ON MAY 26, 1918, SIX years after the election that ended his presidency and fractured his party, William Howard Taft arrived for a conference at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel. As Taft was retiring to his room upstairs, the elevator operator informed him that Colonel Roosevelt was presently seated alone in the dining room. “I hear he’s leaving right away,” the young man remarked. Taft did not hesitate. “Then I’ll ask you to take me back downstairs,” he responded.
After the White House, Taft had become the Kent Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale, a position that offered intellectual engagement, the camaraderie of a cherished college campus, and the freedom to lecture around the country. Roosevelt had found his own solace through a combination of writing, public speaking, and intense physical activity. The election no sooner behind him, he had begun work on his autobiography. Completing that project within ten months, he embarked on an expedition to explore the River of Doubt, an uncharted tributary of the mighty Amazon. Returning home, he occupied himself writing dozens of articles and delivering scores of speeches each year. He had stopped at the Blackstone Hotel on his way to Des Moines, where the following day he was scheduled to deliver three speeches.
Over the years since the contentious 1912 election, mutual friends and political allies had repeatedly tried to reunite Roosevelt and Taft, but their infrequent meetings had been neither “cordial” nor “intimate,” marked by what Taft deemed “armed neutrality.” In 1915, they had both served as honorary pallbearers at the funeral of Yale professor Thomas Lounsbury. Taft made the first overture, extending his hand to Roosevelt. “How are you, Theodore?” he asked. The Colonel merely “shook hands silently without smiling,” and “no further communication passed between them.” A year later, in early October 1916, Elihu Root had arranged for the two men to appear at a Union League Club reception for Republican presidential nominee Charles Evans Hughes. Organized with the goal of “cementing the union of Progressives and Republicans” against Woodrow Wilson, Republicans hailed the event as a “Big Love Feast.” Though Roosevelt’s presence was calculated to symbolize his return to “the Republican fold,” Taft told Nellie they simply “shook hands with a Howdy do and that was all.”
Only when grave illness hospitalized Roosevelt in early February 1918 did the possibility open for a genuine reconciliation. Learning that the Colonel was enduring an operation to remove a fistula much like the ordeal he had suffered through when he was governor general, Taft sent him a sympathetic telegram. “I know something of the pain and discomfort he is passing through,” Taft wrote to Nellie, adding that from “the tone of the dispatches,” he suspected that Roosevelt’s condition was far more serious than his own had been. In fact, the Colonel had never recovered from malaria contracted during his expedition to the River of Doubt, leaving him prone to fever and infection. During this most recent bout of fever, a rectal abscess had developed, along with abscesses in both ears. The surgery to remedy these conditions proved successful, but persistent fever and severe nausea required him to remain in the hospital for almost a month. His first communication was a telegram to Taft. “Am rather rocky, but worth several dear Men,” he jested. “Greatly touched and Pleased by Your Message.”
This written exchange, the first in six years, led Roosevelt to send Taft a draft of a speech he would deliver in late March. An indictment of Wilson’s handling of America’s participation in World War I, the piece was entitled “Speed up the War and Take Thought for After the War.” It criticized the administration for “sluggishness in making war,” and called “for longer hours of work in war plants” as well as for “universal military training—to be continued after the war.” Taft wholeheartedly concurred with Roosevelt’s critique of Wilson’s wartime leadership. He carefully read the draft and made two recommendations. “I have embodied both of those suggestions,” Roosevelt wrote in response. “I think them capital. I am rather ashamed I never thought of them myself, and I am malevolently pleased that neither Root nor Lodge thought of them!”
These cordial exchanges renewed Taft’s optimism that Roosevelt might finally be ready to reconcile. Hurrying across the Blackstone’s dining room, which was bustling with nearly a hundred diners, he spotted the Colonel at a small table by the corner window. “Theodore!” he exclaimed. “I am glad to see you!” Roosevelt rose from his seat and grasped Taft’s shoulders. “Well, I am indeed delighted to see you. Won’t you sit down?” All across the room, customers rose from their dinners and waitstaff paused, “recognizing the significance of the meeting.” Suddenly, the chamber erupted into applause. New York Tribune reporter John Leary, who was traveling with Roosevelt, heard the loud ovation from the lobby. Joined by curious members of the hotel staff, he started up the stairs leading to the dining room. Encountering a patron who had witnessed the hoopla, he asked what had incited the outburst. “T.R. and Taft’s got together,” the man explained. “They’re holding an old-home week.”
