The military, Taft sorrowfully reflected, was determined to treat the Filipinos as “niggers.” Nellie shared his dismay. “It is a great mistake to treat them as if they were inferiors,” she told her husband, “and it really surprises me that the powers that be do not insist upon a different policy.” Nellie deplored MacArthur’s refusal to entertain anyone in the palace “except a select military circle,” and condemned his abhorrence of “even small gestures of social equality among the different races in the Philippines.”
In defiance of the established order, Nellie “made it a rule from the beginning that neither politics nor race should influence [their] hospitality in any way.” Though her dining room seated only twelve in comfort, she could host parties for hundreds of people in her spacious garden. “We always had an orchestra,” she recalled, “and the music added greatly to the festive air of things, which was enhanced too, by a certain oriental atmosphere, with many Japanese lanterns and a profusion of potted plants.” While Nellie’s insistence “upon complete racial equality” marked a spirit of tolerance far ahead of military attitudes, her guest lists were nonetheless drawn from a narrow segment of the population—educated Filipinos of “wealth and position”—the very class Taft hoped to enlist in the new government.
Although Taft’s annual salary of $17,500 was more than he had ever earned, he had to pay his own considerable expenses and could barely sustain his household and lifestyle. Once again, his brother Charley came to his rescue, sending an unexpected $2,500 check. “To say that I was overcome and struck dumb by your generous present is inadequate,” Will responded. “Nothing ever diminishes the ardor and enthusiasm of your loyalty to the family.” Nellie, too, committed her resources to further her husband’s goals, spending a small inheritance she had received to pay for receptions and dinners.
Meanwhile, the Philippine Commission made steady progress. The members revised the Spanish tax code, which had burdened the poor while “giving [the] wealthy comparative immunity.” They built a series of schools throughout the islands and brought five hundred recent college graduates from America as teachers. These idealistic young educators, deemed by one historian “precursors of the Peace Corps,” arrived carrying “baseball bats, tennis rackets, musical instruments, cameras and binoculars.” Under Taft’s guidance, the commission built roads, railways, and hospitals, improved harbors and ports, and instituted extensive legal reforms.
Nellie worked side by side with her husband. Upon arrival, he had encouraged her to “enter upon some work of public importance like the organization of a Philippine Orchestra and Philippine bands.” She needed no further prompting. Drawing on her love of music and organizational experience, she helped create the Philippine Constabulary Band. Led by an African-American captain, comprised of musicians from all over the islands, the celebrated band would achieve international renown and win a coveted prize at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. While Taft worked on regulatory measures to improve sanitation, Nellie decided her personal cause should be the reduction of infant mortality in Manila. To that end, she instituted an educational campaign on good nutrition and launched a highly successful program to provide the city’s children with sterilized milk, a campaign credited with saving many lives. In all her endeavors, she advocated respect for the native culture. When the Army engineers, “in the interest of efficiency and sanitation,” threatened to demolish “the medieval walls of the old city of Manila,” Nellie successfully campaigned to protect this cherished historical monument.
Taft was immensely proud of his wife. He likened her activism to that of Lady Curzon, who had accompanied her husband to India and achieved worldwide fame for championing women’s health. On the eve of their fourteenth anniversary, Will gave Nellie a handwritten note. “I wish to record the fact that it was the most fortunate [day] of my life and every year only confirms me more strongly in that opinion,” he wrote. “Every year I feel more dependent on you . . . and every year, my darling, I love you more.” Nellie had never been happier. She had welcomed her new living situation “with undisguised surprise and pleasure.” The children flourished in their new environment. Bob and Helen were enrolled in one of the new public schools, where they had met “congenial companions.” In the evenings and on weekends, they lived outside. In the year-round warm weather, they raced their little ponies on the Luneta, the public stretch of sandy beach bounded on both ends by bandstands, where “everybody in the world came and drove around and around the oval, exchanging greetings and gossip.” Two-year-old Charlie, nicknamed “the tornado” for his high-spirited whirl of activity, was petted and simply adored.
Each passing month bolstered Taft’s confidence. His judicial training proved indispensable as he labored to draft legislation and regulations. His kind generosity and inclusive style of leadership won the regard of his fellow commissioners. The Filipino people, too, were attracted to the warmth of his personality and his willingness to embrace the native culture. After much practice and intent studying of a diagram indicating the various movements, he and Nellie learned to execute the rigodon, the complicated national dance of the Philippines, “an old fashioned quadrille” that required “graceful and somewhat intricate but stately figures.” Observing Taft’s impressively large frame, spectators marveled at his surprising agility. This gentle giant, one reporter noted, attended scores of state balls, “literally dancing and smiling his way into the hearts of the people.” Indeed, his “unusual size,” which required a double rickshaw, created an aura of “superiority.”
