In his speech at the palace, Taft told the people “in a straightforward way of his experiences in Washington and Rome.” Though negotiations with the Vatican had been suspended, “the sale of church lands to the government was assured,” and he was confident that an agreement to remove the friars would eventually be worked out. Taft took comfort that the natives had clearly interpreted his visit to Rome “as a real effort on the part of the United States to do something which could not have been for any other benefit than the benefit of the Filipino people.” Visibly moved, he promised to work unremittingly for the people of the islands. So “universal, earnest, and enthusiastic” was the response, reporters noted, that it left no doubt that Taft had earned “a proud position in the hearts of the Filipino people.”
Back in the United States, Taft’s visit to Rome met with less enthusiasm. “I am in the worst hole politically I have ever been in my life,” Roosevelt confided to his newspaper friend Herman Kohlsaat. “The whole Catholic Church is on my back.” Though every intelligence from the Philippines established “what a lecherous lot of scoundrels the Spanish friars are,” Roosevelt privately railed, Catholics maintained that these reports were “simply propaganda to establish Protestant missions in the Philippines.” If such “calumnies” did not cease, the president was cautioned, Catholics would join en masse to thwart his nomination in two years’ time.
“As things have turned out, it has probably been unfortunate that we got you to stop at Rome,” Roosevelt wrote Taft, lamenting that the Catholic uproar had “rather complicated the political situation” at home. Perhaps, he suggested, they should “let this whole matter go and simply administer the civil government, leaving the friars and other ecclesiastical bodies to get along as best they can.”
Taft responded vehemently. “While the result of the visit to Rome may have been bad in the United States,” he told Roosevelt, “I do not state it too strongly when I say that the visit to Rome has done us a great deal of good in this country.” Taft’s letter persuaded the president to continue talks with the Vatican, which eventually produced an agreement. The United States paid $7.5 million for the lands, which were divided into small parcels and sold to natives, creating a new landowning class. Though the Spanish friars were never formally withdrawn, their power dwindled with the appointment of priests and bishops from other countries. Under Taft’s deliberate leadership, a solution had been found that eased tensions and, in the end, finally satisfied the islanders, the administration, and the Catholic Church alike.
ON JULY 1, 1902, SPEAKER David Henderson delivered a rousing speech to his colleagues, flattering them before they adjourned that “no house of representatives since the adoption of the Constitution had done so much work as this one.” The Speaker’s laudatory words “touched a responsive chord” among the members, who saluted both their Speaker and themselves with unrestrained emotion. “While the cheering and applause were still in progress,” one reporter noted, “the members on the floor began singing ‘My Country, Tis of Thee.’ It was taken up by the correspondents in the press gallery, and soon the vast hall was ringing” as spectators joined in for “The Star-Spangled Banner” and other patriotic tunes. The mood of jubilation culminated when General Charles Hooker of Mississippi, a Confederate veteran who had lost his arm in the war, “took his place by the side of the speaker, and together they sang ‘Dixie.’ ”
Roosevelt’s assessment of the work done by the 57th Congress was far less sanguine. Nonetheless, he was delighted by the passage of the bill providing $170 million to acquire land and begin construction of the Panama Canal. “By far the most important action I took in foreign affairs during the time I was President,” he later reflected, “related to the Panama Canal.” He also took “a keen personal pride” in the Newlands Reclamation Act, which set aside revenue from the sale of western public lands into a national fund for the construction of dams and irrigation projects. The act was structured to enable small farmers to settle previously arid lands. “I regard the irrigation business as one of the great features of my administration,” he remarked at the time.
Congress also appropriated more than half a million dollars for badly needed renovations to the White House. Despite its thirty-one rooms, the mansion did not provide comfortable living quarters for a family, especially a large one like the Roosevelts’. The entire first floor, except for the family dining room, was used for state functions; the second floor was divided between a private wing and executive offices, including the president’s office, the Cabinet Room, and the telegraph room. The family quarters consisted of only five bedrooms and lacked both closet space and sufficient bathroom facilities. The kitchen was outmoded, and the floors throughout “trembled when one walked on them.”