“By Godfrey, I never was so surprised in my life,” Roosevelt later told Leary. “I no more thought of him being in Chicago than in Timbuctoo. But wasn’t it a gracious thing for him to do?” There was so much commotion when they first greeted each other, he explained, that he could hardly hear what Taft was saying. “I don’t mind telling you how delighted I am,” Roosevelt added. “I never felt happier over anything in my life. It was splendid of Taft.”
The two men talked together “like a pair of happy schoolboys” until Roosevelt had to depart to catch the night train to Des Moines. “Taft was beaming,” one witness reported, “and Colonel Roosevelt, leaning half across the table, was expressing himself very earnestly.” Meeting Leary on the way out, Taft could not disguise his elation. “Isn’t he looking splendid?” he said. “I never saw him looking much better.” Asked about the nature of their conversation, Taft simply replied that they “discussed patriotism and the state and welfare of the Nation.” His smile suggested that a far more important exchange had occurred. Describing the meeting a week later to Henry Stimson, Roosevelt confided that at long last they had “completely renewed the old friendly relations.”
SEVEN MONTHS LATER, ON CHRISTMAS Day, 1918, after a six-week hospital stay for a severe attack of inflammatory rheumatism, Theodore Roosevelt returned to convalesce at Sagamore Hill. Though delighted to be back in his beloved home, he was still in considerable pain. Doctors predicted a full recovery, but Edith hired a nurse to attend to his medical needs and contacted James Amos, the black valet who had served Roosevelt in the White House. Her husband, she explained to Amos, would not allow “anyone else” to help, but they understood that it might be difficult for him to come. Amos never hesitated. He packed a suitcase and made arrangements to remain by Roosevelt’s side as long as he was needed.
By the following Sunday morning, January 5, 1919, Roosevelt “seemed better again.” Comfortably situated in “the warmest room in the house,” the large bedroom that had once been the children’s nursery, he dictated letters and proofread an editorial for Metropolitan magazine, calling on the country to give women the right to vote. “There should be no further delay,” he emphatically stated. The war was over. The time had come to focus on domestic issues. “It is an absurdity to longer higgle about the matter.”
Together, Edith and Theodore passed “a happy and wonderful day,” she later recalled. He had long treasured the view of the water from that corner room, and “as it got dusk, he watched the dancing of waves & spoke with happiness of being home and made little plans for me. I think he had made up his mind,” she wrote, “that he would have to suffer for some time to come and with his high courage had adjusted himself to bear it. He was very sweet all day.”
At around ten o’clock that night, Theodore told Edith he felt a curious “sensation of depression about the chest,” almost as though his heart were preparing to stop. “I know it is not going to happen,” he assured her, “but it is such a strange feeling.” Edith called their family physician, Dr. George Faller, who “examined him carefully, found no indication of anything wrong with heart and lungs, and after giving him a slight stimulant, left him.” While Edith prepared to retire, Amos helped Roosevelt get settled for the night. The Colonel remained for a short time on the sofa before turning to his valet. “James, don’t you think I might go to bed now?” Amos took off Roosevelt’s robe and “had almost to lift him into bed.” Edith returned to give her husband a good night kiss, after which Roosevelt said, “James, will you please put out the light?”
Edith came to check on her husband shortly after midnight, and again two hours later. Finding him in a “peaceful slumber,” she departed for her room. Amos rested in a chair not far from the bed. Shortly before four o’clock, the valet was alarmed by the sound of “irregular breathing.” Roosevelt’s respiration “seemed to stop,” he later said. “Then it resumed again and paused again.” Amos rushed to summon the nurse and alerted Mrs. Roosevelt. By the time Edith reached his room, Theodore was dead. Doctors later confirmed that Roosevelt had died in his sleep from a coronary embolism. “Death had to take him sleeping,” Vice President Thomas Marshall cabled from Washington, “for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
RAY BAKER, IDA TARBELL, AND William Allen White were all in Paris on separate assignments covering the Armistice and the Versailles Peace Conference when news of Roosevelt’s death reached Europe. Their “brave little adventure” in creating a writer’s magazine dedicated to serious public issues had failed. Relentless money troubles had forced John Phillips to sell The American Magazine to a big publishing house, which pressured the writers to satisfy advertisers’ demands for popular pieces. “The test of the stories,” Baker lamented, became not whether they were “good literature” or important contributions to national discourse, but whether they would attract 600,000 readers. Prize contests were introduced, along with stories of romance and marriage. Baker had been tempted to leave in 1912, when the new publishers demanded that he remove a sentence critical of the business community. Loyalty to his colleagues had kept him on board for three additional years until he could no longer abide the way his literary ambitions were continuously “strangled by commercial considerations” and finally resigned. In short order, Tarbell, Phillips, and White also resigned.