As Taft became better acquainted with the people of the Philippines, he grew increasingly confident that he would deliver “a good government” and “prosperous” economy to the islands. While he doubted that independence could soon be granted to an illiterate, and in his words, an “ignorant, superstitious people,” he trusted that the enlightened colonial rule of the United States would gradually prepare them for self-government. His success depended on McKinley’s election, which would ensure consistent support as he constructed new political, educational, and economic institutions. “Not that I am an expansionist,” he told a friend, “for I have not changed my mind on that general subject, but only that in the situation into which events have forced us, the Democratic policy of abandonment of these Islands was impossible.”
Taft was tremendously heartened by the news of Roosevelt’s vice-presidential nomination. The administration had “a good deal to carry” after being in power for four years, he told his brother Charles. Mistakes had “doubtless” been made, and the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, still enjoyed a formidable following among the working class. Roosevelt’s name on the ticket, he explained, added “a following of hero worshippers who [would] give life and vitality to the campaign.” Charles agreed, hopeful that Roosevelt would “draw in line all the younger element of the country.”
“I could wish that you had continued Governor of New York to do the work thoroughly you have so well begun,” Taft told Roosevelt after the Republican National Convention, “but the national election is the more important and you were right to make the sacrifice. The situation here is much more favorable than I had been led to suppose. The back of the Insurrection is broken and the leaders are much discouraged and anxious, most of them, for peace.” The remaining insurgents, he claimed, were “restrained from surrender by nothing now but the possibility of Bryan’s election.” By joining the Republican ticket and rendering “success most probable,” he believed Roosevelt “was performing a great service not only to the people of his own country but to the Filipinos as well.”
In a warm reply to his friend, Roosevelt acknowledged his regret at forgoing a second gubernatorial term but maintained his satisfaction if he should prove “any help to the ticket this year.” Nonetheless, he added wistfully, “I had a great deal rather be your assistant in the Philippines . . . than be vice-president.”
Roosevelt’s immense contribution to the Republican ticket was beyond question. Telling Mark Ha
nna that he was “as strong as a bull moose” and should be used “up to the limit,” Roosevelt carried the entire campaign on his shoulders. “No candidate for Vice-President in the whole history of this Republic ever made such a canvass,” Boss Platt acknowledged. While McKinley remained at the White House, Roosevelt became “the central figure, the leading general, the field marshal.” Breaking every record, “he traveled more miles, visited more States, spoke in more towns, made more speeches and addressed a larger number of people than any man who ever went on the American stump.”
Surrounded by his wife and children on November 6, 1900, Roosevelt waited for the results at Sagamore Hill. Throughout the evening, scattered messages arrived from the telegraph operator at the railroad station three miles away. Around ten o’clock, a newspaper correspondent knocked on the door, bringing news of a smashing Republican victory. On the other side of the world, Will and Nellie were on their “tiptoes with excitement.” The time difference of thirteen hours between the United States and the Philippines exacerbated their anxiety. “We lived through the day knowing that the United States was asleep, and went to bed just about the time the voters began to go to the polls,” Nellie recalled. Finally, just before lunch the next day, a War Department cablegram announced the eagerly anticipated result: “McKinley.”
“My dear Theodore,” Will saluted his friend in a celebratory letter, “the magnificent victory in the states of the Far West and in New York is eloquent testimony to the good which you have done. The party for whom you made a great sacrifice will not forget it. I have no doubt that you will be the nominee in 1904.” Taft felt personal gratitude toward Roosevelt, for McKinley’s election allowed him to continue his work, a mission which had come to mean more than he had ever imagined when he reluctantly resigned from the bench.
As Taft had predicted, insurgent activity began to decrease once Bryan’s defeat confirmed America’s resolve to remain in the Philippines. “Hardly a day passed that did not bring news of the capture or surrender of insurgent officers,” Nellie recalled. “The attitude of the native is completely changed,” Taft told his brother, “and he is looking around to get in on the ‘band wagon.’ ” By early January 1901, he believed that the momentum had shifted in favor of peace. “The leaders in Manila,” he told Senator Lodge, “are hastening to form a party called the ‘Federal Party,’ which is pushing and pressing for peace and which will have an organization in every province and town in the Islands before many months have passed.” The time had come, he continued, to prepare for the transition from General MacArthur and the military authority to the civilian commission. “Their methods of doing things are so very different from ours,” he mordantly remarked, “and the people will welcome a change.”
To ready the Philippine Commission for full control and responsibility, Taft organized a two-month expedition to the southern provinces, where open hearings would be held to explicate new municipal codes that specified a Filipino governor in every province. Nellie insisted on accompanying the commission. “Of course,” Taft told his brother Charles, Nellie would not leave the children behind, so they came along as well. In the end, all the wives and children of the commission were included in the foray, comprising a party of sixty on the Army transport ship. The cluster of wives and children “greatly pleased” the Filipinos, Nellie noted, making the visits far more festive. “Much to the disgust of the military authorities present,” she remembered with satisfaction, “we assumed the friendliest kind of attitude.”
