Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [62]
He may be a brother of Big Bill Taft,
But he ain’t no brother of mine.
Taft had succeeded so well in the Philippines, as diplomat and executive, that his conversion to imperialism passed almost unnoticed. Only recipients of his classified dispatches understood how deeply he despised the people he governed.
Filipinos, Taft wrote, were “the greatest liars it has ever been my fortune to meet.” The educated minority were “ambitious as Satan and quite as unscrupulous.” The rest—some six and a half million peasants and jungle tribesmen—were inferior to “the most ignorant negro,” and “utterly unfit” for self-government. “They need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.”
These sentiments, while not uncommon, had force coming from a man widely believed to be of presidential caliber. Root chose not to reveal that it had been Taft who had initially delayed the Gardener Report. Silent, stern, and loyal, he expressed no chagrin over Roosevelt’s lack of sympathy. Solace was available in the form of a historic task in Havana. Under soothing fans in the Palacio del Gobernador, Root negotiated the final details of Cuban independence.
THE PRESIDENT REMAINED oddly optimistic, although he had more reasons than Root to be gloomy. For the first time since his accession to power, he began to feel real opposition building up against him in Congress. Republican conservatives in the House had reacted contemptuously to an Administration measure aimed at giving Cuba tariff reciprocity as a present for independence. Democratic senators were using Root’s refusal to resign as an excuse to block passage of the Philippines civil-government bill. And on Wall Street, rumors that Attorney General Knox was going to proceed against the “Beef Trust” had strengthened corporate longings for a President Hanna.
“Theodore is a total, abject, hopeless failure,” Henry Adams reported with satisfaction. “He was always what we, in the language of praise, called a damn fool, and he has become a damn nuisance.… At this rate, he will bring the government to a standstill in a year.”
If so, the members of his Cabinet did not seem too worried. On 24 April they invited him to join them on a stag cruise in celebration of John D. Long’s retirement as Secretary of the Navy. Long himself acted as host aboard USS Dolphin.
The little white yacht glided down the Potomac on the evening breeze. She gave off sounds of band music, while a huge, air-filled dolphin swung at her masthead. When the boat returned after dinner, Long’s guests were seen standing on deck in white ties and tails, drinking brandy and coffee, under strings of colored lights. A Navy fiddler began to play bluegrass tunes. The President seized Philander Knox and began to dance. John Hay, tiny, dapper, and white-bearded, launched into a sedate two-step, while Leslie Shaw and Henry Payne “shook down” with Midwestern skill. At the climax of the reel, James Wilson, an awkward six foot three, disgraced the Department of Agriculture by falling down. Roosevelt’s high-pitched laughter could be heard across the water. “Get up, you old cornstalk!”
His good cheer may have been helped by an awareness that the Fifty-seventh Congress was dying, while his Administration was becoming stronger and more Rooseveltian. The appointments of Shaw as Treasury Secretary and Clay Payne as Postmaster General had been political rather than ideological. Long’s retirement (which he had accepted “with regret” but alacrity) gave him the opportunity to hire Representative William Henry Moody of Massachusetts, a forty-eight-year-old expansionist and “big navy man,” who could be relied on to keep the flag flying over the Philippines.
SPRING CAME TO the capital in an efflorescence of azaleas, dogwood, and magnolia, affecting even the dyspeptic Adams with a sense of rising sap and “restless maternity.” Newlywed couples