Recollections of Full Years/Chapter 19
Our second summer at Beverly began with a call from Mr. Roosevelt. When the ex-President returned to the United States, on the 18th of June, 1910, after an absence of a year and a half, Mr. Taft sent two members of his Cabinet, the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Agriculture, and his aide, Captain Butt, to New York to meet him and to extend to him a personal as well as an official welcome home. According to Captain Butt's Official Diary:
"Immediately upon the arrival of the S.S. Kaiserin Auguste Victoria at Quarantine the Presidential party scaled the sides of the steamer by means of a rope ladder and proceeded to the staterooms of Mr. Roosevelt where each member of the party greeted the ex-President. Then Captain Butt, who was in full dress uniform, saluted Mr. Roosevelt and presented to him the letter of welcome entrusted to his care by the President. Mr. Roosevelt read it and expressed his great appreciation of the honour of the receipt of the letter, as also for the ordering of the U. S. S. South Carolina and other vessels to accompany him from Quarantine to New York. Captain Butt also presented to Mr. Roosevelt a letter (from Mrs. Taft) supplementing the President's invitation to Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt to pay them a visit at the White House now or at any time when it might be convenient for them to do so.…Mr. Roosevelt took occasion to send his sincere appreciation and profound thanks to the President by Captain Butt both for the official and personal welcome extended to him."
I removed the Presidential household to Beverly the week Mr. Roosevelt arrived and did not see him until after Mr. Taft joined me about ten days later. Again to quote from Captain Butt's carefully kept record:
"June 30—At 3:30 o'clock ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, accompanied by Senator Lodge, called to pay his respects to the President. He was met at the entrance by Captain Butt, who announced his arrival. The President immediately came out and greeted his visitor most affectionately, addressing him as Theodore.
"Colonel Roosevelt took both hands of the President, and said,
"'Mr. President, it is fine to see you looking so well.'
"'But why "Mr. President"?' laughed the President.
"'Because,' replied Colonel Roosevelt, 'it used to be Mr. President" and "Will," now it must be "Mr. President" and "Theodore."'
"The President conducted his distinguished predecessor to the side porch where they started into a series of delightful reminiscences of the past Administration.…Colonel Roosevelt remained two hours, during which he gave the President an interesting account of his trip."
I was present at this interview and remember it as being remarkably pleasant and entertaining. Everybody will recall that the question of Mr. Roosevelt's attitude toward my husband was even then a debatable one, but Mr. Taft had resolutely refused to believe that it could ever be anything but friendly. I did not share his complete faith, but I was glad on this occasion to find the old spirit of sympathetic comradeship still paramount and myself evidently proved to be unwarrantably suspicious.
Mr. Roosevelt had just been in England where he acted as the representative of the President of the United States at the funeral of King Edward, and that solemnly magnificent event seemed to have overshadowed in his mind every other experience he had had during his long absence. He described the stately ceremonies and the mediævally picturesque procession in vivid detail and did not fail to emphasise their grave and reverential aspects, but he dwelt particularly, and to our great amusement, upon the humorous side of the situation in which he had found himself.
It will be remembered that among Kings and Emperors and Czars, and even lesser potentates, the rank of Presidents was a difficult thing to determine. Should minor royalties take precedence over the representatives of the French Republic and the United States of America, to say nothing of Mexico, Brazil, Switzerland, and all the other great and small democracies?
Mr. Roosevelt had great difficulty in finding his place. Then, too, he was constantly running into kings and other royalties to whom he, naturally, owed ceremonious respect. They were so numerous in London at the time that familiarity with them bred carelessness in one whose tongue had not been trained to the honorifics of Court life, and he found himself making extremely funny blunders. He told us many stories of his adventures with the world's elect and, with his keen appreciation of the ridiculous and his gift of description, gave us as merry an afternoon as we ever spent with him.
I dwell on the memory of this agreeable meeting with Mr. Roosevelt and the entertainment it afforded me, because by his manner he succeeded in convincing me that he still held my husband in the highest esteem and reposed in him the utmost confidence, and that the rumours of his antagonism were wholly unfounded. I was not destined to enjoy this faith and assurance for very long.
In mid-July of that year we started off for a short cruise on the Mayflower, the only one we ever made. It is not really possible for the President to have a vacation, but if he happens to be a good sailor I know of no better way for him to get short intervals of rest than by boarding the Presidential yacht and steaming away, out of the reach of crowds.
We had only a small party with us, my husband's brother, Mr. Horace Taft, my sister, Mrs. Louis More, Miss Mabel Boardman and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Beekman Winthrop, and Mrs. Winthrop; and Captain Butt, of course, was with us always.
