Concerning the New American President

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 21, 18 November 1908, Page 34

Concerning the New American President

A Discursive and Descriptive Life Story of the Uncrowned King of the United States of America

Condensed from the brilliant article by

WILLIAM ALLAN WHITE

in the

“American Magazine.”

The Tafts are the kind of people who most of their lives have lived in a house of nine rooms, on an income ranging from two to six thousand dollars a year, with one or two servants, a horse and buggy, and a child at college. The independence of America is in that class. For the man who does not need a valet Is not much awed by a king. If Taft should be made President of this Republic he would never cease to be in the heart of him a. strap hanger, a commuter, not of the city, with its crass wealth and biting poverty, nor of the country—but a suburban president .the first of his type. NOT WILLIAM OR WILL OR WILLIE OR BILL. Often an illuminating squint at a man may be had by looking at his boyhood. In his early teens he resembled the type of tall, rawboned, lubberly, squeakyvoiced, milky-eyed, shock-headed, bigfooted boy who laughs at himself more than at anyone else; and Taft’s whole boyhood career is epitomised in the fact that a dozen or so of men now in their late forties and early fifties scattered over this planet remember the Honorable Secretary of War, not as William, not even as Will, certainly not as Willie, and not as Bill, but as "old Bill” Taft. When he entered Yale, where his father had been a student before him, young Taft, in spite of the fact that his father was a member of Grant’s Cabinet at the time, still remained “old Bill.” He didn’t let his father’s honours bother him, but in school went after his own honours. Aud. he did that job well, finished it up, rounded it off, put in good measure, and quit the second man in a class of 120 boys. That was his effectiveness showing itself. Five generations of Yankee ancestors—-hard-working, painstaking, efficient and quick-witted—were bred into him, and blood told, so he went into life with the desk cleared. He worked on the newspapers as court reporter, studied law. and accumulated some degrees and some honours in studying it. and —with his father’s prestige to start upon—went into polities in Cincinnati. He knew the gang

ami worked with it when he could, and against it when he hail to. But he was hail-fellow with every one- good people and l>ad people, lie was so diligent that he was hired by the county prosecutor as .in assistant when he was 21. As a re|suter in his late teens, he had helped a young man to be prosecuting attorney by pushing a light on a crooked attorney, and the young man made Ta ft' his assist ant. When he was 23 he was far enough along in Cincinnati polities to be made collector of internal revenue, as a compromise candidate, at Congressman Renju min Butterworth’s suggestion, without applying for the place; but as the job was a mere money-getting job, paving

about ten thousand a year, he gave it up. His father was a lawyer, and his father’s father was a lawyer; the race was a race of gentlemen, not of moneymakers, and young Taft instinctively slipped back into the law. He had no faith in money as a generator of power. It was not in his blood. So when he married the sweetheart of his youth, he was practising law, and was probably good for something over SIOO a month to keep the wolf from the door. A GLUTTON FOR WORK. In those days he was a hulking sixfooter. just under 30, moon-faced, goodnatured. who threw off work by the ton.

without sweating, but with that merry heart that maketh a glad countenance. Imidently, lie had a fighting record. He had ground a blackmailer’s face into the sidewalk for libelling Judge Taft; he had w hipped a ward heeler for intimidating voters at the primaries, and he haa taken a ward boss by the scruff of the neck and the reef of his trousers, paid had literally thrown him out of a convention. He had but one weakness for a politician—work. He kept his docket clean. His traces never scraped the wheel: his shoulders always were in the collar, and withal he never turned a hair. Work was his whisky, his cards, his revelry by night. If he had ever set

