The lights were doused, and a voice announced, “We are now in Darkest Africa.” After a medley of wild-animal noises, the lights came on again, revealing a tent in a tropical jungle. From inside, came the rattle of a typewriter, punctuated regularly by the sound of a bell that registered not carriage returns, but pecuniary ones. A pair of offstage narrators kept “tab” as Author and Auditor:
AUTHOR (typing furiously) The lion is a wild and ferocious animal.
AUDITOR Eight dollars.
AUTHOR It has a soft body and a hard face.
AUDITOR Seventeen dollars.
AUTHOR It is the king of beasts and its daughter is a princess.
AUDITOR Twenty-nine dollars.
AUTHOR The lion roars like distant thunder.
AUDITOR Thirty-five dollars.
AUTHOR But it is nobody’s business what its religion is.
AUDITOR Forty-four dollars.
Roosevelt and Taft guffawed throughout, even when the typed article was followed by another, more serious one, explaining that “Author” had gone to Africa to avoid any appearance of interfering with the Taft Administration.
The Gridiron’s exclusively masculine, joke-heavy atmosphere was not conducive to observation of any change in the relationship of President and President-elect. As so often in situations involving transfer of power, it was women who registered the first signals of strain. Edith Roosevelt was upset to hear that Helen Taft intended to replace the White House’s frock-coated ushers with liveried black footmen. Mrs. Taft let it be known that she, as a frugal housewife, did not intend to continue the Roosevelt tradition of elaborate entertainments catered from outside. Her guests would be fed out of the White House kitchen, and like it. She also felt that her husband was altogether too much seen as Roosevelt’s “creature,” and urged him to demonstrate his independence. Alice Longworth, who was a gifted if cruel mimic, mounted her own propaganda by driving out in the Roosevelt surrey and rearranging her face into a terrifying caricature of the toothy Mrs. Taft.
IN MID-DECEMBER, Washington’s social season began with almost nightly receptions, dinners, and balls in and around the White House. The Roosevelts participated graciously, showing no signs of ennui on their eighth procession through the ritual calendar. Yet small signs of impending change darkened each event, like speckles on tired transparencies. Elihu Root announced that he was stepping down as Secretary of State, handing two months of token power over to Robert Bacon. The President’s annual Cabinet dinner on 17 December was attended, as usual, by Vice President and Mrs. Fairbanks, but “Sunny Jim” Sherman showed up, too, and so did Philander Knox—no longer as a stalwart of the old Roosevelt Cabinet, but as Taft’s rumored replacement for Bacon.
To the President, at least, this rumor did not suggest any abandonment of what he took to be a pledge by Taft to retain as many existing Cabinet officers as possible. He loved Bob Bacon, but the latter’s appointment was strictly stopgap. And Root (having been offered a seat in the United States Senate by Republican leaders in New York) would never have stayed on at State. Afterward, talking to Archie Butt, Roosevelt gave his first hint of accepting Taft’s right to proceed independently.
“I don’t feel any resentment at all,” he said. “Only I hope that he will take care of the men who served me here.”
ALL THE ROOSEVELTS gathered in the White House for a midday Christmas dinner, along with about fifty relatives and close friends. Bamie came with her drowsy husband, now Admiral Cowles, and their son, Sheffield, whose fondness for scrapple had made him an early beneficiary of the Pure Food Law; Alice brought Nick—a rather conflicted congressman these days, being the son-in-law of the President and a protégé of the President-elect; the Lodges were accompanied by their poetic son George Cabot (“Bay”) and his wife and family; the Roots were there, and various Meyers and Gardners and McIlhennys and Lowndeses and Eustaces, with their children; a few unattributable urchins, possibly gate-crashers from the White House Gang, seemed perfectly at home; and the indispensable Archie Butt, who had already been informed that the Tafts wished to keep him on, went about his business of observing and recording.
The Executive Dining Room moose looked down impassively on tables decorated with red leaves and ferns and Christmas crackers. Quentin wore a paper crown. Platters of roast turkey went round and round. Brandy-soaked plum puddings were carried in, flickering with blue flame. Little ice-cream Santas followed, each holding a tiny burning taper.
