John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Skillfully and decorously Hughes began pulling such a story of corruption and extortion out of reluctant witnesses that the featurewriters were delighted.

Reporters, who at first had complained of his austerity and of the chilly personality they found behind his whiskers, now fell over each other to make a public figure of him. The Evening Mail , the house organ of the Roosevelt Progressives, described him as “a large man, not burly but with the appearance of one who is built on broad lines. He looks strong. His shoulders are square, his limbs solid, his teeth big and white and his whiskers thick and somewhat aggressive.” Pulitzer’s New York World described his whiskers as being “broader, braver, bigger, bushier” than they appeared in the cartoons … “In action they flare and wave about triumphantly like the battleflag of a pirate chief.”

He was invited to run for mayor on a reform platform. Instead he went mountainclimbing in Switzerland with the children, but soon he let himself be called back for a new investigation, this time of the life insurance companies. By the time he had grilled a choice assortment of capitalists and revealed the highhanded way in which the men who ran the companies paid off the politicians and handled the public’s funds as if they were their own, Hughes was a national hero.

Legislation followed which cut the insurance companies down to size. Ida Tarbell gave him the accolade: “Charles E. Hughes is engaged in a passionate effort to vindicate the American system of government.”

Even though Hughes had given the chief financial backer of T.R.’s presidential campaign, George W. Perkins, a bad quarter of an hour, forcing him to admit that in a four million dollar bond deal he had represented both New York Life, which was the buyer and J. P. Morgan and Co., which was the seller, Theodore Roosevelt began quietly pushing Hughes as a Republican reform candidate for the governorship of New York.

The World proclaimed that he had “restored faith in legislative committees as a means of bringing the truth to light,” and described him as a man “who has a service of the highest order to give to the public and who can be neither intimidated or betrayed.” “Why not make him governor?” asked Ida Tarbell in the American Magazine.

To run against him Boss Murphy, who had been much bespattered by the reformers, put up William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had all the money in the world to spend and was a reformer, an extremely noisy one, to boot. It was an exciting campaign.

T.R. wrote Hughes from Washington … “You are an honest fearless square man, a good citizen and a good American first and a good republican also … If I were not president I’d be stumping New York from one end to the other for you.”

Hughes turned out an unexpectedly effective campaigner. His election put the quietus on William Randolph Hearst’s political career. He successfully served two terms as governor and became one of Taft’s chief assets in his campaign for the presidency in 1908.

William Howard Taft had been Roosevelt’s Secretary of War. In the Cabinet he was the President’s most faithful lieutenant. Such was T.R.’s prestige at the end of his second term that he was able to impose Taft’s nomination on the Republican Party in spite of the big man’s mumbled protest that as a Unitarian he could never be elected. Roosevelt considered Taft the man most certain to carry out his progressive policies.

It was only when T.R. saw his dear friend, in spite of innate modesty, willynilly taking the center of the Washington stage as President-elect that his enthusiasm for him began to cool. Now he talked as if Governor Hughes, whom in impatient moments he’d scornfully referred to as “that animated feather duster,” might be the man on whom the mantle of his strenuous Republicanism would fall when he disappeared from the Washington scene. To distract himself from the acute pain it gave him to leave the White House he was planning a public massacre of the lions and leopards and elephants of the African wilds.

In Taft’s inaugural parade, beset by a famous blizzard that almost froze out the proceedings, Governor Hughes reached the peak of his political popularity. In silk hat and frock coat he risked pneumonia by riding at the head of the New York militia.

“Thinking an overcoat too clumsy” Hughes wrote in his notes, “I had protected myself with a chamois vest But my hands inside my gloves were very cold and I had to dig them into the horse’s flesh to keep from freezing. As we came down the hill from the Capitol our horses almost slid on the icy street. My horse had always been in the ranks and it was with some difficulty he could be persuaded to take his place at the head of the procession. But with the cheers of the crowd as we came to the large stands, he seemed to realize that this was his day and he went along at the head, proudly arching his neck and acting his part as a well trained horse of the Commander in Chief should. I made my bows with all the grace I could command and managed to get through without mishap. I dismounted,” he added, “with a keen sense of relief.”

Mr. Hughes was being modest. The Washington Post reported that he had aroused the wildest enthusiasm. According to the New York Tribune “a continuous roar of applause … greeted him from one end of the avenue to the other.”

When Hughes stepped down as governor, Taft gratefully appointed him to the Supreme Court.

Once the ex-President was off harrowing the great carnivores in Africa, Taft, though he showed almost pathetic eagerness to carry out T.R.’s instructions, found himself straying from the straight path of progressivism. No continuous roar of applause greeted his administration.

President Taft was a corpulent humane slowmoving man with a sharp streak of intellectual honesty that made public life far from easy for him. He had the judicial temperament to a high degree and seems to have been forced to undergo the hazards of politics largely because he was a Cincinnati Taft and because his wife and the family expected it of him.

Politics with the Tafts was an avocation. The President’s father, Alphonso Taft, moved out to Ohio from Vermont in the early eighteen hundreds to grow up with the country. He served as Secretary of War and then as Attorney General in Grant’s cabinet and, in his declining years, as American minister to the courts of Vienna and St Petersburg. He left the family not only rich but leaders of a group of literate and cultured people who early made Cincinnati one of the intellectual centers of the middlewest. President Taft’s older halfbrother Charles started schools and endowed his home city with an art gallery and a symphony orchestra. The Tafts were the embodiment of public spirit.

Like his father, William Howard Taft graduated at Yale. He studied law in the lawschool his halfbrother founded in Cincinnati. He was early elected to an Ohio judgeship which he reluctantly gave up for the post of Solicitor General in Benjamin Harrison’s administration. Then for six years he served as a federal circuit judge. The class war was heightening. Some of his decisions were considered antilabor but few of them pleased the vested interests.

In 1900 McKinley appointed Taft to the Philippine commission. Serving as their first civil governor he showed real friendship and understanding in his dealings with the various inhabitants of that barely pacified archipelago. He made himself such a reputation in Manila that Theodore Roosevelt brought him home for the job of Secretary of War. He gave a good account of himself in Washington.

As President, Taft, innately a conservative man, lost touch with the ebullient progressives in the east and with the western radicals accustomed to the strong drink of T.R.’s or La Follette’s public speeches. The resurgent Democrats took over the House of Representatives in 1910 and filled the welkin with their outcry against entrenched privilege and the Payne-Aldrich tariff. With his soupstrainer mustache and his elephantine girth Taft was the very picture of the Mr. Moneybags of the radical cartoonists. “Politics makes me sick” was a phrase that appeared oftener and oftener in his private letters.