The desire of the provinces to substitute civil government for military rule was “manifest on every side,” Taft reported to his brother Horace. In each provincial capital, “the streets were crowded with men, women and children waving flags and shrilly cheering.” Bands playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” led the commission to the public hall where daylong hearings were held. “Spectacular” festivities followed the working day, Nellie recalled; torchlight parades, fireworks, six-course banquets, and balls celebrated their progress. Altogether, she later wrote, it was “a singular experience, an expedition perhaps unique in history, with which was ushered in a new era, not to say a new national existence, for the people of the Philippine Islands.”
At long last, in late February 1901, Congress passed the Spooner Amendment that declared the Insurrection over and called for the transfer of power from military to civilian authorities. Taft informed Roosevelt that he had been selected as the first governor general. “The responsibilities of this position, I look forward [to] with a great deal of hesitation,” he confided. “The pitfalls are many and the territory to be traversed is almost unknown.” Still, he admitted, “there is a natural gratification in taking control of things.”
Roosevelt would have given a great deal to change places with his friend. “I envy you your work,” he told Taft eight days after he was sworn in as vice president, bemoaning his own situation. “More and more it seems to me that about the best thing in life is to have a piece of work worth doing and then to do it well.” The lull in Roosevelt’s customary frenetic activity allowed time for painful reflection: “I did not envy you while I was Governor of New York,” he wrote, “nor while I was on the stump last fall taking part in the campaign which I believed to be fraught with the greatest consequences to the Nation; but just at present I do envy you. I am not doing any work and do not feel as though I was justifying my existence.”
Roosevelt similarly registered his discontent in a letter to Maria and Bellamy Storer; neither McKinley nor Mark Hanna, he wrote, “sympathize with my feelings or feel comfortable about me, because they cannot understand what it is that makes me act in certain ways at certain times, and therefore think me indiscreet and overimpulsive.” Though the president was “perfectly cordial,” Roosevelt insisted, “he does not intend that I shall have any influence of any kind, sort or description in the administration from the top to the bottom.” Roosevelt longed for some active enterprise in Cuba or the Philippines, but the president had no interest in sending him where real work might be done. The vice presidency “ought to be abolished,” he told his friend Leonard Wood. “The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing. I do not think that the President wants me to take any part in affairs or give him any advice.”
When Congress adjourned for nine months in the spring, suspending the vice president’s sole constitutional responsibility of presiding over the Senate, Roosevelt retired to Oyster Bay. “I am rather ashamed to say,” he wrote Taft at the end of April, that I do “nothing but ride and row with Mrs. Roosevelt, and walk and play with the children; chop trees in the afternoon and read books by a wood fire in the evening.” Despite this peaceful existence, Roosevelt admitted to “ugly feelings,” aware that he was “leading a life of unwarrantable idleness.”
Taft tried to buoy his friend’s spirits with the prospect of a presidential bid in 1904. “I look forward with great confidence to your nomination for President at the next convention,” he declared, “and I sincerely hope it may be brought about. Four years in the Vice-Presidential chair will save you from a good many hostilities that might endanger such a result, while the prominence of the position keeps you continually to the front as the necessary and logical candidate.” But to Roosevelt it seemed more likely that Taft would get the nod. “I doubt if in all the world there has been a much harder task set any one man during the past year than has been set you,” he observed, praising Taft’s work under such trying circumstances: “In spite of all the difficulties you have done well, and more than well, a work of tremendous importance. You have made all decent people who think deeply here in this country feel that they are your debtors. . . . It has paid after all, old man.”
On the Fourth of July, 1901, William Howard Taft was inaugurated as governor general of the Philippines. The spectacular ceremony featured “music, fireworks, gold lace and glitter, dancing and feasting and oratory.” A pavilion had been erected in C
athedral Plaza, the large square in the center of the Walled City, to accommodate the celebration. It was “an occasion of great dignity and interest,” Nellie happily remembered. “Americans and Filipinos, all in gala attire, were pressed close together . . . the plaza below was thronged with Filipinos of every rank and condition, in all manner of bright jusis and calicos; while above the crowd towered many American soldiers and sailors in spic-and-span khaki or white duck.” General MacArthur, who would be departing Manila the next day, stood by as the Filipino chief justice administered the oath of office to Taft. Resplendent in a “crisp white linen suit,” Taft appeared “larger even than his natural size.”
In his inaugural address, Taft hailed the transfer of authority from the military to the civilian commission as “a new step” toward “Permanent Civil Government on a more or less popular basis.” He announced that three leading Filipino citizens would be added to the five-member commission and that educated Filipinos would have voices both in the legislature and in the governance of the provinces. In time, as Stanley Karnow and James Bradley observe, the flaws in Taft’s attempt to construct a democracy “from the top down” would become clear. Reliance upon the elite, refusal to sanction any opposition to the Federal Party, and the policy of granting suffrage to a select minority further entrenched the existing “feudal oligarchy,” thereby expanding “the gap between rich and poor.” On this inaugural day, however, Taft’s forthright speech elicited “the wildest of cheering, and the playing of national airs.” Such a manifestation “of popular approval,” one correspondent noted, “indicates an auspicious beginning for the administration of the new governor.”