William Howard Taft

by Peter Cates

William Howard Taft

The 27th former President William Howard Taft (1857-1930) had what might be considered the closest friendship possible with his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt. They more than frequently visited with each other, advised each other, encouraged each other, even rebuked each other.

Under Roosevelt, Taft served as Governor/General of the newly-annexed Philippines and, in a strange twist of fate, as Secretary of War at the same time; TR had so much faith in Taft that he used him as his personal roving ambassador at large (no pun intended with Taft’s well known obesity of over 300 pounds) and as a diplomatic mediator in setting up peace talks between the Russians and Japanese during their 1905 War.

When the 1908 Republican Convention occurred, Roosevelt, due to his own popularity with the voters, pretty much had control of its delegates, got his friend easily nominated as the front runner and a Republican president another four years in the White House, an achievement not to be achieved again until the Reagan/Bush years of 1980-1992.

An interesting anecdote in Christine Sadler’s 1963 book America’s First Ladies tells of a vicious blizzard of an ice storm that “tied up transportation all along the Atlantic coast, left thousands of inaugural visitors stranded on trains and roads leading into Washington, and temporarily halted the sending of telegrams. President Roosevelt said the storm was aimed at him and would abate when he got out of town, but Taft replied, ‘You’re wrong; it’s my storm. I always said it would be a cold day when I got to be president of the United States. ‘ ”

At the actual inauguration ceremony, Taft’s youngest son Charles brought along a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in case he was bored by his father’s speech; it proved to be a very interesting speech which 11-year-old Charles enjoyed immensely. The boy never even cracked his book and his father considered the boy’s attention a personal compliment.

Taft himself had always set his ambition on being Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court but his wife Helen (1861-1943) pushed him into politics and he lacked the will to resist her.

However, once in the White House, Taft, while still believing in Roosevelt’s policies, steered a more cautious middle ground between the traditional Republicans who detested Roosevelt’s aggressive “bull in a china shop” progressivism and the progressive Republicans who wished to continue where Roosevelt left off.

He also basically disliked the job, didn’t try very hard to achieve much and had an ultra-cautious Vice-President James Sherman (1855-1912) who made Taft seem like a radical progressive.

Meanwhile, the First Lady suffered a physical collapse and some paralysis of her facial muscles which left her an invalid most of the first year (She did eventually recover much of her health and lived to see oldest son Robert elected to the U.S. Senate in 1939.).

As mentioned in an earlier column, Taft lost in the three-way race of 1912 in which Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican vote and was quite happy to turn the White House over to Woodrow Wilson.

Finally in 1921, President Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) appointed Taft to his dream job as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court where he would do fine work, would swear in both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover as president in 1925 and 1929, respectively, and would retire in February 1930, one month before his death from a heart ailment at the age of 72.

Theodore Roosevelt

by Peter Cates

Theodore Roosevelt

As the 25th former President William McKinley was slowly dying in a bed chamber, in Buffalo, New York, of a gangrenous infection from Leon Czolgosz’s bullet, Vice-President Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919) was still vacationing with his family high up in the Adirondacks 400 miles due northeast in the Empire State, but felt the increasing urgency necessitated that he hurry to Buffalo.

The first seven hours of descent down the steep, slippery, curving trails to the trains were via horse and buggy, the driver instructed by his lone passenger to proceed at full speed.

This incident conveys the frequently much too brash boldness with which the first President Roosevelt proceeded through life. He was a total believer in the active strenuous life, both physically and intellectually.

Roosevelt could box, wrestle, hunt wild game and rope steers with expertise. He also mastered languages, speedred two or three books a day and wrote several highly acclaimed volumes of history.

I wrote in an earlier column of how McKinley and Roosevelt had a very wary relationship. Basically, it boiled down to McKinley having serious misgivings about Roosevelt’s much too brash boldness versus his own circumspect caution and consummate diplomacy in his career as a public servant; to the credit of both men, each believed in doing what was right.

There is a fascinating photo of President McKinley and Vice-President Roosevelt sitting together on the White House porch but neither one is smiling. Supposedly, McKinley, who had seen a lot of bloodshed as a Major in Civil War battles, was turned off by Roosevelt’s Rough Rider enthusiasm in seeing duty in the Spanish-American War while Roosevelt considered McKinley, according to biographer Edmund Morris, “a cold-blooded politician.”

President McKinley and Vice-President Roosevelt

I admit to a bias towards McKinley as a more decent human being the more I read about him, whereas Roosevelt has increasingly struck me as a combination of the bull in a china shop, personally enjoying upper class luxury and hobnobbing with his rich and famous friends while maybe pretending to have sympathy for the common man and being one himself.

