Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [322]
Foraker, devastated, admitted the authenticity of the letters, but claimed that they related to law work only, which he had performed during intersessional times, and before such outside work was frowned upon by the Senate. At least one check—the largest—had been not a payment, but a loan from Standard Oil, to help a colleague buy a newspaper. Hearst had neglected to mention that Foraker had paid Archbold back within a month.
These qualifications, however, had little effect on public outrage. Foraker himself neglected to explain how $150,000 in corporate contributions toward the redecoration of his Washington mansion in no way related to his defense of corporations on Capitol Hill. He was, overnight, a dead man politically, and Roosevelt urged Taft to make the most of his demise. “I would have it understood in detail what is the exact fact, namely, that Mr. Foraker’s separation from you and from me has been due not in the least to a difference of opinion on the Negro question, which was merely a pretense.… Make a fight openly on the ground that you stood in the Republican party and before the people for the triumph over the forces which were typified by the purchase of a United States Senator to do the will of the Standard Oil Company.”
Taft, however, was not a fighter, either open or covert. Lacking aggression, all he wanted was to be loved. For the most part, this need served him well on the hustings. Audiences forgave his lackluster speaking style and warmed to his portly, always cheerful demeanor. When pressing flesh, he discharged none of Roosevelt’s galvanizing energy, but instead imparted an unthreatening, gentle glow. He was everybody’s favorite fat uncle from childhood, dispensing coins and lollipops.
Bryan’s brazen vocal cords were worked to the limit as he crisscrossed the country, meeting large and rapturous audiences wherever he went, and saying little to tax either his or their own mental abilities. But as James Bryce sympathetically observed, “That a man who talks so much should be able to think at all is amazing.”
ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO Washington on 23 September and plunged into the only kind of campaign work he could do, barring a request (which never came) to tour on behalf of Taft. He fired off a series of press statements and public letters attacking every candidate in the Democratic ranks who seemed vulnerable to charges of corruption, or any other sins on the calendar of human frailty. His biggest triumph was in causing the resignation of the treasurer of the Democratic campaign, Charles N. Haskell—also on account of links to Standard Oil, which by now was equated in the public mind with Attila’s Kingdom of the Huns. That the links had been first announced, again, by Hearst in no way spoiled Roosevelt’s satisfaction in having deeply embarrassed Bryan. “How the President does enjoy a fight when there is need of one,” James Garfield wrote in his diary.
Taft came to Washington only once, on 18 October. He was fresh from a tour of the Baptist South, and feeling somewhat bruised by the hostility of evangelicals toward his Unitarian faith. Roosevelt sympathetically went to church with him. “I did this,” he wrote Kermit, “hoping that it would attract the attention of sincere but rather ignorant Protestants who support me, and would make them tend to support Taft also.” It was the first time President and candidate had met since July. Roosevelt was pleased to find Taft, as ever, “just a dear,” and confident of victory in a majority of states. Dixie, after all, had never been GOP territory.
The nearest thing to a campaign debate that month was that over the use of injunctions in labor disputes. Unions claimed that corporations