Theodore Roosevelt and His Times The Taft Administration byHowland, Harold
In the evening of that election day in 1904 which saw Roosevelt
made President in his own right, after three years of the
Presidency given him by fate, he issued a brief statement, in
which he said: "The wise custom which limits the President to two
terms regards the substance and not the form, and under no
circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another
nomination." From this determination, which in his mind related
to a third consecutive term, and to nothing else, he never
wavered. Four years later, in spite of a widespread demand that
he should be a candidate to succeed himself, he used the great
influence and prestige of his position as President and leader of
his party to bring about the nomination of his friend and close
associate, William Howard Taft. The choice received general
approval from the Republican party and from the country at large,
although up to the very moment of the nomination in the
convention at Chicago there was no certainty that a successful
effort to stampede the convention for Roosevelt would not be made
by his more irreconcilable supporters.
Taft was elected by a huge popular plurality. His opponent was
William Jennings Bryan, who was then making his third
unsuccessful campaign for the Presidency. Taft's election, like
his nomination, was assured by the unreserved and dynamic support
accorded him by President Roosevelt. Taft, of course, was already
an experienced statesman, high in the esteem of the nation for
his public record as Federal judge, as the first civil Governor
of the Philippines, and as Secretary of War in the Roosevelt
Cabinet. There was every reason to predict for him a successful
and effective Administration. His occupancy of the White House
began under smiling skies. He had behind him a united party and a
satisfied public opinion. Even his political opponents conceded
that the country would be safe in his hands. It was expected that
he would be conservatively progressive and progressively
conservative. Everybody believed in him. Yet within a year of the
day of his inauguration the President's popularity was sharply on
the wane. Two years after his election the voters repudiated the
party which he led. By the end of his Presidential term the
career which had begun with such happy auguries had become a
political tragedy. There were then those who recalled the words
of the Roman historian, "All would have believed him capable of
governing if only he had not come to govern."
It was not that the Taft Administration was barren of
achievement. On the contrary, its record of accomplishment was
substantial. Of two amendments to the Federal Constitution
proposed by Congress, one was ratified by the requisite number of
States before Taft went out of office, and the other was finally
ratified less than a month after the close of his term. These
were the amendment authorizing the imposition of a Federal income
tax and that providing for the direct election of United States
Senators. Two States were admitted to the Union during Taft's
term of office, New Mexico and Arizona, the last Territories of
the United States on the continent, except Alaska.
Other achievements of importance during Taft's Administration
were the establishment of the parcels post and the postal savings
banks; the requirement of publicity, through sworn statements of
the candidates, for campaign contributions for the election of
Senators and Representatives; the extension of the authority of
the Interstate Commerce Commission over telephone, telegraph, and
cable lines; an act authorizing the President to withdraw public
lands from entry for the purpose of conserving the natural
resources which they may contain--something which Roosevelt had
already done without specific statutory authorization; the
establishment of a Commerce Court to hear appeals from decisions
of the Interstate Commerce Commission; the appointment of a
commission, headed by President Hadley of Yale, to investigate
the subject of railway stock and bond issues, and to propose a
law for the Federal supervision of such railway securities; the
Mann "white slave" act, dealing with the transfer of women from
one State to another for immoral purposes; the establishment of
the Children's Bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor;
the empowering of the Interstate Commerce Commission to
investigate all railway accidents; the creation of Forest
Reserves in the White Mountains and in the southern Appalachians.
Taft's Administration was further marked, by economy in
expenditure, by a considerable extension of the civil service law
to cover positions in the executive departments hitherto free
plunder for the spoilsmen, and by efforts on the part of the
President to increase the efficiency and the economical
administration of the public service.
But this good record of things achieved was not enough to gain
for Mr. Taft popular approval. Items on the other side of the
ledger were pointed out. Of these the three most conspicuous were
the Payne-Aldrich tariff, the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, and
the insurgent movement in Congress.
The Republican party was returned to power in 1908, committed to
a revision of the tariff. Though the party platform did not so
state, this was generally interpreted as a pledge of revision
downward. Taft made it clear during his campaign that such was
his own reading of the party pledge. He said, for instance, "It
is my judgment that there are many schedules of the tariff in
which the rates are excessive, and there are a few in which the
rates are not sufficient to fill the measure of conservative
protection. It is my judgment that a revision of the tariff in
accordance with the pledge of the platform, will be, on the
whole, a substantial revision downward, though there probably
will be a few exceptions in this regard." Five months after
Taft's inauguration the Payne-Aldrich bill became law with his
signature. In signing it the President said, "The bill is not a
perfect bill or a complete compliance with the promises made,
strictly interpreted"; but he further declared that he signed it
because he believed it to be "the result of a sincere effort on
the part of the Republican party to make downward revision."