White and Tarbell had been sent to Paris by the Red Cross Magazine, where John Phillips was now the editor. Ray Baker was serving President Wilson as press liaison, assigned to give daily briefings to over one hundred American correspondents who had journeyed overseas to report on the peace conference. Tarbell observed that Baker managed his demanding job with such “absolute fairness” that even “the tongues of some of the most bumptious” journalists were “silenced.” The three old colleagues had taken rooms in the Hôtel de Vouillemont, located just off the Place de la Concorde not far from the headquarters of the American Peace Commission. “There were hours when it seemed like a gathering in the office of the old American Magazine,” Tarbell recalled, “so natural and intimate it was.”
White was at breakfast when he read of Theodore Roosevelt’s death in the Paris Herald’s morning edition. “Again and again I looked at the headlines to be sure that I was reading them correctly,” he recalled. Just then, Ray Baker arrived, carrying the same paper. “Ray, Ray, the Colonel is dead—Roosevelt!” White cried. “Yes, Will,” Baker responded, sadly embracing him. “It’s a great blow. We are all sorry.” Soon Ida Tarbell joined them, White recalled, and the three “sat down to talk it all over, and get used to a world without Roosevelt in it.”
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT WAS AMONG the five hundred guests invited to attend Roosevelt’s private funeral service, held in the modest Episcopal church in Oyster Bay. “It was my father’s wish,” Archie Roosevelt explained, “that the funeral service be conducted entirely by those friends among whom he had lived so long and happily.” After their fortuitous meeting at the Blackstone Hotel, Roosevelt and Taft had resumed their old habit of intimate, friendly correspondence, sending each other drafts of speeches, commenting on articles, sharing thoughts on the central issues of the day. Visiting Roosevelt in the hospital in late November, Taft had discovered with delight that they were in essential accord on the need for a league of nations to enforce the postwar peace. Snow had fallen the morning that Theodore Roosevelt was laid to rest, but the sun had come out by the time Taft arrived at the church. “You’re a dear personal friend,” Archie said, taking him by the hand and directing him to a pew in the front. Though the half-hour service had “no pomp, no ceremony,” no singing or music, its very simplicity, one mourner observed, made it “profoundly impressive.”
The village bells tolled as mourners followed the casket up the hill to the gravesite where “a mound of flowers hid the freshly-turned earth.” According to an old “widow’s custom,” Edith Roosevelt attended neither funeral nor burial. Though she would live to the age of eighty-seven, she had lost the only man she would ever love, the man, she had told Theodore, she loved “with all the passion of a girl who had never loved before.”
As Theodore Roosevelt’s casket was lowered into the ground, “an isolated figure” stood “quite apart from the others,” William Howard Taft, softly crying. “I want to say to you,” Taft later told Roosevelt’s sister Bamie, “how glad I am that Theodore and I came together after that long painful interval. Had he died in a hostile state of mind toward me, I would have mourned the fact all my life. I loved him always and cherish his memory.”
AT NOON ON OCTOBER 3, 1921, sixty-four-year-old William Howard Taft finally secured the position he had long desired “as strongly as a man can ever want anything.” The death of Chief Justice Edward White the previous May had created a vacancy that President Warren Harding was happy to fill with the former chief executive. In a ceremony witnessed by Nellie and dozens of old friends, Taft took the judicial oath “to administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” Reporters noted that “the famous Taft Smile” was irresistible as friends and colleagues “rushed up to congratulate him.” After the ceremony, Taft and Nellie joined the other justices and their families at a White House reception. “This is the greatest day of my life,” the new chief justice of the United States declared.
“The people of the United States greet Mr. Taft in his new role,” The Washington Post editorialized the following day. “Their good wishes will not be inspired solely by their abiding faith in his wisdom and justice, but also by the fact that they like him personally. His popularity throughout the country has grown from the day, nearly ten years ago, when the fortunes of political warfare went overwhelmingly against him and, instead of permitting defeat to sour his nature or crush his spirit, he accepted his lot philosophically and with a smile.”