out to sow wild oats he would have harvested them by the car-load. But he sowed no wild oats, and turned into his thirties a clean-skinned, dear-eyed, sharpbrained, hard-muscled, soft-hearted, wellread, well-bred young gentleman, whom the younger men were pointing to with some pride, and their ambitious elders, seeing him climb, were viewing with some alarm. Then, in 1890, Benjamin Harrison, being President, made young Mr Taft, aged solicitor-general of the United States, and he had a man’s work on his desk when he sat down to it. But the yellow moustache of youth shaded a firm, strong mouth, and the blue eyes were awash with visions that sometimes flooded through them into the world about him, and the moon-face of adolescence was growing sturdy and full of character. HOW TAFT AND ROOSEVELT MET. But the most important thing that came into the life of Solicitor-General Taft in Washington was not his legal victories. They wo-e incidents the day’s work. He was 33 years old, and, as they say, “young for his age.” Youth was still afire in him, and the interstices of his mind were waxen. So when in knocking about Washington young Taft, living in the real world of ideals, and scorning the dream world of material things, met a short, stockv. bull-necked, hfgh-souled young man with the Harvard pickle nearly washed off his mind—a civil service commissioner. Theodore Roosevelt by name, as full of energy as a newly wound clock—the stars of two destinies hitched up a notch in their orbits and prepared for a long parallel journey. Never were men who were basicly one so entirely antipodal in their expression of the same ideals. Externally. Taft is everything that Roosevelt is not. Taft begins each day by a weary, painful, perfunctory, half-hour of gymnastic pvrations—a kind of canned exercise—which, having been opened amd devoured, finishes his physical duty for tTic day. Roosevelt takes his exercise in the open, with the jov of a satyr in it. Roosevelt's mental processes are quick, intuitive, and -sure. Until he has made up his mind 'he is a most ooen-minded person. Taft works it out. He is never too sure to receive new evidence. Taft grapples a proposition, wrestles with it without resting and without fatigue until it is settled or solved. His joy i« found at the end of the road. Roosevelt’s joy is found in many, roads.

He Wearies of monotony, and keeps divers interests in his mind, many things to employ him under the head of unfinished business. If Providence is slow in sending wars and rumours of wars—what ho, for the nature fakers! Let us be Up and doing. Roosevelt has a marvellous moral sense; he has a detective’s nose for finding iniquity in measures. Taft has a prodigious capacity for hard, consecutive work and an instinct for evidence founded on a broad, charitable affection for men, whom he knows as a hunter knows his dogs; and Taft finds the right of things, as Roosevelt find's it, but by a different path. Taft enjoys his meals. Roosevelt, absorbed in work or play, would eat hay and not know it. With Roosevelt culture is like bear-hunting, trust-fighting, muckraking or fence-jumping, a rampant, gorgeous reaction upon his insatiable soul. With Taft culture is a sweet, indefinable mental and moral digestant tincture that colours his soul’s eyes so that he may see a delightful world; or, to change the figure, it is an easy garment, a sort of drapery of his spiritual couch, which he wraps about him and lies down to “pleasant dreams.” He has read widely —- though not so widely as Roosevelt probably. To find' that Taft has read a certain book pleases but does not amaze one. Yet the two men are fundamentally of the same stuff, of the same mind and of the same heart, and when in Washington in those early days of the nineties Taft and Roosevelt loafed together and invited their souls, they established one of those strong friendships that may be established only by men whose exteriors form such antipathetical sutures that they unite by a spiritual affinity. Both of them scorned money. Neither cared for the thing known as society. Each knew the vanity of the thing called power, and, with all their hearts they despised the selfish, sordid, greedy, money getting tendency of the times. Each was the complement of the other. Taft gave Roosevelt poise. Roosevelt fired the soul of Taft. No other friendship in our modern politics has meant more to the American people than has this youthful attachment of William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, for it lias made two most im-

portant and devoted public servants wiser, kindlier, more useful men. PRESIDENT HARRISON’S DISLIKE OR ROOSEVELT. It is curious how men so similar at heart can affect other men so differently. Whenever Commissioner Roosevelt of the Civil Service came into President Harrison’s room on official business, the pre cise, punctilious little president would begin drumming on the table nervously and show in a number of ways his impatient

irritation at the length of the interview, however short it might be. Yet so greatly did he admire Solicitor Tait, who believed in the same thing that Roosevelt believed in. and was working toward ex actly the same end, that President Harrison promoted Solicitor Taft to a judgeship in the United States Circuit Court — an honour rarely conferred upon so young a man and a distinction which marked him as a man among ten thousand at the American bar. So with the spring of youth still in his step, a firm, hard, masculine step, your.ig

Judge Taft went into his life’s work. Thirty-live is rather young for a man to sit in a Court, but one remove from the highest Court in his country. It was said of him that he lacked dignity; that he laughed too easily; that he romped with his wife and 'babies too much, and that—horrible dictu!—he hummed and whistled at his work in his office, and surrounded himself with no ceremonious outer guards, but worked by an open door. His blond moustache, his merry blue eyes, his heavy mop of dark-brown

hair, and the cherubic look on his big face, conspired with his soft, sibilant, self-deprecatory voice to create the impression that he was like the good aster of the song, “Mild and lovely, gentle as the summer breeze”; and so in the Debs strike of 1894 a labour leader named Phelan came down to Cincinnati to call the boys out on a railroad 'which, for the moment, was in Judge Taft’s Court in a receivership. It looked like an easy proposition. Here was tlie whole Mississippi Valley paralysed by a strike of railroad employees, who had the

