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.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 22