But Roosevelt’s presidency did achieve much in the government trust busting and other such crusades. Health and safety standards in industry were enforced . Roosevelt fought for preservation of wilderness park lands, spearheaded the building of the Panama Canal, and mediated peace talks to end the 1905 war between Russia and Japan.

There have been hundreds of books written about Roosevelt. Years ago, I read Hermann Hagedorn’s 1954 The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, the author having been a close friend of TR and the family, and having access to droves of letters, journals and other archived materials. The book recounted much first hand knowledge about Roosevelt’s personality with his family and friends at home – Sagamore Hill being the mansion in Oyster Bay on the northernmost end of Long Island, New York, where he resided most of his adult years.

Alice Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s first wife Alice Lee (1861-1884) died two days after giving birth to a baby girl named Alice. She also died the same night as Roose­velt’s mother, a double tragedy that traumatized Roosevelt so much that he left his daughter in the care of his sister Anna and moved out west to the Dakota badlands to be a rancher for two years.

Edith Roosevelt

In 1886, he returned East and married Edith Carow (1861-1948) who gave birth to five children. She epitomized classy poise and dignity, displayed phenomenal gifts at managing five very rambunctious children and yet would join her husband and kids on horseback rides through the woods surrounding the Sagamore Hill estate.

She and stepdaughter Alice had a contentious relationship; she had known Alice’s mother and made a hurtful comment that, if her mother had lived, she would have eventually bored her father with her insipid personality.

However, daughter Alice could hold her own with the sharp tongue; she once summed up her father’s ego-driven need to be the center of attention everywhere: “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every christening.”

After leaving the White House in 1909, Roosevelt remained active in both public and private life. He hoped that his like-minded friend Howard Taft, whom he helped win the Republican nomination and presidency, would continue his policies but Taft became his own man.

In 1912, Roosevelt ran as an independent Bull Moose candidate against Taft, splitting the vote and giving the White House to Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.

All four Roosevelt sons served in World War I, inspiring much pride in their father but tragedy struck in mid-1918 when youngest son Quentin was killed in France at the age of 21.

After that Roosevelt basically lost his own will to live and died on January 6, 1919, of a heart ailment, at the age of 60.

William McKiinley

by Peter Cates

William McKinley

In a speech given at the Pan-American Exposition, in Buffalo, New York, on September 5, 1901, (one day before he was shot by the psychotic anarchist Leon Czolgosz), the 25th President William McKinley (1843-1901) stated that “Isolation is no longer possible or desirable….The period of exclusiveness is past.”

During his first term in office, McKinley would be faced with the challenges of the Spanish-American War in Cuba, an armed insurrection in the Philip­pines and the Boxer Rebellion in China ; and the annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Hawaiian Islands. But he showed gifts of leadership that were both firm and quietly unobtrusive.

His main political goal, one that had pre-occupied him since he was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1876 as a Republican from Ohio, was the protective tariff and, after an exhaustive study of its intricacies, concluded that protectionism benefitted both American industry and the working people, guarding them from the unregulated cheap foreign goods.

Within 14 years, his McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 attracted much criticism but gave Congressman McKinley additional fame throughout the country. The tariff imposed rather high rates on agricultural and manufactured products from abroad yet, strangely, raw sugar was not taxed.

Interestingly, a reciprocity agreement on the tariff provided elbow room for any sitting president to impose additional duties on goods from nations if they were extorting extra duties on our exports .

At the 1888 Republican Convention, McKinley attracted the attention of the multi-millionaire manufacturer Mark Hanna (1837-1904) whose strategic talents and personal wealth would help McKinley win the White House in 1896 and 1900. As with many such behind-the-scenes individuals, Hanna’s own rise to power would make a fascinating case study in the political science realm.

William McKinley Jr. was born January 29, 1843, in Niles, Ohio, to William (1807-1892) and Nancy Allison McKinley (1809-1897). Being the seventh of nine children, he had three brothers and five sisters. His father operated an iron foundry but the business started floundering when McKinley was attending Allegheny College, in Pennsylvania, necessitating his withdrawal to go to work as a schoolteacher and store clerk to help support the family.

When the Civil War started, McKinley joined the 23rd Ohio Regiment and moved up its ranks to the post of Major under the command of Rutherford B. Hayes, who called McKinley, because of his performance during some very bloody skirmishes, “one of the bravest and finest officers in the army.”

When the war ended, McKinley studied law, was admitted to the Ohio bar and shared a partnership in the city of Canton with an elderly judge who soon retired and handed over his practice to the younger man. He moved with assurance in society and soon became interested in politics, campaigning for his former commanding officer Hayes (who by now was a close friend) when the older man successfully ran for governor and later president.

As an eligible bachelor in Canton society, McKinley attracted the ladies but set his sights on the beautiful and well-connected Ida Saxton (1847-1907) who was quite attracted to the young lawyer in return.