This view was not shared by even all Republicans. Twenty of them
in the House voted against the bill on its final passage, and
seven of them in the Senate. They represented the Middle West and
the new element and spirit in the Republican party. Their
dissatisfaction with the performance of their party associates in
Congress and in the White House was shared by their constituents
and by many other Republicans throughout the country. A month
after the signing of the tariff law, Taft made a speech at
Winona, Minnesota, in support of Congressman James A. Tawney, the
one Republican representative from Minnesota who had not voted
against the bill. In the course of that speech he said; "This is
the best tariff bill that the Republican party has ever passed,
and, therefore, the best tariff bill that has been passed at
all."
He justified Mr. Tawney's action in voting for the bill and his
own in signing it on the ground that "the interests of the
country, the interests of the party" required the sacrifice of
the accomplishment of certain things in the revision of the
tariff which had been hoped for, "in order to maintain party
solidity," which he believed to be much more important than the
reduction of rates in one or two schedules of the tariff.
A second disaster to the Taft Administration came in the famous
Ballinger-Pinchot controversy. Louis R. Glavis, who bad served as
a special agent of the General Land Office to investigate alleged
frauds in certain claims to coal lands in Alaska, accused Richard
Ballinger, the Secretary of the Interior, of favoritism toward
those who were attempting to get public lands fraudulently. The
charges were vigorously supported by Mr. Pinchot, who broadened
the accusation to cover a general indifference on the part of the
Secretary of the Interior to the whole conservation movement.
President Taft, however, completely exonerated Secretary
Ballinger from blame and removed Glavis for "filing a
disingenuous statement unjustly impeaching the official integrity
of his superior officer." Later Pinchot was also dismissed from
the service. The charges against Secretary Ballinger were
investigated by a joint committee of Congress, a majority of
which exonerated the accused Cabinet officer. Nevertheless the
whole controversy, which raged with virulence for many months,
convinced many ardent supporters of the conservation movement,
and especially many admirers of Mr. Pinchot and of Roosevelt,
that the Taft Administration at the best was possessed of little
enthusiasm for conservation. There was a widespread belief, as
well, that the President had handled the whole matter maladroitly
and that in permitting himself to be driven to a point where he
had to deprive the country of the services of Gifford Pinchot,
the originator of the conservation movement, he had displayed
unsound judgment and deplorable lack of administrative ability.
The first half of Mr. Taft's term was further marked by acute
dissensions in the Republican ranks in Congress. Joseph G. Cannon
was Speaker of the House, as he had been in three preceding
Congresses. He was a reactionary Republican of the most
pronounced type. Under his leadership the system of autocratic
party control of legislation in the House had been developed to a
high point of effectiveness. The Speaker's authority had become
in practice almost unrestricted.
In the congressional session of 1909-10 a strong movement of
insurgency arose within the Republican party in Congress against
the control of the little band of leaders dominated by the
Speaker. In March, 1910, the Republican Insurgents, forty in
number, united with the Democratic minority to overrule a formal
decision of the Speaker. A four days' parliamentary battle
resulted, culminating in a reorganization of the all-powerful
Rules Committee, with the Speaker no longer a member of it. The
right of the Speaker to appoint this committee was also taken
away. When the Democrats came into control of the House in 1911,
they completed the dethronement of the Speaker by depriving him
of the appointment of all committees.
The old system had not been without its advantages, when the
power of the Speaker and his small group of associate party
leaders was not abused. It at least concentrated responsibility
in a few prominent members of the majority party. But it made it
possible for these few men to perpetuate a machine and to ignore
the desires of the rest of the party representatives and of the
voters of the party throughout the country. The defeat of
Cannonism put an end to the autocratic power of the Speaker and
relegated him to the position of a mere presiding officer. It had
also a wider significance, for it portended the division in the
old Republican party out of which was to come the new Progressive
party.