We headed north for the Maine coast with Eastport our first stopping place. The mayor of that interesting city of fisheries came on board as soon as we dropped anchor, made a felicitous speech of welcome and proceeded to lay out a programme of sightseeing and festivities which would have kept us there for a considerable longer time than I could stay if it had all been carried out, and this experience was repeated everywhere we went. We had to decline everything except a motor ride about town for the pin of getting a glimpse of the weir fisheries and the sardine canneries, but a President doesn't visit Eastport very often, the people thronging the streets made it seem quite like a holiday.
Then a committee from the Island of Campo Bello, which lies a short distance off the coast and which is a British possession, waited upon us with an invitation to come across and go for a buckboard ride around a part of the island. It sounded like such a homely and restful form of amusement that Mr. Taft was sorely tempted to break the unwritten law which decrees that a President may not set foot outside United States territory, but he concluded that he had better not. The rest of us, however, decided to go and we had a jolly, jolting ride which ended at the summer home of Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt.
Everywhere we went we were most delightfully entertained, finding beautiful homes and merry summer hosts at every port and town. At fashionable Bar Harbor we found a colony of friends whose winter homes are in Washington and Mr. Taft got some excellent golf. There were luncheons and dinners, of course, every day and everywhere, to say nothing of teas and large receptions, and Mr. Taft had to make speeches, too, and meet all the Maine politicians. But there were the long restful nights on the Mayflower, steaming along among the crags and rocks of the broken, picturesque coast, or lying at anchor in some quiet harbour with only the soft water sounds to break the stillness, and it would not have taken much persuasion to have kept me aboard indefinitely.
The Mayflower is used ordinarily for official purposes in connection with naval reviews and other naval ceremonies, and at such times, with the President on board, there is a punctilious formality to be encountered which makes a mere civilian feel like a recruit under the eyes of a drill-sergeant. But it is very interesting. One gets so used to seeing everybody in uniform standing stiffly at attention as the President passes that one almost forgets that it isn't their natural attitude.
And then the guns. They shake one's nerves and hurt one's ears, but they are most inspiring. The President's salute is twenty-one guns. It is fired every time he sets foot on the deck of the Mayflower, or any other naval vessel, and when he passes, on the Mayflower, between the lines of naval vessels on review he gets it from every ship in the fleet, not one by one, but altogether, so I think I know what a naval battle sounds like.
Shortly after we returned from our little cruise on the Maine Coast we received a visit from the President of Chili, Señor Montt, and Señora Montt. He was on his way to Europe, having been ordered abroad on account of ill health. He stopped in New York at the request of his government, and at Mr. Taft's invitation came to Beverly to pay his official respects to the President of the United States. He made the trip to Boston by special train and was there met by the Mayflower and by Captain Butt.
President Montt was very ill indeed. On the way down to Beverly he had a heart attack which alarmed everybody and made it seem very probable that he would not be able to land. But he recovered sufficiently to become the most cheerful and confident member of the party and we found him and Señora Montt to be among the most delightful of all the distinguished visitors we had the pleasure of entertaining during our term in the Presidency. After the ceremonious presentation and the exchange of international compliments were disposed of they took luncheon with and we spent several most interesting and memorable hours together. The members of his numerous entourage for whom there was no room in our modest summer cottage were entertained at luncheon on board by Captain Logan of the Mayflower and by Captain Butt. We were told afterward that they managed to create quite an entente cordial, toasting each other's Presidents and armies and navies and ministers and attachés and everybody else they could think of with great enthusiasm and gusto. Señor Montt died a week later just as he reached England on his health-seeking trip. In his death Chili lost an eminent citizen.
Mr. Taft remained with us at Beverly, playing golf, attending to routine business, seeing the never-ending line of visitors and preparing speeches until September when there began for him one of those whirlwind seasons, so many which he had lived through. With a printed itinerary in his pocket he was off from Boston on the third of September to attend the Conservation Congress at St. Paul. With two speeches to be delivered, one at the Congress and one at the State Fair in Minneapolis, to say nothing of another in Chicago and numerous short speeches from the rear platform of his train, he was still back in Boston on the eighth to be present at an aviation meet where together we saw the performance of the best aviators of that day.
A short interval of rest and he was away again to New Haven to attend a meeting of the Yale Corporation, then out to Cincinnati to the Ohio Valley Exposition and back to Washington as quickly as a long programme of speeches and hospitalities could be disposed of.
The political skies were then beginning to cloud up in earnest; he had a Democratic Congress to prepare messages for, and I suppose the approaching winter looked anything but alluring to him.
For the first time in the history of the Executive Mansion it was turned into a bachelors' hall during my various absences. My husband always had one or more men staying with him, he would move his aides and secretaries into the White House, and so arrange things that my frequent desertions of him never weighed very heavily on my conscience.