The public trust was not misplaced. Under Taft’s able leadership, “antiquated” court procedure was streamlined, “speeding up” and greatly improving the delivery of justice throughout “the whole system of federal courts.” And through his “great skill and patience,” Taft finally secured from Congress the funds to construct a separate building for the Supreme Court, allowing the justices to move from the “old Senate chamber” to the classic marble structure that graces Washington today. As Taft had always suspected, the position of chief justice was more suited to his mind and temperament than the presidency had ever been. Fulfilled at work and happy at home, he embarked upon a successful regime of diet and exercise, bringing his weight down to less than 250 pounds, a reasonable weight for a man of his stature and proportions. Years of obesity, however, had already damaged his health. On February 3, 1930, escalating heart trouble forced his resignation from the job he had loved more than any other. “We call you Chief Justice still,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a week later on behalf of his colleagues, “for we cannot give up the title by which we have known you all these later years and which you have made so dear to us . . . you showed us in new form your voluminous capacity for getting work done, your humor that smoothed the tough places, your golden heart that brought you love from every side and most of all from your brethren whose tasks you have made happy and light.”
Just over a month after he left the bench, on March 8, 1930, William Howard Taft was dead. Nellie Taft, whose catastrophic illness had left her husband bereft of his most valuable ally and altered his presidency in ways the public never comprehended, would live thirteen years more, dying just short of her eighty-second birthday.
DURING THE 1920S AND THE 1930s, the members of the original McClure’s magazine staff continued to celebrate each other’s birthdays. Such was the “unbreakable quality in friendship,” Ida Tarbell marveled, that despite the bitter 1906 split, the core group could not be permanently alienated. “You pick up at the day when the friendship was—not broken but interrupted,” she observed. Year after year, the “old Crowd” would convene, reviving “a hundred, yes a thousand memories” of the days that had proved the most fulfilling of their lives—the idealistic time when they genuinely believed, in Ray Baker’s words, that they were “saving the world.” Sustained by passion and optimism, they “muck-raked never to destroy, but with utter faith in reason and progress”; they “criticized in full confidence that, once understood, evils would be speedily corrected.” None of them had truly realized, Baker later acknowledged to Lincoln Steffens, how “hard-boiled” the world really was.
At each of these collective birthday celebrations, Sam McClure, then in his seventies and eighties, was “the star of the evening.” He would recount his personal history with such charm—his impoverished youth, his marriage to Hattie when his weekly salary was only twelve dollars, his eventual triumph “storming the sacred citadels in the publishing business”—that his listeners were riveted as if the tale were novel. His “old fire” flared up, Tarbell was happy to see. “We sat enthralled,” she wrote, as McClure “enlarged on his latest enthusiasm, marveling as always at the eternal youthfulness in the man, the failure of life to quench him.”
After John Phillips was unable to attend one of these gatherings, Tarbell wrote to tell him how much he had been missed, how they all realized that he was the one, during all those years, who had kept the McClure’s “flame steady and lasting.” Revisiting “that wonderful adventure we all had together,” Phillips confessed to Ray Baker, was “almost like a physical pain—not because of you and me and so on. But because of this country, and because those sincere attempts, to do something in reporting and interpretation of what was good and sound and progressive, seemed lost and forgotten.” Still, he hoped that other “times of awakening” lay ahead, that a new generation of journalists would be drawn to the work that “seemed once almost a mission and a call.”
1. Theodore Roosevelt as a Harvard sophomore in 1878. Never content to sit still and listen, he constantly posed questions in class until one professor cut him short: “Now look here, Roosevelt, let me talk. I’m running this course.”
2. Known to his admiring Yale classmates as “Big Bill,” Taft’s affable disposition made him one of the most popular men on campus. His fellow students elected him class orator in 1877, an honor considered “the greatest prize in college.”
3. Young Will Taft, perched on a gatepost in the foreground, grew up with four brothers and one sister in this substantial, two-story yellow brick house in a fashionable neighborhood of Cincinnati.
4. When the Roosevelt family returned from a yearlong tour of Europe and the Mediterranean in 1873, they moved into a stately mansion on West 57th Street in Manhattan that boasted a magnificent library, pictured, and a fully equipped gymnasium.
5. Intimate childhood friendships flourished between Edith Carow (seated on the ground) and the Roosevelt siblings Teedie, Corinne, and Elliott (top left to right) during their vacations at Tranquillity, a beloved summer retreat on Long Island.