When the mid-point of the Taft Administration was reached, a
practical test was given of the measure of popular approval which
the President and his party associates had achieved. The
congressional elections went decidedly against the Republicans.
The Republican majority of forty-seven in the House was changed
to a Democratic majority of fifty-four. The Republican majority
in the Senate was cut down from twenty-eight to ten. Not only
were the Democrats successful in this substantial degree, but
many of the Western States elected Progressive Republicans
instead of Republicans of the old type. During the last two years
of his term, the President was consequently obliged to work with
a Democratic House and with a Senate in which Democrats and
Insurgent Republicans predominated over the old-line Republicans.
The second half of Taft's Presidency was productive of little but
discord and dissatisfaction. The Democrats in power in the House
were quite ready to harass the Republican President, especially
in view of the approaching Presidential election. The Insurgents
in House and Senate were not entirely unwilling to take a hand in
the same game. Besides, they found themselves more and more in
sincere disagreement with the President on matters of fundamental
policy, though not one of them could fairly question his
integrity of purpose, impugn his purity of character, or deny his
charm of personality.
Three weeks after Taft's inauguration, Roosevelt sailed for
Africa, to be gone for a year hunting big game. He went with a
warm feeling of friendship and admiration for the man whom he had
done so much to make President. He had high confidence that Taft
would be successful in his great office. He had no reason to
believe that any change would come in the friendship between
them, which had been peculiarly intimate. From the steamer on
which he sailed for Africa, he sent a long telegram of cordial
and hearty good wishes to his successor in Washington.
The next year Roosevelt came back to the United States, after a
triumphal tour of the capitals of Europe, to find his party
disrupted and the progressive movement in danger of shipwreck. He
had no intention of entering politics again. But he had no
intention, either, of ceasing to champion the things in which he
believed. This he made obvious, in his first speech after his
return, to the cheering thousands who welcomed him at the
Battery. He said:
"I have thoroughly enjoyed myself; and now I am more glad than I
can say to get home, to be back in my own country, back among
people I love. And I am ready and eager to do my part so far as I
am able, in helping solve problems which must be solved, if we of
this, the greatest democratic republic upon which the sun has
ever shone, are to see its destinies rise to the high level of
our hopes and its opportunities. This is the duty of every
citizen, but is peculiarly my duty; for any man who has ever been
honored by being made President of the United States is thereby
forever rendered the debtor of the American people and is bound
throughout his life to remember this, his prime obligation."
The welcome over, Roosevelt tried to take up the life of a
private citizen. He had become Contributing Editor of The Outlook
and had planned to give his energies largely to writing. But he
was not to be let alone. The people who loved him demanded that
they be permitted to see and to hear him. Those who were in the
thick of the political fight on behalf of progress and
righteousness called loudly to him for aid. Only a few days after
Roosevelt had landed from Europe, Governor Hughes of New York met
him at the Commencement exercises at Harvard and urged him to
help in the fight which the Governor was then making for a direct
primary law. Roosevelt did not wish to enter the lists again
until he had had more time for orientation; but he always found
it difficult to refuse a plea for help on behalf of a good cause.
He therefore sent a vigorous telegram to the Republican
legislators at Albany urging them to support Governor Hughes and
to vote for the primary bill. But the appeal went in vain: the
Legislature was too thoroughly boss-ridden. This telegram,
however, sounded a warning to the usurpers in the house of the
Republican Penelope that the fingers of the returned Odysseus had
not lost their prowess with the heroic bow.
During the summer of 1910, Roosevelt made a trip to the West and
in a speech at Ossawattomie, Kansas, set forth what came to be
described as the New Nationalism. It was his draft of a platform,
not for himself, but for the nation. A few fragments from that
speech will suggest what Roosevelt was thinking about in those
days when the Progressive party was stirring in the womb. "At
many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the
men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have
earned more than they possess is the central condition of
progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of free men to
gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special
interests, who twist the methods of free government into
machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and
under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to
equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and
citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both
to himself and to the commonwealth.
"Every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is
entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to
representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees
protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But
it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.
"The absence of effective state and, especially, national
restraint upon unfair money getting has tended to create a small
class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose
chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need
is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate
power which it is not for the general welfare that they should
hold or exercise.
"We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of
property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of
the rights of property as against the rights of men have been
pushing their claims too far.