country terrorised. No judge among all the graybeards on the Bench had reached out an effective hand to stop the spread of disorder. And Phelaai took a casual glance at the youthful-looking person on the Circuit Bench, and after the Court hail enjoined Phelan from inciting the men to strike, he held a meeting, defied the Court, and called out the boys. But Phelan made a bad guess, and went to gaol for contempt of Court, as a result of that casual glance at the young judge, who whistled in his office. Phelan overlooked the jaw, a broad, hard, canine feature, well upholstered in adipose, but still a powerful lever that did not budge under pressure. Judge Taft gave Phelan a trial. Having heard the evidence, the judge announced that he would render his decision at noon on the fourth day thereafter.

As the second and third day passed, the forces of disorder attempted to terrorise the judge. Feeling grew bitter, and the judge’s friends urged him to defer his decision; or to postpone the reading of the decision; or to let it be read and absent himself from court—ai least to have a bodyguard. But Taft and his stenographer worked on. All the night of the third day he spent on his decision, going over it and over itThe stenographer wearied toward morning, and the judge went on alone. At half-past nine of the fourth morning the stenographer came back, and the two worked until noon. A great crowd had assembled in the court-room. There was danger in the air. Judge Taft, with the bland smile still on his cherubic face, mounted to the bench and read the de eision which sent Phelan to jail. As he read, the fires of just wrath began to glow in the judge’s eyes, and colour began to flame in his faee. As he finished he addressed the sullen crowd before him, and his voice rang out in a clear challenge like the blast from a horn. “When you leave this room I want you to go with the conviction that if there is any power in the army of the United States to run these trains, these trains will run,” and the big iron fist banged on the bench, and the man of wrath looked into the faces of those who had threatened him, and they saw their

master. The judge rose, strode to his room, and the crowd melted silently away. He had stood the test. Moral courage, backed by physical courage, had been welded into his soul.

Three limes in his judicial career was Judge Taft compelled by the evidence and°the law lo decide against organised labour. Ami not once did he flinch. For eight years Judge Taft sat on the federal bench, and just when it seemed that the time was ripe for his promotion to the supreme bench of the I nited States —the goal of his life's ambition he was called away from his work, and the course of his life was changed. It was in 1900 that President McKinley called Judge Taft to Washington, and begged him to accept the presidency of the Philippine Commission. The Judge frankly protested that he had not believed in holding the Philippines, and that he wa> not the man to send to govern them, even if he had come to feel a duty toward the Filipinos as wards of the nation. But McKinley prevailed prevailed even over Judge Taft’s further protest, that his ambition was judicial and not executive—by replying: “You will make a better Supreme Court judge for having served on this commission than you will make if you remain on the circuit bench.” So McKinley sent Taft to the Philippines. Now it is really more significant for the uses of this narrative to vote that McKinley sent Taft to the Philippines than to set down the fact that he went there; for McKinley’s greatest strength as a public man was his in fallible judgment of num. He chose nicr. for tasks with an intuition that was marvellous considering the obvious limitations of McKinley in other directions. McKinley's greatest heritage to his country piobably will be found to be the men he chose as public servants, men like* Roosevelt and Root and Taft and Knox, and Hanna with all his intensely human faults. Without these men and the public service they have done since McKinley’s defeat, the country would be much behind its present progress. And the fact that McKinley, living in the Stat ■ where Taft had grown up and done his greatest service, chose him for the most, important office in the president’s gift that last year of the passing century, is even a greater compliment to Taft, and a surer index to his sturdy character, than is the manifest fact that President Roosevelt prefers Taft to all other candidates as the next president of this Re public. For Roosevelt knows measures infinitely better than be knows men. Taft’s work in the Philippines was that of the benevolent despot. He went without let or hindrance. 11 is job was somewhat judicial, more or less legislative, and largely administrative. A man is a remarkable man who can spend his whole life in legal work holding positions largely judicial, and Hum step without faltering or stumbling into a place requiring rare executive ability and extraordinary executive skill. Only a man of genius could do it, and when one reflects that genius is the capacity for hard work, one sees

how Taft did it; one understands why be succeeded, and why McKinley knew that Taft could do the work. Then Taft came back to serve in the cabinet of the young man who had walked and talked and worked with him a dozen years before. They never let their friend ship grow stale. And twice while Taft was in the Philippines did he refuse the offer of a place in the Supreme Court

which Roosevelt tendered, because Taft believed that the Filipinos needed him as governor worse than the Supreme Court needed him as judge. And when he got home after his four years’ w r ork, all that he had to show in material goods for nearly fifty years of life was fifteen hundred dollars in money and a good name. Yet he went whistling to bis work, happy in the belief that he had done something in the world that monev could not do.