They married in January 1871, and a baby girl, Katherine, was born on Christmas Day of that year. They were a very happy and financially prosperous couple with a wonderful future in the works.

But then tragedy struck . Just before their second daughter was born in 1873, Ida’s mother, to whom she had been very close, died; the baby girl, also named Ida, was born but only lived a few months; and finally in 1875, their daughter Katherine died at the age of four from typhoid.

Already having suffered a physical and mental breakdown when she lost her mother and baby daughter, Ida had taken great comfort in Katherine and might have recovered most of her health, but losing Katherine, too, resulted in Ida being an invalid for the rest of her life, clinging to her husband with brief periods of remission during which she went to social gatherings with him. Among the ailments were epilepsy and later phlebitis.

One of her hobbies was crocheting bedroom slippers and she made several thousand pairs .

She and her husband also opened their homes to children from both sides of the track who needed a place to stay during daylight hours and always provided them with lunch, both when residing in Canton and later in Washington D.C., on up to and including the White House years, and she became known as “Auntie McKinley.” It was believed by friends and family as a way of sublimating her grief at the loss of her daughters by giving attention and affection to other children who needed it.

However, she did encourage her husband’s political career even as she was totally dependent on him.

For reasons of space, I now move to the aftermath of when McKinley was shot by Czolgosz on September 6, 1901. The president was beginning to improve a few days later but then gangrene set in around the wound in his stomach and McKinley died on September 14, his wife by his side and his last words to her were those of a favorite hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee, Nearer to Thee.”

Leon Czolgosz was tried quickly and sentenced to death in the electric chair on October 29, six weeks after McKinley’s death.
McKinley’s first vice-president was Garret Hobart (1834-1899), a very shrewd New Jersey lawyer and politician who became a very close friend while in office but he died before the first term ended.

At the 1900 Convention, McKinley allowed its leaders to pick his running mate, Theodore Roosevelt; McKinley accepted him but the two men had a wary dislike for each other.

Then fate intervened and Teddy was president until 1909, when he was succeeded by his own hand-picked choice, William Howard Taft, their stories for later.

Benjamin Harrison with his Secretary of State, Maine’s James G. Blaine, and Representative Henry Cabot Lodge on a ship off the coast of Maine.

by Peter Cates

Benjamin Harrison

The 23rd former President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) was the grandson of the 9th former President William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) and great-grandson of Benjamin Harrison (1726-1791), one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Like his predecessor/successor Grover Cleveland, Harrison was unwaveringly honest. Unlike Cleveland, he was a believer in the protectionist tariff system on imports, to benefit both agriculture and industry, and in decent pensions for Civil War veterans, particularly the disabled, and their widows, which Cleveland fought against tooth and nail.

(Harrison also championed voting rights and education for African Americans, which made zero minus headway with both parties, the 1880s and ’90s being known as the “Period of No Decision; ” anything to do with any rights for African-Americans was considered highly toxic.)

Unfortunately, Harrison had a stodgy colorless personality and could be very aloof, which didn’t serve him well while in office while also antagonizing a number of fellow Republicans.

He was also a fervently religious Presbyterian and led the family in daily Bible studies and prayers during the breakfast hour, with a tendency to give credit for any political success to Providence.

Harrison’s vice-president was New York representative Levi P. Morton (1824-1920) who, after Harrison lost his re-election bid, would become governor of his home state.

Harrison’s Secretary of State was our own James G. Blaine until he resigned due to ill health in 1892. (Blaine was a very close friend of Andrew Carnegie and stayed with the multi-millionaire at his castle in Scotland for several weeks in 1888.)

Benjamin Harrison was born on a North Bend, Ohio, farm to John Scott Harrison and his second wife Elizabeth. He had five brothers, two sisters and two half-sisters.

Harrison was married twice – first in 1853 to the former Caroline Scott (1832-1892) who gave him a son and a daughter; who was the opposite of Harrison in personality and made many friends with her warmth and generosity; and with whom he remained deeply in love for the almost 40 years they were married before she died of tuberculosis.

In 1896, Harrison married Caroline’s niece, a young widow Mary Scott Lord Dimmick (1858-1948) who was the same age as Harrison’s daughter and two years younger than his son. Both of them, objecting strenuously to the marriage, refused to attend the ceremony. The second Mrs. Harrison gave birth to another daughter a year after the marriage.

In early 1901, Harrison contracted influenza and died on March 13, at the age of 67.

Two very enjoyable 12-inch 78 shellac discs:

Frederick Stock (1872-1942) served the longest as music director of the Chicago Symphony for 37 years until his death at 70. The Victrola Red Seal #6579 features Stock’s vibrantly alive conducting of the Sibelius Valse Triste, Volkmann Serenade and Rimsky-Korsakov Flight of the Bumblebee, all three pieces then well-known light classics.