6. Teedie and Edith’s adolescent romance came to an abrupt end in August 1878. Just eight weeks later the young Harvard student met Alice Hathaway Lee. For Teedie, pictured here with Alice (seated) and Corinne, “it was a real case of love at first sight.”
7. Tranquility, the Roosevelts’ summer retreat on Long Island
8. As young girls, both Edith Carow and Nellie Herron hungered for intellectual stimulation. Edith formed an all-girl literary society with Teedie’s sister, Corinne (seated center).
9. Nellie Herron, shown here to the left of twenty-six-year-old Will Taft, organized a lively Saturday night debate society among her circle of friends. Taft’s brother Horace is at far right and Nellie’s sister Maria at far left (standing). Nellie’s salon flourished for three years. “Nobody is absent when he can help it,” Taft enthusiastically remarked.
10. Seen here as a twenty-four-year-old New York State legislator, Roosevelt found the state assembly to be a “great school” for learning the rough-and-tumble of politics and how to cooperate with colleagues far removed from his patrician background.
11. The years Roosevelt spent visiting this Badlands cabin and working as a cattle rancher would become critical to his evolving public image—as in this 1889 cartoon, where Thomas Nast emblazons Roosevelt as a cowboy in the popular imagination.
12. Theodore Roosevelt as a cattle rancher
13. An 1889 Thomas Nast cartoon of Roosevelt
14. As New York City police commissioner, Roosevelt, seen here in his office on Mulberry Street circa 1896, would traverse the city streets at night. Concealing his evening clothes beneath a long coat, he made a series of surprise inspections, checking if policemen on the beat were faithfully safeguarding their posts. He was accompanied on some of these night rambles by Lincoln Steffens, then an enterprising crime reporter for the New York Evening Post, but who later joined the celebrated team at McClure’s magazine.
15. Lincoln Steffens
16. Samuel S. McClure, the indomitable and visionary founder of McClure’s magazine, faced obstacles unimaginable to Roosevelt or Taft. Raised in poverty in northern Ireland in a thatched cottage, McClure emigrated to America as a young child. Though penniless, his charismatic personality and extraordinary mental abilities earned him a place at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He is pictured here as an undergraduate circa 1878.
17. The thatched cottage where McClure was raised
18. In 1893, McClure launched the magazine that would become the engine of progressive reform.
19. At the time he headed the magazine, McClure was capable of wild bursts of creativity, punctuated by periods of exhaustion and depression. His staff, considered by many the most brilliant gathering of journalists ever assembled, included Ida Tarbell (shown here), Ray Stannard Baker, and William Allen White, as well as Lincoln Steffens.
20. Ray Stannard Baker
21. William Allen White
22. “I am having immense fun running the Navy,” Assistant Secretary Roosevelt boasted from his office in the Navy Department.
23. While President McKinley vacillated about intervening in Cuba, TR could not contain his excitement at the prospect of conquest, as this 1898 cartoon suggests.
24. A more skeptical Ida Tarbell, covering the developing story for McClure’s, derided Roosevelt’s martial enthusiasm as that of “a boy on roller skates.” Even before war had been declared, she wrote, Roosevelt “saw himself an important unit in an invading army.”
25. Far from dreading the challenge of moving her three children over 8,000 miles from home, Nellie Taft—shown here en route to Manila—“knew instantly” that she “didn’t want to miss a big and novel experience.”
26. At the Malacañan Palace, she blazed a trail by opening her guest lists to Filipinos and Americans on an equal basis. “Neither politics nor race,” she insisted, “should influence our hospitality in any way.”
27. In Albany, Edith Roosevelt turned a cavernous governor’s mansion, pictured here, into a comfortable home for her six children, adding a nursery, a schoolroom, and a gymnasium.
28. Will and Nellie Taft seated in the Philippine governor’s residence circa 1901 with their children, four-year-old Charlie (standing in rear), ten-year-old Helen (seated), and twelve-year-old Robert (standing at right).
29. Governor Taft in 1902, somewhat awkwardly riding a carabao, the breed of water buffalo relied upon by Filipino farmers to till fields and haul timber.
30. Nellie Taft, a tireless hostess during her husband’s tenure as governor general of the Philippines, wore a Spanish costume for one official reception.
31. After his widely publicized Rough Rider heroics in Cuba, Roosevelt—as seen in this Harper’s Weekly cartoon from 1900—was an obvious choice for vice president on the Republican ticket.
