Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [326]
Roosevelt, beguiled too, told Archie Butt, “He is going to be greatly beloved as President. I almost envy a man who has a personality like Taft’s.” Then, with a self-mocking leer, “No one could accuse me of having a charming personality.”
Butt certainly could, after seven months of almost daily exposure to evidence in proof. Pondering the President’s remark, he decided that the difference between Taft and Roosevelt was that of the inanimate versus the animate. Taft’s personality was soothing, “like a huge pan of sweet milk,” whereas Roosevelt’s was galvanic. “When he comes into a room and stands as he always does for one second before doing something characteristic, he electrifies the company and gives one just that sensation which a pointer does when he first quivers and takes a stand on quail.”
“HE WAS IN REALITY DEPRESSED AND WISHING THAT HE
WAS HEADED FOR THE SUPREME COURT.”
President-elect William Howard Taft, 1909 (photo credit 32.1)
About the only trait the two men had in common was their shared love of laughter. In company or alone, they were continually roaring with mirth, Taft quaking from head to foot, Roosevelt so convulsed that he had to hang on to a window frame for support. Members of the Gridiron Club had an opportunity to see them in action on 12 December, as they sat through a skit that satirized Roosevelt’s forthcoming role as a paid-by-the-word foreign journalist.
The lights were doused, and a voice announced, “We are now in Darkest Africa.” After a medley of wild-animal noises, the lights came on again, revealing a tent in a tropical jungle. From inside, came the rattle of a typewriter, punctuated regularly by the sound of a bell that registered not carriage returns, but pecuniary ones. A pair of offstage narrators kept “tab” as Author and Auditor:
AUTHOR (typing furiously) The lion is a wild and ferocious animal.
AUDITOR Eight dollars.
AUTHOR It has a soft body and a hard face.
AUDITOR Seventeen dollars.
AUTHOR It is the king of beasts and its daughter is a princess.
AUDITOR Twenty-nine dollars.
AUTHOR The lion roars like distant thunder.
AUDITOR Thirty-five dollars.
AUTHOR But it is nobody’s business what its religion is.
AUDITOR Forty-four dollars.
Roosevelt and Taft guffawed throughout, even when the typed article was followed by another, more serious one, explaining that “Author” had gone to Africa to avoid any appearance of interfering with the Taft Administration.
The Gridiron’s exclusively masculine, joke-heavy atmosphere was not conducive to observation of any change in the relationship of President and President-elect. As so often in situations involving transfer of power, it was women who registered the first signals of strain. Edith Roosevelt was upset to hear that Helen Taft intended to replace the White House’s frock-coated ushers with liveried black footmen. Mrs. Taft let it be known that she, as a frugal housewife, did not intend to continue the Roosevelt tradition of elaborate entertainments catered from outside. Her guests would be fed out of the White House kitchen, and like it. She also felt that her husband was altogether too much seen as Roosevelt’s “creature,” and urged him to demonstrate his independence. Alice Longworth, who was a gifted if cruel mimic, mounted her own propaganda by driving out in the Roosevelt surrey and rearranging her face into a terrifying caricature of the toothy Mrs. Taft.
IN MID-DECEMBER, Washington’s social season began with almost nightly receptions, dinners, and balls in and around the White House. The Roosevelts participated graciously, showing no signs of ennui on their eighth procession through the ritual calendar. Yet small signs of impending change darkened each event, like speckles on tired transparencies. Elihu Root announced that he was stepping down as Secretary of State, handing two months of token power over