Meanwhile Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) served, by comparison, a mere 26 years from 1912 to 1938 as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra before handing over the reins to Eugene Ormandy whose tenure – 1938 to 1980 – would surpass Stokowski’s. A 1930s RCA Victor Red Seal #14472 has an intensely lavish and colorful performance of another light classic, the Liszt 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. I also have a 1940s Columbia Masterworks 78 rpm of the same piece with the Philadelphians conducted by Ormandy which is differently colorful from Stokowski’s.

Grover Cleveland

by Peter Cates

Grover Cleveland

The 22nd/24th former President Stephen Grover Cleveland achieved distinction in three ways during his years in the White House:

1. He was the only Democrat to be elected president since James Buchanan’s one term ended in 1861 and would remain so until 1913 when the Democrat Thomas Woodrow Wilson would defeat both Republican William Howard Taft in his bid for re-election and Taft’s predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, who had bolted the Republican party and ran as an independent Bull Moose candidate.

2. Cleveland remains the only president to serve two split terms, first from 1885 to 1889 only to be defeated by the Republican Benjamin Harrison ; and then to defeat Harrison in the latter’s re-election bid and again serve from 1893 to 1897.

3. He was stubbornly, abrasively, incorrigibly honest, not giving a hoot about his own political interests, let alone pleasing others; he earned the honorary epithets “Ugly-honest” and “His Obstinacy!”

Cleveland was born in Caldwell, New Jersey, March 18th, 1837, to a Presbyterian minister, Richard Falley Cleveland (1804-1853), and his wife, the former Ann Neal (1806-1882), and had three brothers and five sisters.

When Rev. Cleveland was appointed district secretary for the American Home Mission Society, he relocated the family to New York State, which Cleveland himself would consider his home base for most of his working adult life.

He taught at a New York City school for the blind, moved to Buffalo where he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1859, became a ward supervisor, assistant district attorney and sheriff of Erie County, mayor of Buffalo and finally governor of New York before winning the presidency.

As sheriff, Cleveland personally pulled the lever at the hangings of two convicted killers.

During the horrible 1880s of corruption in the country when the rich kept getting richer and buying up just about every official in government, one historian remarked that “the Standard Oil Company has done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it.”

Despite the rampant political criminality versus Cleveland’s refusal to wheel and deal in his frequently cursed honesty and independence, honest people in high places sought him out and his rise in public life began its ascendancy. As mayor, governor and president, he cut much fraud and waste with his own reforms and reduced tariffs.

But he did at times make mistakes, perhaps the greatest one being his appointment of a hard-nosed Attorney General Richard Olney , who in turn used harsh measures in cracking down on unemployed workers and strikers against the Pullman Railroad and Standard Oil.

In 1886, the 49-year-old bachelor married 21-year-old Frances Folsom, the daughter of one of his Buffalo law partners who had died 11 years earlier and of whom Cleveland had been a guardian for both her and her widowed mother. Married life softened Cleveland’s personality considerably. The couple had three daughters and two sons.

Cleveland had two vice-presidents – Indiana Senator Thomas A. Hendricks (1819-1885) who died shortly after taking office; and, during the second term, Illinois Representative Adlai Stevenson (1834-1914) who was the grandfather of the more famous opponent of Dwight D. Eisenhower twice for the White House and later appointed by John F. Kennedy as Ambassador to the United Nations.

An addendum:

Cleveland’s Republican opponent in 1884 was Maine’s own James G. Blaine who, as Speaker of the House, had engaged in suspicious sales of some railroad stocks and bonds.

The campaign became one of vicious mud-slinging with Democrats singing “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine/The continental liar from the State of Maine!”

Then Republican operatives found a woman, Mrs. Maria Halpin, who stated that Cleveland had fathered her illegitimate son.

He accepted responsibility and, when his advisors inquired as to how they should respond, simply replied, “Tell the truth.”

Now the Republicans jeered, “Ma! Ma! Where’s my Pa?/Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

After leaving the White House in 1897, Cleveland moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he served on the University board of trustees and wrote the occasional article for Saturday Evening Post.

Grover Cleveland’s health declined during his last two or three years and he died of a heart attack on June 24, 1908, at the age of 71.

His widow outlived him by 39 years and died at the age of 83 in 1947. Except for the couple’s oldest child Ruth, who died at 13 in 1904, the remaining four children outlived both parents.

A personal note: the Nobleboro, Maine, author Elizabeth Coatsworth and her husband Henry Beston visited my grandmother annually for dinner over a period of years. She was a native of Buffalo and a cousin of Frances Folsom Cleveland.

Another cousin, Amelia Folsom, was one of Brigham Young’s 27 wives.