Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [477]
27 She was denied Pringle, William Howard Taft, vol. 1, 353.
28 But Lodge Ibid.; Bishop, Presidential Nominations, 76.
29 a 2:00 A.M. telegram Charles Evans Hughes, interviewed by Howard K. Beale, n.d. [ca. 1935] (HKB). The alleged bribe, apparently vouchsafed by one of Taft’s rich friends, was one hundred thousand dollars, and the intermediary was identified as one Elbert Baldwin.
30 LaFollette complained LaFollette, “Autobiography,” 247 (LC).
31 at five hundred pounds Mayer, Republican Party, 303. Progressives could hardly say that Taft had not made gestures in their direction, having tried without success to get Jonathan P. Dolliver and Albert J. Beveridge to run with him. Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 284–85.
32 “THERE IS A” Qu. in TR, Letters, vol. 6, 184.
33 “It was absolutely” Ibid., 183–84.
34 “Well, I’m through” “Roosevelt Tired,” ms., 1908 (RSB). There is another version of this interview (misdated late summer 1908) in Baker, American Chronicle, 204–5.
35 “No, revolutions” “Roosevelt Tired,” ms., 1908 (RSB). “I have never seen him in a more human mood,” Baker wrote afterward, “nor have I ever been more impressed with his bigness and breadth.”
36 He stayed Henry L. Stoddard, As I Knew Them: Presidents and Politics from Grant to Coolidge (New York, 1927), 341; Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 285. Wright, a Tennessee Gold Democrat, took over as Secretary of War on 1 July 1908.
37 “He and I” TR, Letters, vol. 6, 1085.
38 Taft headed Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 341.
39 FOUR DAYS LATER Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, 536–38.
40 “A trifle too” EKR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 18 May 1908 (HKB).
41 Instead of heading New York Tribune, 22 and 24 July 1908; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 342.
42 Large, strong, plumpish This description of Captain Butt is taken from references passim in Butt, Letters. See especially Lawrence F. Abbott’s introduction, vii–xxviii.
43 JULY 25, 1908 Some of Butt’s letters were misdated in publication, including this one, which was begun on the twenty-fourth. Those describing his first days in the White House (pp. 1–6) should be dated May, not April. The following long quotation is from Butt, Letters, 62–65.
44 smoking on the porch TR never smoked.
45 Like the President Butt, Letters, 70–71.
46 “I want ghosts” Ibid., 88.
47 “You know how” Ibid., 85.
48 Winthrop asked Ibid.
49 Roosevelt moved on Ibid., 86–87.
50 Despite the Ibid., 75–76.
51 “Archie, when I” Ibid., 78.
52 Forty little boys Ibid., 79–80.
53 Asked afterward Ibid., 81. See also TR, Letters, vol. 3, 448.
54 He indulged Butt, Letters, 77.
55 He sensed a Ibid., 91.
56 “And he is” Ibid.
57 “No one dreads” Ibid., 92.
58 TAFT’S SPEECH Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 344.
59 Now began what Ibid., 342. TR was deeply saddened this month by the death, after a long battle with cancer, of his old friend Baron Speck von Sternburg.
Chronological Note: Although TR’s presidential power was diminishing steadily in mid-1908, he still retained to the full his command of the executive order. On 10 August, he announced the appointment of a Commission on Country Life, a Pinchot-inspired board charged with finding out why the nation’s rural population was advancing more slowly than city dwellers’.
In his letter to the Commission’s chairman-designate, the agronomist Liberty Hyde Bailey, he observed that the government was subjecting farmers to too many economic coachings and cajolements, in order to increase their productivity, at the expense of consideration for their social and emotional well-being. “The great rural interests are human interests, and good crops are of little value to the farmer unless they open the door to a good kind of life on the farm.”
He asked the Commission to report to him upon the present condition of country life, and to advise him as to how it could be improved, especially with regard to rural education. The children of farmers should be encouraged to grow up wanting to do what their parents did, rather