Afterward, gentlemen smoked in the Red Room while the women and children went down into the basement. There, in a specially darkened room, the White House Christmas tree stood out in colored radiance. The Jusserands and Bryces and Cabinet officers and their families came from other parties to give and exchange gifts (a volume of G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics for Captain Butt), and the President talked politics and kissed whichever child came within reach of his bear hug.
No sooner had the debris of this party been swept up the following morning than preparations began for a much more formal event on the twenty-eighth: the debut ball of Miss Ethel Roosevelt, age seventeen. The East Room’s floor was polished until it seemed to hold its own inverted chandeliers. Four hundred and forty-four places were laid at tables extending right down the length of the upper apartments. The glassed-in eastern colonnade, never used before, was turned into a luminous, flower-hung gallery. Clusters of roses perfumed the Blue Room, where expressionless Ethel would stand in her white satin gown.
A few hours before the party began, Captain Butt escorted Alice Longworth through the mansion. It looked more beautiful than either of them could remember. Time was when Alice—almost twenty-five now, filling out sexily, more poised and contemplative than in her wild teens—had made a rebellious point of staying away from the White House, but since marrying she had developed a passionate attachment to it, coming in daily for tea and gossip. Today, she had little to say, and her demeanor struck Archie as “unutterably sad.”
“MR. SPEAKER, a message from the President of the United States!”
The traditional call echoed through the House of Representatives on 4 January 1909, in the midst of a furor prompted by Roosevelt’s insinuation, one month before, that congressmen did not “wish to be investigated” by the Secret Service. That remark, coming soon after a sly reference to “the criminal classes,” had been too much for Senator Aldrich, who had demanded an inquiry into whether the President should be condemned for discourtesy toward Congress. The House had simultaneously challenged Roosevelt to substantiate his words.
So far, the second session of the Sixtieth Congress had been, in Alice’s words, “one long lovely crackling row between the White House and Capitol Hill.” Her father’s Eighth Annual Message had been, for Joseph Cannon, the last of a haystack of straws heaped on the camelback of the Constitution. The Conservation Conference and the Commission on Country Life had been bad enough, he felt; but if any of the significant centralizations of power Roosevelt called for—over the railroads, over telecommunications, over the environment—were made law, states could say good-bye to their individual rights. Progressivism would have finally replaced conservatism, with outright socialism sure to follow.
Cannon sat now, gavel in hand, as yet another Special Message was announced. It elicited such a bedlam of mocking laughter that the Speaker had to pound for order for several minutes. The Message, when read, amounted to a semi-apologetic withdrawal of Roosevelt’s perceived insult to Congress. But he persisted in objecting to a House move to confine the Secret Service’s activities strictly to presidential protection and the investigation of counterfeiting. Again, he said, such limitation would benefit “the criminal class.”
He might also have added, but wisely did not, that the House’s sudden prejudice against a venerable federal agency was due to rumors that he had been using the Secret Service for his own purposes over the years, harassing Senators Foraker and Tillman and other political opponents, gathering espionage for political campaigns, even getting his bodyguards to fetch and ca
rry for him.
There was some substance to these rumors, although evidence of abuse of power was lacking. As The Atlanta Constitution pointed out, the Secret Service had been involved in most of Roosevelt’s major initiatives, from antitrust probes and peonage prosecutions to pure-food sleuthing and the grilling of Brownsville discharges. Its chief, John E. Wilkie, was a known favorite of the President. The force was tiny—only ten full-time agents—but Wilkie had funds to hire an unlimited number of private detectives for whatever purposes he deemed fit. It was these funds, and these purposes, that anti-Rooseveltians in Congress sought to restrict, conveniently focusing years of resentment against the President for his steady transfer of power away from Capitol Hill.