Previous presidents had failed to persuade Congress that a thorough renovation was necessary. The Roosevelts alone, Sylvia Morris writes, “had the determination, in spite of criticism, to forge ahead with the long-overdue changes.” The plans, drawn up by the architect Charles McKim, called for the construction of a new West Wing office building connected to the main house by a colonnade, freeing up the old second-floor spaces for conversion into extra bedrooms, bathrooms, and sitting rooms—as well as a boudoir, a library, and a den. The demolition and major renovations were scheduled during the summer months, allowing Edith and the children to escape to Oyster Bay. Roosevelt had originally planned to remain in the White House but was finally persuaded to move into a large town house on Lafayette Square.
Despite his satisfaction with the Canal bill, the Reclamation Act, and the successful appropriations for the White House renovation project, Roosevelt was sorely disappointed by the failure of Congress to take action on the signal economic issue of the day: the trusts. The call to establish a Department of Commerce with the power to demand information and determine necessary regulation of corporate trusts had been at the center of Roosevelt’s first annual message. While the bill was debated at the committee level, Republican opposition prevented any real progress. Meanwhile, the Democratic attack on the trusts gathered momentum, heightening Roosevelt’s anxiety that Republicans would pay at the polls for their failure to address the issue.
Senators obligated to the sugar trust also had managed to kill a reciprocity bill designed to reduce the tariffs on Cuban exports, including raw sugar, by 20 percent. The reduction of duties, Roosevelt argued in a special message, would boost the young republic’s economy and simultaneously open Cuba’s markets to the United States. “I ask that the Cubans be given all possible chance to use to the best advantage the freedom of which Americans have such right to be proud,” he exhorted, “and for which so many American lives have been sacrificed.” Despite his plea, no action was taken. “Their conduct will return to plague them later,” Joseph Bishop predicted.
With the adjournment of Congress, Roosevelt headed to Oyster Bay for a six-week vacation with his family before launching a campaign swing to generate popular enthusiasm for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. The failure of the Republican Congress to take action on corporate regulation and reciprocity issues had furnished Democrats with powerful proof, despite Roosevelt’s anti-trust initiatives, that the Republican Party was “in alliance with the trusts and with all the great monopolies of every description which are preying upon the country.” By appealing directly to the people and lending his personal prestige to the fight for trust regulation, Roosevelt hoped to save his party from defeat in November.
Traveling by train and open carriage, accompanied by dozens of reporters, he opened his campaign in New England. In each of the six states, he delivered speeches focused predominantly on the trust issue, emphasizing the distinction between his own reasonable call for oversight of federal regulation of trusts and the Democratic crusade to eradicate all trusts in a manner that would “destroy all our prosperity.” Roosevelt understood that many looked back with nostalgia on the pre-industrial era, when “the average man lived more to himself,” when “the average communi
ty was more self-dependent,” and when the gap between rich and poor was less glaring. He conceded that cities could never provide “the same sense of common underlying brotherhood” as country living, but argued that the modern industrial society had substantially raised “the standard of comfort” for most people. Efforts to turn backward he considered not only futile but also wrongheaded. Lending “a sympathetic ear” to “the unfocused discontent” he encountered, Roosevelt forged a powerful connection with his audience and then hammered home his core message: the national government must assume “full power” over the giant trusts and that power must “be exercised with moderation and self-restraint.”
From Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, the president was met with overwhelming fervor. “The booming of cannon, the clanging of church bells, the tooting of whistles, the braying of brass bands and the cheering of thousands” marked his progress. When he delivered his prepared speeches in the major cities, “factories shut down, stores put up their shutters, flags were hoisted and the people were out in their holiday clothes.” There was not a single moment, observed reporters, “when the streets were not crowded and people were not cheering themselves hoarse.” As the train moved from city to city, thousands gathered at local railroad stations to glimpse their vibrant young president. Indeed, it seemed to one journalist that “small towns turned out their entire population.”