When he arrived in Washington this time he organised a Cabinet House Party so that Washington and the newspaper correspondents had something to worry about for quite a while. He gathered all the members of his Cabinet under his roof and kept them there where he could have three cabinet meetings a day besides the ones he called in the Executive Offices. People made wild guesses at all kinds of crises and at all manner of important disclosures to be made, but it was only a house party after all. There were a great many problems to be solved, proposed legislative measures to be discussed, and with every woman in the Cabinet off summering somewhere it was an excellent opportunity for the Executive branch of the Government to do extra work.
The distinguished gentlemen had to "double up" in rooms, too, so I have often imagined that they got very little rest at any time. 'The Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury had the southeast room; the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of the Interior had the northeast room; the Attorney General and the Secretary of Commerce and Labour had the northwest room; the Postmaster General had Robert's room; the Secretary of Agriculture had the
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At this point in Archie Butt's record I find the note: "Mrs. Taft left this morning for New York to fit her son Charlie out in long trousers."
That brings up unpleasant memories. Like any sensible woman I never would admit that I had reached the high point in life as long as I had one son still in knickerbockers, but with one son at Yale, with a young lady daughter ready to be presented to society, and with Charlie going into long trousers I felt that the day was approaching when the unhappy phrase "getting on in years" might be applied to me.
The very rapid lengthening of Charlie's legs had been a subject of much discussion at Beverly during the summer and the necessity for bestowing upon him the dignity of man-style garments had been manifest to everybody sometime before I would consent to recognise it.
One day the telephone rang and Helen answered it. A voice at the other end of the line said:
"I'd like to speak to Master Charlie Taft, please."
"Somebody wants to speak to you, Charlie," said Helen. Then sister-like she stood by to see who it was and what he could possibly want with her unimportant younger brother. She was surprised to hear this half of a very earnest conversation:
"Who said so?"
"Certainly not!"
"Well, somebody has been giving you misinformation."
"An absolute denial."
"Well, if you want to quote me exactly you may say that I said the rumour is false; wholly without foundation."
"All right. Goodbye."
Helen was sufficiently startled to place Charlie under cross-examination at once. She had visions of grave complications wherein he played the unfortunate part of a President's son who had forgotten the rigid discretion exacted of him by the nature of his position.
Charlie admitted that it was a reporter who had called him up.
"Couldn't you tell that from the way I talked to him?" said he.
He had heard enough such conversations to have acquired the natural "tone," but he insisted that the subject of his conversation with his reporter was "purely personal" and had nothing whatever to do with his sister nor yet with any matters of high importance to the Government.
The question had to be referred to the President, his father, before he would admit that the reporter wanted to write something about his going into long trousers.
"And if that isn't a personal matter," said he, "I should like to know what is."
To his intense delight, his "absolute denial" to the contrary notwithstanding, I fitted him out, kissed my baby good-bye and sent a young man son off to school in his stead, feeling vaguely thankful that I should have until Christmas to get used to the thought of him before having to see him again.
Shortly afterward I returned to the White House and to the routine of a social season. The Cabinet officers having all gone to their respective homes we gave the Cabinet Dinner with all its accustomed formalities, then came musicals, luncheons, small dinners, teas and parties of various sorts until near the end of the year when I introduced my daughter to society.
Helen had gone out in Washington and had attended my entertainments during the winter of 1909 whenever she had been at home from college and when I was ill had even acted as hostess in my place at a dinner we gave for Prince and Princess Fushimi of Japan, but she had never "come out," so I gave two parties early in the winter of 1910 in honor of her début.
We began with an afternoon At Home, for which, as my daughter says she "got all the flowers there were in Washington," and later I gave a ball on the night of December 30th, when the East Room was filled with hundreds of young people clamouring for "just one more dance" until two o'clock in the morning.
The New Year's Reception was followed in quick succession by the Diplomatic, Congressional, Judicial and other state functions; the winter passed like a dream; the Garden Party season was upon us; then came the greatest event of our four years in the White House, our Silver Wedding.
Twenty-five years married and all but a single year of it spent in the public service. It did not seem unfitting to me that this anniversary should be spent in the White House or that we should seek to make it an event not to be forgotten by anybody who happened to witness it. I thanked the happy fate that had given me a summer wedding-day because I needed all outdoors for the kind of party I wanted to give. That silver was showered upon us until we were almost buried in silver was incidental; we couldn't help it; it was our twenty-fifth anniversary and we had to celebrate it.
I am not going to try to remember or to take the trouble to find out how many invitations we issued. I know there were four or five thousand people present and that a more brilliant throng was never gathered in this country.
It was a night garden party with such illuminations as are quite beyond description. Every tree and bush was ablaze with myriads of tiny coloured lights, the whole stately mansion was outlined in a bright white glow; there were strings of bobbing, fantastic lanterns whenever a string would go; the great fountain was playing at its topmost height in every colour of the rainbow; while on the gleaming point of the Monument and on the flag stretched in the breeze from the staff on the top of the White House shone the steady gleam of two searchlights.