32. Stumping for McKinley, Roosevelt became “the central figure, the leading general, the field marshal” of the entire Republican campaign; yet the prize of victory was a do-nothing office that Roosevelt himself believed “ought to be abolished.”
33. On September 6, 1901, the kaleidoscope turned: an assassin’s bullet made him at forty-two years of age the youngest president in the country’s history. Roosevelt is pictured below in 1901, conferring with reporters shortly after McKinley was shot.
34. During whistle-stop speaking tours across the country in 1902 and 1903, Roosevelt began to test the phrase “the square deal”—the slogan that would come to characterize his entire domestic program.
35. After visiting a majestic grove of giant sequoias in California, Roosevelt exhorted an audience “to protect these mighty trees, these wonderful monuments of beauty.”
36. Roosevelt’s inauguration: After weeks of cloudy skies and heavy snow, the morning of March 4, 1905, broke “blue, flecked with lazily floating white clouds.”
37. To audiences who gathered at the Capitol to watch him take the oath of office, the new president appeared “supremely happy.” Roosevelt’s election, the journalist William Allen White predicted, was a clear signal that “the Republican party has turned the corner and is now on a new road.”
38. President Roosevelt’s dynamic, often collaborative, relationship with a rising class of progressive journalists resulted in a wave of public enthusiasm for political and social reforms. “The Crusaders,” a cartoon from the February 21, 1906, edition of Puck magazine, portrays Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, S. S. McClure, and others as medieval knights in shining armor, with shields and weapons, waving banners emblazoned with the names of their publications, crusading against corruption and injustice.
39. The Roosevelt children, ranging here from five to nineteen years of age, unabashedly made the White House their own. Not since Willie and Tad Lincoln scampered through the halls had there been such a din in the executive mansion. “Places that had not seen a human being for years were made alive by the howls and laughter of these newcomers,” observed the chief usher at the White House.
40. The Tafts, shown here circa 1904, traded their exotic life in the Malacañan Palace for a house on K Street in Washington. Their daughter Helen joined Ethel Roosevelt at the National Cathedral School, and seven-year-old Charlie became great friends with Quentin Roosevelt.
41. “Thank Heaven you are to be with me!” Roosevelt exclaimed in 1903, when Taft agreed to return home from the Philippines and become his secretary of war. Taft is pictured here at is desk in the War Department.
42. The president knew that he could rely on Taft as “a needed and valuable corrective to his own impetuosity.”
43. The 1906 schism that ended McClure’s magazine’s glorious era shocked the publishing world. John Phillips, Ida Tarbell, Albert Boyden (seated left to right), Ray Stannard Baker, and John Siddal (standing left to right) were no longer able to continue working with the mercurial S. S. McClure. Together they pooled their talents and resources to buy The American Magazine, which they recast as a writers’ collective. “This is undoubtedly the most notable combination that has ever launched any publication,” one journal commented.
44. After deciding not to seek a third term, Roosevelt told journalists that “he would crawl on his hands and knees from the White House to the Capitol” to secure the election of Taft as his successor.
45. Turning the candidate’s oversized physique into a metaphor for his inability to take Roosevelt’s place, one cartoonist showed Taft vainly trying to stuff himself into Teddy’s Rough Rider garments.
46. A cartoon from 1907 captured the president’s determination. Its caption has Roosevelt asking: “Uncle Sam, can’t you take him for my third term?”
47. Charley Taft’s colonial mansion in Cincinnati, with its white pillars and sweeping green lawns, provided a perfect setting for his brother Will to officially accept his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate on July 28, 1908.
48. During the election campaign Roosevelt watched over Taft, one political correspondent observed, “like a hen over her chickens.” Exultant over Taft’s victory, Roosevelt is pictured here with his old friend at the White House on the morning of the new president’s inauguration.
49. Defying inaugural tradition, Nellie decided to do what “no President’s wife had ever done”—accompany her husband from the Capitol to the White House on March 4, 1909. “That drive was the proudest and happiest event of Inauguration Day,” she recalled. “I was able to enjoy, almost to the full, the realization that my husband was actually President of the United States.”
50. As first lady, Nellie, pictured with Taft and his military aide Captain Archie Butt (far left), introduced a series of Friday afternoon garden parties that quickly became, as one reporter observed, “the most popular form of official hospitality yet seen in Washington.” But only ten weeks into her husband’s administration, Nellie’s career as a social leader in Washington was cut short by a devastating stroke that permanently robbed her of the ability to speak intelligibly.
