LITMIR.BIZ

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      Roosevelt picked Taft to succeed him because he found him a fitting person to carry on his legacy. The same amiability and loyalty that had earned Taft so many good appointments encouraged Roosevelt to believe that Taft would do little to alter Roosevelt’s reformist agenda. TR had declined to run for a third term, but in Taft he envisioned a third term by proxy.

      Within a few months, the new president proved him wrong. Perhaps the most grievous blow was Taft’s firing of Roosevelt’s close advisor Gifford Pinchot, who had been instrumental in creating the U.S. Forest Service and crafting a new federal approach to the management of lands and natural resources. When it came to corporate reform, Taft was actually a little more reform-minded than Roosevelt had been. But his political bumbling and reluctance to break with the GOP stalwarts on ossified approaches to trade and commerce gave many people—Roosevelt included—the impression that he was hardly the Progressive hero they wanted and needed.

      In a world of increasingly advanced technology and complex organizations, it no longer made sense to have a U.S. government whose biggest agency was the Post Office. As Progressive era author Herbert Croly put it in 1909, “an American statesman could not longer represent the national interest without becoming a reformer.”¹⁸

      It was in this atmosphere that the campaign of 1912 began. The United States had had a long and venerable tradition of small government and limited executive power. It was a testament to the incredible changes that had occurred over the four candidates’ lifetimes that they all agreed that more government action and regulation was necessary, and inevitable.

      They just disagreed on how to get there.

       The End of a Friendship

      William Howard Taft seemed like an uninteresting president to many of his contemporaries. It might have been because he was uninterested in being president.

      Taft’s greatest dream was to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. After obtaining his law degree, his quick ascent in the world of Republican politics came not through winning elections but through a series of judicial and administrative appointments. He once wrote that his professional rise was due to having his “plate right side up when offices were falling.”¹⁹ Yet this self-deprecating characterization belied his true accomplishments. First appointed a judge in 1887, by the mid-1890s Taft had distinguished himself as one of the most prominent and well-regarded jurists in the country, often mentioned as a likely appointee to the Supreme Court. Only his youth—he was less than forty at the time—put him out of serious contention.²⁰

      By this time, Taft and Roosevelt had become good friends. Their age, class, and political outlook gave them much in common. Their radically different personalities, extrovert and introvert, complimented one another. In Taft, Roosevelt had an attentive listener and advocate; in Roosevelt, Taft had both entertainment and intellectual stimulation. In the beginning, Taft was the senior of the two, having been appointed by Benjamin Harrison to be the nation’s number-three lawyer, solicitor general, in 1890. Roosevelt had a relatively less important appointment, civil service commissioner. When William McKinley became president in 1897, Taft urged him to appoint Roosevelt assistant secretary of the navy.

      That appointment became TR’s springboard to national political celebrity, as he famously quit his job the following year to lead a brigade of roughneck cowboys and mercenaries into battle in Cuba. Despite his middle age and the general unpreparedness of U.S. troops, Roosevelt and his Rough Riders won the Battle of San Juan Hill and catapulted into legend. Riding the wave of postwar celebrity, he became governor of New York. Yet Roosevelt’s thirst for reform made him a thorn in the side of Republican Party bosses in New York, and by 1900 this contributed to his being dislodged from a job he enjoyed into one that had far less influence: the vice presidency of the United States. One commentator observed that the preternaturally vigorous Roosevelt had little desire to be “laid upon the shelf at his time of life.”²¹ He ended up spending little time on that shelf, however. On 14 September 1901, an assassin’s bullet felled McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt moved into the President’s Office.

      The Spanish American War had resulted in Taft getting a new job as well: governor general of the Philippines, one of the remnants of the Spanish empire left in U.S. hands after the guns had been silenced. From 1900 to 1903, Taft took on this high-stakes, high-risk job and—from the perspective of his bosses in Washington—excelled at it. He walked into a political tinderbox. Most Filipinos had little desire to exchange one colonial ruler for another, and had launched a fiercely fought nationalist rebellion that was, in turn, being quite violently repressed by the U.S. military. By the time he left, the Filipino independence movement had been quashed and U.S.-led social and political institutions were in place that maintained civic stability and protected American economic interests. The regime Taft established helped perpetuate U.S. control over the nation and its people for another forty-one years.²²

      By 1904, Roosevelt had pulled his old friend back home to become his Secretary of War, one of the most powerful positions in Washington. The job further strengthened the relationship between Roosevelt and Taft. After some public dithering about whether to run again in 1908 (he had only been elected once, and the two-term limit then was a tradition rather than a statutory limitation), Roosevelt decided to step aside. Taft—supremely competent, unfailingly loyal, a strategic problem-solver—seemed like an eminently sensible choice to carry on the TR legacy.

      It was not easy to convince Taft to run; he still had the Supreme Court highest in his mind. “The President and the Congress,” he once said, “are all very well in their way … but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they really thought.” He had repeatedly denied, publicly and privately, that he would ever agree to be put in the running for the presidency.²³ However, Roosevelt had an ally in Taft’s ambitious wife Nellie, who had been aspiring to the First Ladyship since her husband’s earliest days in politics. Faced with the combined persuasive powers of Teddy and Nellie, Taft agreed to do it. He later called the 1908 campaign “the most uncomfortable four months of my life.”²⁴ He won, quite decisively vanquishing William Jennings Bryan, who would never run for president again.

      The next day, Roosevelt sat down to write Taft a congratulatory letter that, while effusive, reflected the complicated nature of the two men’s friendship. Taft was the winner, but Roosevelt saw the victory as a validation of his own good judgment. “Dear Will,” TR wrote. “The returns of the election make it evident to me that you are the only man who we could have nominated that could have been elected. You have won a great personal victory as well as a great victory for the party, and all those who love you, who admire and believe in you, and are proud of your great and fine qualities, must feel a thrill of exultation over the way in which the American people have shown their insight into character, their adherence to high principle.”²⁵

      Within days, however, Taft began to disappoint Roosevelt’s high expectations. The note of thanks the president-elect wrote his predecessor in response expressed great gratitude for all Roosevelt had done to help the campaign, but it also gave some credit to Taft’s brother Charles, a Republican Party moneyman and political fixer. Roosevelt fumed. To him, Charlie Taft was a hack; Roosevelt was a statesman. Would Billy Taft be in the White House without Roosevelt’s endorsement and encouragement? Was this any way to repay a friend?

      Rumors of rift started buzzing in the early months of 1909, as Roosevelt prepared to hand over the reins to his successor. And Roosevelt did little to stop them. “He means well and he’ll do his best,” he told a sympathetic journalist on the last day of his presidency. “But he’s weak.”²⁶ With that, the ex-president steamed away on safari. He and Taft did not correspond for a year.

      The real problem was bigger than a breach in etiquette. Theodore Roosevelt had a hard time not being president any more. He was fifty years old, healthy and energetic, and unemployed. He was hugely popular. He also was spending a lot of time thinking and absorbing new ideas as he traveled abroad. Touring Europe in the first months of 1910, he was presented by a range of political ideas and policy solutions more audacious and far-reaching than American reforms. The sweeping social insurance programs of Germany, the support for mothers and children in France, the worker housing programs of Great

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