and that he was worth more, to his country and to his family than if he had set himself to make money and do good with it. lie set to work digging the Isthmian canal as cheerfully as a boy builds a dam across a brook. It was not judicial work. H’s ambition still lay in another direction. but again, the third tinra when he could have satisfied that ambition to go on the supreme bench, he squinted up his eyes, took the case under advisement and handed down an opinion against himself and for the work in hand. Trouble in Cuba came, and he humped himself under

it, and carried it, feeling its thanklessness, its hopelessness, and its galling burden the while, but laughing through it all. and working overtime at the miserable business. And now we have a rounded, full-grown man of fifty more or less, with a streak of grey in his blond moustache, with a thin patch in his brown hair, with a firm, manly stride, with rather a husky, soft-spoken drawl, with blue eyes sometimes vaguely dimmed by moisture; he is a man with a large face from which the cherubs have been driven by care, though

they peak out occasionally through the cracks of his smiles. It is not the benign face of meditative inaction, but the kind, charitable face of the man who has work ed with men, ami found them for the most part good. The body of this man is six feet high and more, still unbent, still with some reminiscences of youth in it. The skin of the face and hands is fresh and unwrinkled, and tells of a clean, wellregulated life. And the whole creature, soul and body, each visible in the natural, unaffected expression of the figure, seems to tell a straight, simple, direct story of a strong, kindly, gentle, hearty, highly cultivated man. “Old Bill” has gone, and a rather serious man has come into his kingdom—a man who has quick hum our, but little malice in his wit, a dillident man, who sighs sometimes and smiles sometimes when no one is talking, and who at rare intervals and early in the morning will whistle if he is alone. What kind of a president, all things considered, will he make? That, after all, is the reason why this article was written. If its facts are passably correct, one may deduce certain things from

them. Assuming that the facts herein l»efore set down are correct, it is obvious that first of all we may expect a president who will work hard for he has but two meals a day and toils without rest ing from ten until six every day; then we may expect that he will work hard with a kind, self-effacing spirit, then that he will work hard unselfishly and without much initiative. For he has rarely gone from beaten paths, though lit* has shown that he can go alone. The great things he has done in this world have been done at the desk. IL* is “no orator as Brutus is.” He wdl -ay little and do much. But what is then* to do? That is important in considering his relation to the presidency. In tin* first place, in the executive department of this Government there is much unfinished business—begun with entire propriety and in the fire of the heart, but still only begun. Then* an* a dozen and mon* great epoch-mak-ing law-suits pending mostly in federal courts of the first instance which must be pushed through by tin* executive department to a successful adjudication by the Supreme Court before certain laws

may Im* enforced. We have statutes but little law upon the great vital questions now l>efore the American people for first settlement. The railroad law is an undigested statute, new and raw an*l not entirely understood, certainly not entirely adjusted to our commercial life. The Sherman law, which Judge l a It’s opinion revived and reinforced, still lacks much of being a perfect statute. Many of its provisions literally and maliciously enforced would work more harm than good. The Pure Food law is still in the making before the courts. The Panama Canal is only well begun. Our relations with Cuba loom big on the horizon, unsettled and portentous, and even with our insular possessions relations have assumed no timeworn security. There is enough unfinished bus.ne.Ns in the executive branch of this government to keep an active man in the presidential office busy light ami day for half a dozen years, if he does nothing else. Indeed, the most rapid pngress towards a more equitable distiihution of the common wealth of thi< nation may be secured not by piling up new work on the executive desk, but by cleaning oil the desk. The times demand not a man bearing promises of new things, but a man who can finish the thing begun. Such a ma.i is Taft, a hewer of wood, who has no ambition to link his name with new measures, but who, with a steady hand, a lid a heart always kind and a mind always generously just, can clean off the desk. He knows the desk is cluttered up. He knows that it may take six or eight sears merely to get down to the mahogany under things now pending. But the American people know that some way this must be done before this nation can go further. And hence, in the Mississippi valley at least, there is a belief that the man who can make the Hepburn railroad law as much a part of our common life as the postal regulations, who can grind the rough edges off the Sherman law through tin* courts, who can finish the canal, and deal with Cuba kindly, honestly and firmly, who can lead the brown men of the islands further into the light, is this big hard-working soft-hearted, fair-minded, unselfish man, Taft. He can clean off the desk.