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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Invention of McClure’s
S. S. McClure (left) and John S. Phillips (right), in the offices of McClure’s magazine, 1895.
IN THE MID-1890S, THE GENTEEL world of patrician reformers and civil service enthusiasts that Taft and Roosevelt initially typified had begun a seismic shift. Widespread discontent with the industrial order, building for over a decade, threatened now to flare into open revolution. The growth of colossal corporations in the aftermath of the Civil War had produced immense, consolidated wealth for business owners, but the lives of the working people, western farmers and eastern factory workers alike, had become increasingly difficult. “We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found new cities,” Roosevelt’s mayoral rival, Henry George, observed; “we girdle the land with iron roads and lace the air with telegraph wires; we add knowledge to knowledge and utilize invention after invention.” Yet despite such vaunted progress, he declared, “it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.”
The captains of industry, George acknowledged, had fueled unprecedented innovations: “the steamship taking the place of the sailing vessel, the railroad train of the wagon, the reaping machine of the scythe.” To confirm the positive changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, he continued, one need only visit “the great workshops where boots and shoes are turned out by the case with less labour than the old fashioned cobbler could have put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye of a girl, cotton becomes cloth faster tha
n hundreds of stalwart weavers could have turned it out with their hand-looms.” With this transfiguring mechanization and the development of mass production, however, “the gulf between the employed and the employer is growing wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper; as liveried carriages appear, so do barefooted children.”
Far from heralding an age of plenty, these wondrous savings of time and labor served only to diminish the ability of many Americans to procure the goods they needed to sustain their families. So long as the frontier remained open, restless Americans could escape hardships by moving west, lured by promises of free land and equal opportunity. By the 1890s, this option had withered. As Frederick Jackson Turner observed in a seminal paper delivered during the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago in 1893, the frontier had closed, and a distinctive phase of American history had thereby come to an end.
A mood of rebellion began to spread among the laboring class. The late eighties and nineties witnessed an unprecedented number of violent strikes in the nation’s factories, mines, and railroads. The combination of meager wages for twelve-hour working days in unsafe, unsanitary conditions had spurred millions of workers to join unions. “It was a time of strikes and riots, pitting troops against desperate workers,” the historian Frank Latham observed, “of tense meetings where businessmen talked fearfully of ‘a coming revolution.’ ”
In the year 1886 alone, more than 600,000 workers walked out on strike, disrupting thousands of businesses and railroad lines for weeks at a time. At the McCormick Reaper plant in Chicago, police were called in to break up a confrontation between strikers and scabs. In the brutal clash, four workers were killed. On May 4, a group of anarchists gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest those deaths. The peaceful demonstration turned violent when police ordered the protesters to disperse. A bomb thrown into the officers’ formation killed eight policemen and four protesters and wounded more than seventy others.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 23