51. She spent months recuperating in a seaside mansion in Beverly, Massachusetts. Surrounded by “parklike lawns” and adjacent to a country club, this residence was a favorite retreat of President Taft and quickly became known as “the Summer White House.”
52. Roosevelt displayed no interest in what critics called “devil wagons,” far preferring his horses, but Taft fell in love with automobiles “on the first whirl.” As president, Taft converted the White House stables into an oversized garage for his collection of motorcars.
53. Nellie and President Taft in one of the his many automobiles
54. Taft exercised regularly while in the White House and worked with doctors to improve his diet, yet his weight remained a constant issue, affecting both his health and energy level, and skewing the public’s perception of him. The bathtub, easily holding four workmen, was specially designed to accommodate his huge frame.
55. Despite Roosevelt’s caution that the working class looked upon golf as a “rich man’s game,” Taft loved nothing more than to spend the afternoon on the green.
56. Taft better served his public image when, on June 9, 1910, accompanied by the ever present Archie Butt, he threw out a ceremonial first pitch at a Washington Nationals game, establishing a tradition that has continued ever since.
57. In April 1910 Roosevelt met with the deposed forester Gifford Pinchot on the Italian Riviera. After receiving a full briefing from Pinchot about his battles with Taft over conservation, Roosevelt for the first time expressed open disappointment at the course of his successor’s presidency.
58. The anguish that Taft (shown here signing a bill) felt over Roosevelt’s disapproval would be temporarily dispelled by the nearly complete triumph of his administration’s legislative agenda. “We never had such a towering wood pile of work from the congressional saw mill,” one newspaper editorial observed.
59. When Roosevelt returned from Africa, he established a base of operations at the offices of the weekly public affairs magazine, The Outlook.
60. On August 23, 1910, Roosevelt boarded a private railroad car secured by The Outlook to begin a speaking tour through the West. One political question was on every reporter’s mind: “On which side will the Colonel now align himself? What changes have taken place in his philosophy?”
61. Before every speech President Taft was beset by grave misgivings, acutely aware that his texts remained “infernally long” despite his efforts to prune his words. “Never mind if you cannot get off fireworks,” Nellie consoled him. “That is not your style, and there is no use in trying to force it.”
62. When he threw his hat into the ring in the 1912 race for the presidential nomination, Theodore Roosevelt’s personal popularity had never been higher. Drawing enthusiastic crowds, he scored impressive victories in states where direct primaries were held.
63. “If they are anxious for a fight, they shall have it,” thundered Roosevelt during the 1912 Republican campaign. Crowds cheered Roosevelt as if he were a boxer, urging him to attack Taft: “Hit him between the eyes!” and “Put him over the ropes!” Political cartoonists were quick to seize on the phenomenon, as in this cartoon of prizefighter Roosevelt working over a Taft-shaped punching bag.
64. Despite his popularity with rank-and-file Republicans, Roosevelt failed to capture his party’s support for president at the Republican National Convention in Chicago in June 1912. The old system prevailed, and Taft was nominated to pursue a second term. The disappointed candidate is shown here arriving in New York after the convention with Edith Roosevelt at his side, firmly resolved to form a third party.
65. On October 14, 1912, a would-be assassin shot at Roosevelt while he campaigned in Milwaukee. The candidate’s bundle of notes for his speech, stored in his coat, helped save his life: the bullet penetrated no farther than the ribcage, and Roosevelt, though in pain, was able to deliver his speech on schedule. Returning home after the shooting, he descends from the train in Oyster Bay, assisted by aides and doctors.
66. In later years, the members of the old McClure’s magazine staff gathered to celebrate their birthdays. For Tarbell (seated between Willa Cather and Will Irwin), these gatherings represented the “unbreakable quality in friendship” that healed old wounds. “We sat enthralled as in the old years while Mr. McClure (at left) enlarged on his latest enthusiasm, marveling as always at the eternal youthfulness in the man, the failure of life to quench him.”
67. Theodore and Edith Roosevelt shared an enduring love affair over three eventful decades of marriage. They are pictured here in 1917, two short years before Roosevelt’s death at age sixty. He repeatedly declared that she remained as pretty as on the day he married her.
68. In 1921, William Howard Taft finally achieved his life’s ambition when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The position was perfectly suited to his temperament: no professional assignment ever made him happier.