Mr. Hearst was running against Mr. Hughes for Governor of New York, and the situation in Idaho, complicated by the murder of Governor Steunenberg and the activities of the anarchistic element in the Western Federation of Miners, seemed also to demand special attention from the Administration, so Mr. Root was delegated to “hurl the spear of civilisation and right thinking” in New York, while Mr. Taft was sent into the West with Idaho as the climax of his itinerary.
All this had been arranged for him while he was away on the mission of averting disaster in Cuba, and when he returned to Washington he had just time, as he expressed it, “to pack the War Department into a suitcase” before he was off on a speechmaking trip which took him from Baltimore through Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming and Idaho and back through Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Orleans to Washington, with only such time for preparation of speeches as he could get on the trains between stops.
His letters to me were dictated to his stenographer, and in rereading them I get the impression that I was made the victim of his thinking processes since he poured into them all the politics and the turmoil of the hour, together with lengthy comments which kept me very much alive with interest in the campaign in which he was engaged.
About this time there appeared in the New York Sun an editorial which pleased me and which expressed the rush of our lives with singular vividness. It said in part:
Merely to record the movements and missions of the Secretary of War requires a nimble mind. He journeys from Washington to Manila to reassure ten millions of natives restive under an experimental scheme of civil government and turns up in Panama to speed the digging of the Isthmian Canal. To give a fillip to a campaign for reform in some western State, or direct the southern Republicans in the way they should go, or enlighten the people Down East as to the President’s home policy, or illuminate the recesses of a problem in jurisdiction for the benefit of a bar association, is only a matter of grabbing a time table and throwing a change of clothing into a travelling bag. Such are mere relaxations and holiday jaunts for the Hon. William H. Taft.
A Cuban revolution would be a poser to most statesmen, and to an ordinary Secretary of War a labour of Hercules; but to the business of bringing peace with honour to a distracted land, deposing one government and setting up another, meanwhile gratifying everybody and winning the esteem of the fiercest warrior, Mr. Taft devotes only one page of the Calendar and takes ship for the States to resume his routine duties as if he had done nothing out of the common.
But routine duties in Washington do not hold him long. An itinerary is made up for him and he plunges into the stress and turmoil of a political campaign. He is to make speeches in Ohio and Illinois, and Idaho claims him too. From Havana to Pocatello is something of a change and a far cry, but it is all in the day’s work for William H. Taft … all nice problems look alike to the Secretary of War who should be called the Secretary of Peace, so uniform is his success in smoothing the wrinkled front of conflict and making two laughs echo where one groan was heard before.
No emergency, no exigency can put the Hon. William H. Taft down. With a heart for any fate, buoyant as hope, versatile as the kaleidoscope, indefatigable as fate and indomitable as victory, he is a most amazing and effective Secretary of War. “Cabinet help” when William H. Taft is the instrument and medium, is tantamount to the energy and force of a whole Administration. Yet there are those who would circumscribe his activities by investing him with the robes and immobile dignity of judicial office.
This subject of my husband’s appointment to the Supreme Bench cropped up with what seemed to me to be rather annoying frequency. While we were in Cuba it was rumoured that he would be asked to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Brown, but the report correctly stated that he would be likely to refuse the appointment because of the rapidly developing possibility that he would be the Republican nominee for the Presidency the following year.
At this time Mr. Taft was all but impervious to any friendly advice which, being followed, would have tended to enhance his own political advantage. He was not playing politics for himself; he was attending strictly to business, fully imbued with the conviction that the public desired a continuation of the Administration as it stood. Mr. Roosevelt’s personal popularity could not be denied nor in any way belittled, but he had already announced that he was not a candidate for a third term, and all over the country the party was organising to support Mr. Taft, while a number of other names were prominently mentioned as “possibilities.” Mr. Roosevelt had assured my husband that he could count on his support, and he also urged him to lose no opportunity to give personal encouragement and impetus to the campaign that was being started in his behalf. But Mr. Taft paid very little attention, and never did he cease to regard a Supreme Court appointment as vastly more desirable than the Presidency. If his letters of that period could be read it would readily be seen that he was a most difficult candidate for his loyal and eager supporters to manage.
About this time, in conversation with Mr. Roosevelt in respect to Mr. Taft’s candidacy, I got the impression that he was discouraged over my husband as a candidate because he had avoided cooperation with certain political organisations in the West, and, further, that Mr. Roosevelt
