think at all is amazing.”

ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO Washington on 23 September and plunged into the only kind of campaign work he could do, barring a request (which never came) to tour on behalf of Taft. He fired off a series of press statements and public letters attacking every candidate in the Democratic ranks who seemed vulnerable to charges of corruption, or any other sins on the calendar of human frailty. His biggest triumph was in causing the resignation of the treasurer of the Democratic campaign, Charles N. Haskell—also on account of links to Standard Oil, which by now was equated in the public mind with Attila’s Kingdom of the Huns. That the links had been first announced, again, by Hearst in no way spoiled Roosevelt’s satisfaction in having deeply embarrassed Bryan. “How the President does enjoy a fight when there is need of one,” James Garfield wrote in his diary.

Taft came to Washington only once, on 18 October. He was fresh from a tour of the Baptist South, and feeling somewhat bruised by the hostility of evangelicals toward his Unitarian faith. Roosevelt sympathetically went to church with him. “I did this,” he wrote Kermit, “hoping that it would attract the attention of sincere but rather ignorant Protestants who support me, and would make them tend to support Taft also.” It was the first time President and candidate had met since July. Roosevelt was pleased to find Taft, as ever, “just a dear,” and confident of victory in a majority of states. Dixie, after all, had never been GOP territory.

The nearest thing to a campaign debate that month was that over the use of injunctions in labor disputes. Unions claimed that corporations had too much power, under existing law, to force strikers back to work, by unduly influencing judges. Samuel Gompers of the AFL castigated the Republican Party for reneging on instructions from Roosevelt himself, earlier in the year, to adopt an anti-injunction plank. But the issue appealed only to a hard core of union voters, and the President neutralized it by publishing one of his typical public letters, accusing Gompers of impugning the integrity of the courts. On 26 October, Roosevelt released another epistle, four thousand words long, summarizing Taft’s fair-minded labor policies as a judge in the 1890s and as the Cabinet officer responsible for the well-being of workers in the Panama Canal Zone. He proudly identified himself as an honorary locomotive fireman, and announced that no less a personage than “the secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Steamshovel and Dredge men” was going to vote Republican.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Theodore Roosevelt turned fifty. He celebrated with a solitary ride, jumping all the hurdles in Rock Creek Park. “That is, Roswell jumped them,” he wrote Jules Jusserand. “I just sat on his back and admired the scenery.”

By now, it was apparent that Taft was going to win, in a victory proportionate to his size if not his stature. Ohio black leaders announced for him, the Republican labor vote remained loyal, and Bryan’s search for a last-minute, election-breaking issue failed. The President did not deny himself credit for having turned Taft into an effective campaigner. “I told him he must treat the political audience as one coming, not to see an etching, but a poster,” he said to Jusserand and Archie Butt. “He must, therefore, have streaks of blue, yellow, and red to catch the eye, and eliminate all fine lines and soft colors.”

Changing the subject, Roosevelt began excitedly to discuss a lecture he had been invited to give at Oxford University after he emerged from Africa. It was to be entitled “Biological Analogies in History,” and would discuss the continuance and disappearance of species as illustrative of the limitations of Social Darwinism. He was already deep into paleontological and sociological research. To save time, he was dictating the lecture while Joseph De Camp painted his portrait. He wanted both it and another paper, commissioned by the Sorbonne, to be well in hand before he devoted himself entirely to safari preparations.

Jusserand, who had come to the Executive Office for tea, had to keep listening until almost eight o’clock. Captain Butt was finally permitted to escort him out.

“Was there ever such a man before?” the Ambassador asked.