My husband and I received the almost endless line of guests under a large tree about midway between the South Portico and the fountain; the entire house was thrown open and was filled constantly with people seeking the refreshment tables laid in the dining rooms and vestibule. I have a right to be enthusiastic in my memory of that party because without enthusiasm it could not have been given at all. And why should not one be frankly grateful for success?
With the passing of another season, in no way different from those that went before, I come to the end of my story. There is another story to tell, longer and fuller, but it does not belong to me. It belongs to the man whose career has made my story worth the telling.
After Mr. Taft was renominated, or rather after the second convention in Chicago when the Republican party was divided, I began to make plans for the future in which the White House played no part. I stopped reading the accounts of the bitter political contest because I found that the opposition newspapers made so much more impression on me than those that were friendly to my husband that I was in a state of constant rage which could do me no possible good.
Mr. Taft had never been subjected to bitter criticism and wholesale attack until his term in the Presidency and I suppose I had formed a habit of thinking that there was nothing to criticise him for except, perhaps, his unfortunate shortcoming of not knowing much and of caring less about the way the game of politics is played. Such criticism of him as Mr. Bryan's supporters were able to create for their use in 1908 amounted to nothing. His record of twenty years' uncriticised service stood, and he stood on it. I think we both avoided much perturbation after we became convinced of the unfairness and injustice of much that was said by hostile newspapers, by not reading it. Mr. Taft took much satisfaction from those words of Lincoln's which Mr. Norton, his Secretary, had photographed and placed in a frame on his office desk:
"If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."
I wanted him to be re-elected, naturally, but I never entertained the slightest expectation of it and only longed tor the end of the turmoil when he could rest his weary mind and get back into association with the pleasant things of life. Fortunately we are a family that laughs. Both Mr. Taft and the children manage to get some fun out of almost everything, and I and my matter-of-factness have afforded them life-long amusement. They like now to tell a story about me which doesn't impress me as being particularly funny.
During the last campaign I was at Beverly alone a part of the summer, but when Mr. Taft did join me for short intervals he brought Republican Headquarters with him, more or less, and a few political supporters were sure to follow for consultation with him.
There was one good old enthusiastic friend who had always supported him and who was then making a valiant fight in his behalf. And he had faith that they would win. He assured me they would win. He told me how they were going to do it, pointing out where Mr. Taft's strength lay and telling me how kindly the people really felt toward him.
"Mrs. Taft, you mark my word," said he, "the President will be re-elected in November!"
"Well," said I, "you may be right, but just the same I intend to pack everything up when I leave Beverly, and I shall take the linen and silver home."
........
At a dinner given by the Lotos Club in New York, just ten days after Mr. Wilson's election in 1912, Mr. Taft said:
"The legend of the lotos eaters was that if they partook of the fruit of the lotos tree they forgot what had happened in their country and were left in a state of philosophic calm in which they had no desire to return to it.
"I do not know what was in the mind of your distinguished invitation committee when I was asked to attend this banquet. They came to me before election. At first I hesitated to accept lest when the dinner came I should be shorn of interest as a guest and be changed from an active and virile participant in the day's doings of the Nation to merely a dissolving view. I knew that generally on an occasion of this sort the motive of the diners was to have a guest whose society should bring them more closely into contact with the great present and the future and not be merely a reminder of what has been. But, after further consideration, I saw in the name of your club the possibility that you were not merely cold, selfish seekers after pleasures of your own, and that perhaps you were organised to furnish consolation to those who mourn, oblivion to those who would forget, an opportunity for a swan song to those about to disappear.…
"The Presidency is a great office to hold. It is a great honour and it is surrounded with much that makes it full of pleasure and enjoyment for the occupant, in spite of its heavy responsibilities and the shining mark that it presents for misrepresentation and false attack.…Of course the great and really the only lasting satisfaction that one can have in the administration of the great office of President is the thought that one has done something permanently useful to his fellow countrymen. The mere enjoyment of the tinsel of office is ephemeral, and unless one can fix one's memory on real progress made through the exercise of presidential power there is little real pleasure in the contemplation of the holding of that or any other office, however great its power or dignity or high its position in the minds of men.
"I beg you to believe that in spite of the very emphatic verdict by which I leave the office, I cherish only the deepest gratitude to the American people for having given me the honour of having held the office, and I sincerely hope in looking back over what has been done that real good has been accomplished, even though I regret that it has not been greater. My chief regret is my failure to secure from the Senate the ratification of the general arbitration treaties with France and Great Britain. I am sure they would have been great steps toward general world peace. What has actually been done I hope has helped the cause of peace, but ratification would have been a concrete and substantial step. I do not despair of ultimate success. We must hope and work on."
THE END