The Secret Service’s necessarily covert nature only fueled the suspicions of conspiracists in politics and the press. Seeking, as conspiracists always do, a central intelligence behind diverse activities, these rumormongers ignored the fact that many other government departments used confidential agents not under Wilkie’s or Roosevelt’s direct control. The irony was that the President himself wanted to concentrate all such activities in one federal bureau of investigation, answerable to the Attorney General, if not to the general public. So, conspiracism clashed with coordination, and seven years of cumulative frustration exploded in jeers and catcalls.
The chorus unhappily coincided with a debate on the very subjects Roosevelt had raised. After seven hours of mounting rancor, the House handed him a rebuke unprecedented since the days of Andrew Jackson, voting to table his new Message as so much white paper. Thus, little more than eight weeks before the end of his Presidency, Roosevelt reached the nadir of his relations with Congress. But—to his great personal glee—the House’s very action made it seem as if it was indeed afraid of an empowered Secret Service, because certain representatives might have things to hide. Effectively if not legislatively, he came out looking like a political winner.
“Nobody likes him now but the people,” Ambassador Bryce remarked.
ARCHIE BUTT WAS amazed at the President’s good-humored calm after his rejection by the House. While Mrs. Roosevelt chafed, her husband chuckled at Congressman Longworth’s discomfiture. (“Poor Nick! What he is not suffering for love’s sake these days!”) He was heard laughing heartily over a newspaper transcript of Benjamin Tillman’s latest anti-Roosevelt tirade in the Senate, and that night waltzed at a White House ball, happy and flushed as a boy.
Butt wrote home, “I think he sees more clearly than the rest of us do, or else he has no nerves at all.”
One legislative request that Congress was powerless to deny him, because of its guarantee of last April, was an appropriation for two more all-big-gun battleships. It came through on 22 January, adding an extra glow of celebration to the White House Army and Navy Reception. Roosevelt could—and did—congratulate himself on having built up a navy second only, now, to that of Great Britain in first-class capital ships, with vastly improved design and marksmanship standards.
All that remained to complete his sense of satisfaction was the return of the Great White Fleet, scheduled for exactly one month’s time.
FEBRUARY—THE MONTH in which Taft had set himself a languid deadline for the appointment of his Cabinet—found Roosevelt showing, for the first time, occasional hints of melancholy. He was saddened to hear that the Ohio Society of New York had declined to drink to his health at its recent annual banquet, presumably because the President-elect’s brother was present.
“I do not believe that it was done with a view to aid in the divorcement of Taft and myself, as some friends seem to think,” he said to Archie Butt. The captain thought otherwise, but kept silent.
Nothing but disillusioning news had come from the Taft camp for the past several weeks. Of all the current Cabinet, only George von L. Meyer, at latest report, stood a chance of being reappointed. So much for Taft’s promise of continuity. Roosevelt, still refusing to believe the worst of his erstwhile laughing companion, went on, as if trying to convince himself: “They little realize that Taft is big enough to carve out his own administration on individual lines.… I felt he was the one man for the Presidency, and any failure in it would be as keenly felt by me as by himself or his family.” Then, in a revealing free association, he went on, “You have heard some things said against my administration, Archie, but they are nothing to what you will hear when I am completely robbed of power and in Africa. But when the history of this period is written down, I believe my administration will be known as an administration of ideals.”
He cheered up in the days that followed, as carpenters invaded the upper floor of the White House and began to box up books and other Washington acquisitions for transfer to Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt went into a distributive frenzy as memento seekers, hearing that he could not resist a sad face, kept making meaningful visits. “Why, Mother,” Ethel complained, “he has given away nearly everything in the study, and Aunty Corinne and every other guest in the White House have their arms full of pictures, books, and souvenirs.”
Only when the carpenters transferred their hammering and sawing to Lafayette Square, and a review stand for the coming Inaugural Parade rose outside the North Gate, did the realization sink in that he was about to give away the largest memento of all: a presidency immeasurably enhanced in force, glamour, and power.
