Recollections of Full Years

and become their guest. At Berlin we had just time to dine with the American Ambassador and Mrs. Tower, and to meet a few American friends whom they had invited in, then Mr. Taft and the other members of the party went to Hamburg to take the Steamship General Grant at that port, while I, with Mrs. Post Wheeler, rushed down to Paris to do a few hours’ shopping, planning to join the Grant at Boulogne the next evening. In the meantime a terrible storm began to rage along the coast, and when we reached Boulogne there was some question about our being able to get to the Grant which lay at anchor just outside the breakwater. However, we boarded the little tender and she started for the very wild looking open channel. She had no sooner struck the heavy seas before she had broken her rudder and was being buffeted about in a really terrifying manner. We managed in some way to get back inside the breakwater where some repairs were made, then we started out again. We repeated this performance several times, listening meanwhile to generally voiced predictions that nothing on earth could save us from going to the bottom, and, although it was only nine o’clock in the evening when we boarded the little vessel, it was four o’clock in the morning before she came alongside the Grant and discharged her dilapidated and exhausted passengers.

Mr. Taft had waited up for us and had seen the tender come out of the harbour and go back, and, assuming from what was told him that no attempt would be made to transfer the passengers before morning, he went to bed. When I got aboard the steamer, filled with excitement over the dangers through which I had passed, and found him peacefully sleeping in his cabin, I declined to accept any explanation. A French sub-prefect, who had been sent out by the Minister of the Interior of France with greetings and compliments, and who had come in his full regimentals with a cocked hat, was waiting to see Mr. Taft and I was cruel enough to insist that he should get up and receive him. Throwing a long fur coat over his pajamas the Secretary of War of the United States walked out into the salon to meet the polite representative of the politest of peoples, but after a grave exchange of formal salutations the situation proved too much for their gravity. They burst out laughing at each other, to the immense enjoyment of the bystanders, and the gloom of the wee sma’ hour was lifted.

When we touched at Plymouth that afternoon we received a despatch announcing the death of Mr. Taft’s mother. The funeral took place in Cincinnati, at the home of Mr. Charles Taft, several days before we could reach New York.

On our return to the United States we found that my husband’s rivals for the Republican nomination had been making great headway. Mr. Roosevelt was quite impatient at the loss of ground that Mr. Taft’s candidacy had suffered and he urged him to take a more active interest in the situation. He insisted that Mr. Taft should change the subject of a speech which he had agreed to deliver in Boston from the Philippine problem to a discussion of the financial situation which was then acute after the depression which had taken place during our absence. Mr. Roosevelt’s forcible expression was that the business and political public had no more interest in the Philippines than in the subject of “nature faking.”

I cannot go into the details of the preliminary convention fight. My husband’s brother Charles devoted a full year to it, established headquarters in Ohio and Washington, and bore the brunt of the contest. The afternoon of the convention when the voting came, we all assembled at my husband’s office in the War Department and received the news over the telephone as it came in. I have a series of photographs, taken by a friend, of the expressions on my husband’s face as the results of the voting were being announced. Soon after the nomination was made, on the first of July Mr. Taft resigned from the Cabinet, and we established ourselves at Hot Springs, Virginia, where he spent some weeks preparing his address of acceptance. This he submitted to Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Root before he went to Cincinnati to deliver it. Mr. Charles Taft made elaborate preparations to receive and entertain the Committee of Announcement, and on a platform in front of his fine old house, in Pike Street, on one of the hottest days of the summer, my husband delivered his acceptance. We then returned to Hot Springs and spent another month in preparation for the campaign. From Hot Springs we went to Middle Bass Island on Lake Erie to spend a week or more there. We then went to Cincinnati. Upon this latter trip Mr. Taft made a good many speeches from the platform of our car. In September Mr. Bryan’s campaign looked very hopeful. The opposition of Mr. Gompers and organised labour seemed formidable. Mr. Taft determined to meet this issue fully and frankly. He was attacked because he had delivered a number of labour decisions supposed to be against the interest of labour. He had sent to jail, for six months, the chief lieutenant of Debs in the Debs railway rebellion of 1894, breaking it up in Cincinnati and the vicinity. He did not apologise in any way for the action he had taken. A meeting of the railway trade organisations was called in Chicago at Orchestra Hall, and there he explained his action, defended it, and avowed that were the same questions presented to him again, he would do the same thing he had done, and that he had no excuses to offer. From that point he made a long trip in the West, upon which I did not accompany him. I remained in Cincinnati with