"The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns
only the people of the State; and the nation for that which
concerns all the people. There must remain no neutral ground to
serve as a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers
of great wealth, who can hire the vulpine legal cunning which
will teach them how to avoid both jurisdictions.
"I do not ask for overcentralization; but I do ask that we work
in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work
for what concerns our people as a whole.
"We must have the right kind of character--character that makes a
man, first of all, a good man in the home, a good father, a good
husband--that makes a man a good neighbor . . . . The prime
problem of our nation is to get the right kind of good
citizenship, and to get it, we must have progress, and our public
men must be genuinely progressive.
"I stand for the Square Deal. But when I say that I am for the
square deal I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under
the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those
rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of
opportunity and of reward for equally good service."
These generalizations Roosevelt accompanied by specific
recommendations. They included proposals for publicity of
corporate affairs; prohibition of the use of corporate funds, for
political purposes; governmental supervision of the
capitalization of all corporations doing an interstate business;
control and supervision of corporations and combinations
controlling necessaries of life; holding the officers and
directors of corporations personally liable when any corporation
breaks the law; an expert tariff commission and revision of the
tariff schedule by schedule; a graduated income tax and a
graduated inheritance tax, increasing rapidly in amount with the
size of the estate; conservation of natural resources and their
use for the benefit of all rather than their monopolization for
the benefit of the few; public accounting for all campaign funds
before election; comprehensive workmen's compensation acts, state
and national laws to regulate child labor and work for women, the
enforcement of sanitary conditions for workers and the compulsory
use of safety appliances in industry.
There was nothing in all these proposals that should have seemed
revolutionary or extreme. But there was much that disturbed the
reactionaries who were thinking primarily in terms of property
and only belatedly or not at all of human rights. The Bourbons in
the Republican party and their supporters among the special
interests "viewed with, alarm" this frank attack upon their
intrenched privileges. The Progressives, however, welcomed with
eagerness this robust leadership. The breach in the Republican
party was widening with steadily accelerating speed.
In the fall of 1910 a new demand arose that Roosevelt should
enter actively into politics. Though it came from his own State,
he resisted it with energy and determination. Nevertheless the
pressure from his close political associates in New York finally
became too much for him, and he yielded. They wanted him to go as
a delegate to the Republican State Convention at Saratoga and to
be a candidate for Temporary Chairman of the Convention--the
officer whose opening speech is traditionally presumed to sound
the keynote of the campaign. Roosevelt went and, after a bitter
fight with the reactionists in the party, led by William Barnes
of Albany, was elected Temporary Chairman over Vice-President
James S. Sherman. The keynote was sounded in no uncertain tones,
while Mr. Barnes and his associates fidgeted and suffered.
Then came a Homeric conflict, with a dramatic climax. The
reactionary gang did not know that it was beaten. Its members
resisted stridently an attempt to write a direct primary plank
into the party platform. They wished to rebuke Governor Hughes,
who was as little to their liking as Roosevelt himself, and they
did not want the direct primary. After speeches by young James
Wadsworth, later United States Senator, Job Hedges, and Barnes
himself, in which they bewailed the impending demise of
representative government and the coming of mob rule, it was
clear that the primary plank was defeated. Then rose Roosevelt.
In a speech that lashed and flayed the forces of reaction and
obscurantism, he demanded that the party stand by the right of
the people to rule. Single-handed he drove a majority of the
delegates into line. The plank was adopted. Thenceforward the
convention was his. It selected, as candidate for Governor, Henry
W. Stimson, who had been a Federal attorney in New York under
Roosevelt and Secretary of War in Taft's Cabinet. When this
victory had been won, Roosevelt threw himself into the campaign
with his usual abandon and toured the State, making fighting
speeches in scores of cities and towns. But in spite of
Roosevelt's best efforts, Stimson was defeated.
All this active participation in local political conflicts
seriously distressed many of Roosevelt's friends and associates.
They felt that he was too big to fritter himself away on small
matters from which he--and the cause whose great champion he
was--had so little to gain and so much to lose. They wanted him
to wait patiently for the moment of destiny which they felt sure
would come. But it was never easy for Roosevelt to wait. It was
the hardest thing in the world for him to decline an invitation
to enter a fight--when the cause was a righteous one.
So the year 1911 passed by, with the Taft Administration steadily
losing prestige, and the revolt of the Progressives within the
Republican party continually gathering momentum. Then came 1912,
the year of the Glorious Failure.