AT HAMPTON ROADS on 22 February, Roosevelt stood for the last time as Commander-in-Chief on the bridge of the Mayflower. He strained his one good eye through a pair of naval binoculars, trying to glimpse what everyone around him saw clearly: distant white superstructures looming through gray rain and fog. “Here they are,” he eventually shouted, feeling rather than seeing, as the sound of twenty-eight ships’ bands playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” grew in volume, to the rhythmic crash of cannon. The music, the gunpowder, the echelons of saluting bluejackets: all were for him, and for history.
“That is the answer to my critics,” he said, his top hat glistening in the wet air. “Another chapter is complete, and I could not ask a finer concluding scene for my administrations.”
“I COULD NOT ASK A FINER CONCLUDING SCENE FOR MY ADMINISTRATIONS.”
The Great White Fleet returns from its round-the-world trip, 22 February 1909 (photo credit 32.2)
EPILOGUE
4 March 1909
AT A TIME when he was still able to joke about his future, William Howard Taft used to say, “It will be a cold day when I go into the White House.”
He was right, although he could not have imagined how cold. His Inauguration was the most arctic any Washingtonian could remember. For many of the visitors whose trains managed to scrabble into town, along rails carbuncled with rock-hard ice, it was the worst weather they had known in their lives. A brutal west wind drove in billows of snow. Branchloads of ice crashed from trees, some bringing down tangled decorations. Ice sheaths snapped telephone and telegraph wires, cutting off communications with the rest of the country. Freezing rain sent automobiles careening, carriage horses sliding, and streetcars to unscheduled terminals. And the sullen sky discharged such further quantities of snow that groundsmen gave up any attempt to keep the eastern Capitol plaza clear. At eleven o’clock, spectators were told that the swearing-in ceremony was being transferred indoors. Arriving guests had to find their own way to the Senate chamber, and their own seats when they got there. The rough pine platform built for the swearing-in whitened slowly as it stood abandoned, bare of all bunting.
“I KNEW THERE WOULD BE A BLIZZARD WHEN I WENT OUT.”
Roosevelt and Taft arriving at the Capitol, 4 March 1909 (photo credit epl.1)
“I knew there would be a blizzard when I went out,” said Roosevelt, with grim satisfaction.
He left the White House with Taft at ten o’clock, and they were driven to the Capitol in a twelve-team equipage whipped by flying snow. Pennsylvania Avenue was lined with empty bleachers. A few hundred well-wishers straggled along the sidewalks, walking to keep warm, easily keeping up with the presidentia
l carriage. They cheered occasionally—“Oh, you Teddy!”—but their mood seemed more sad than celebratory. Roosevelt kept dropping his window and waving at them until the snow clouds forced him to raise it again.
Progress was so slow that the procession did not crest Capitol Hill until shortly before eleven. A small, familiar figure awaited Roosevelt and Taft at the foot of the Senate steps: that of Philander Knox, exuding triple dignity as Senator, Secretary of State-designate, and chairman of the congressional welcoming committee. He led the way to the President’s Room, where a final bureaucratic duty awaited Roosevelt: the signing of a pile of bills that had been passed overnight. The Sixtieth Congress and he were going out together. There had been precious little else they had done in tandem over the last couple of years.
Roosevelt’s entire Cabinet was on hand to witness this ritual. Scrupulous to the last, he handed each bill out to the appropriate officer for approval before taking it back and writing his name. Taft, meanwhile, played host to politicians drifting in to pay their respects.
Toward noon, the flow of visitors slowed. Roosevelt finished his work and went to join Taft. They chatted and laughed with much of their old warmth, but a sense of strain was apparent between them. They soon ran out of conversation, and sat side by side in silence until the President got up to bid farewell to a few departing guests.
One of them was Captain Butt, already transferred to Taft’s service, and not entirely happy about it. He choked as he tried to say good-bye.
“It isn’t good-bye,” Roosevelt said to soothe him. “We will meet again, and possibly you will serve me in a more important capacity than the one you have now.”
Butt had little time to ponder this strange remark, for Vice President Fairbanks had come through the door with Sherman and announced that the “march” would begin at once.
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