The heady atmosphere of Roosevelt’s tour abruptly ceased on the final day of his New England campaign when a speeding trolley car crashed headlong into the open carriage carrying Roosevelt and his party from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Stockbridge. The impact overturned the carriage and hurled its occupants to the ground. The president, his private secretary George Cortelyou, and Governor Winthrop Murray Crane of Massachusetts were thrown clear of the wreck, but Roosevelt’s favorite Secret Service agent, William Craig, was caught under the wheels of the rushing trolley car and torn apart. “It was a dreadful thing,” Roosevelt grimly observed; “the car was coming at such a terrific speed that I felt sure all in the carriage would be killed.” The crowd hastened toward the spot where Roosevelt lay, but despite a blackened eye and deep bruises on his jaw and leg, he insisted that he required no help. “I’m all right,” he said. “Some of the others are badly hurt. Look after them.” When he saw the body of his loyal guard he dropped on his knee. “Poor Craig,” he muttered over and over, “too bad, too bad.” Still, he insisted that his tour through Stockbridge, Great Barrington, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, should proceed. Seated in a new carriage, he gave the mounted guard somber instructions: “Gallop ahead, tell the people everywhere along the line that Craig has been killed and I wish no cheering.” Edith rushed to meet her husband at Bridgeport and take him back to Oyster Bay, where he remained for only one day before departing on a weeklong campaign swing through Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina.
Returning to Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt convened a “memorable conference” (with Senators Aldrich, Spooner, Hanna, Allison, and Lodge) to resolve how he should handle the divisive issue of tariffs during his upcoming western tour. The Republican establishment viewed the high Dingley tariff, passed during McKinley’s first administration, as sacrosanct—the key to the country’s economic prosperity. Yet in recent years sharply rising consumer prices had produced growing demand for downward revision of the tariff. Capitalizing on this discontent, Democrats argued that high tariffs not only inflated prices but effectively sustained the hated trusts. The destruction of both trusts and tariffs would be the rallying cry of their fall campaign.
Complicating matters further, the tariff issue threatened to divide the president’s own party between western Republicans, who clamored for relief from the highest tariff in history, and eastern manufacturers, who insisted on continued protection. At a state convention in the Republican stronghold of Iowa, a resolution had passed that linked tariffs to trusts and called for the elimination of tariffs on any product manufactured by a monopolistic trust. “The tariff must be revised, for it is barbarous, extortionate, damnable,” the Chicago Record-Herald journalist Walter Wellman wrote to Roosevelt, insisting, “I want to see you take the lead. It is the biggest work to be done in the country today.” Should Republicans launch the fall campaign without lowering the tariff, he warned, “hell will be to pay.”
Though Roosevelt found this point of view congenial, he also recognized the “dynamite” in tariff reduction. Tinkering with tariff policy might well produce “a panic or something approaching to it, with consequent disaster to the business community and incidentally to the Republican party.” Moreover, Senators Aldrich and Hanna made it clear that if a reciprocity treaty could not pass the protectionist Senate, more general tariff revision had absolutely no chance of success. “As long as I remain in the Senate and can raise a hand to stop you,” Mark Hanna pointedly told him, “you will never touch a schedule of the tariff act.” Bowing to reality, Roosevelt promised the senators gathered at Oyster Bay that he would “make no attempt to revise the tariff at the coming session of Congress,” though he would continue to speak out about the trusts. “I do not wish to split my own party wide open on the tariff question,” he conceded, “unless some good is to come.” The implications of Roosevelt’s retreat on this issue would be far-reaching.
Certain that he carried an unwelcome tariff message to western audiences, Roosevelt anticipated “a three weeks’ nerve-shattering trip.” He soldiered on from Cincinnati to Detroit to Logansport, Indiana, where the sentiment for downward revision of the tariff was particularly strong. The president’s references to the tariff, the New York Times editorialized, sound “like that of a man treading a path selected for him by others, not chosen by himself, and pursued only because the situation seemed to require it.” His words were absorbed by crowds “in comparative silence” after the noisy acclaim that had greeted his earlier speeches. “There are a good many worse things than the possibility of trolley-car accidents in these trips!” Roosevelt darkly quipped.
Unfortunately, the injuries he sustained in the collision proved far more agonizing than tariff complications. He had tried to ignore the continued pain in his leg but was noticeably limping by the time he reached Logansport. A visit to the hospital revealed “a threatening abscess” that required immediate surgery. The abscess was lanced and a miniature pump attached to drain the bloody serum. Refusing anesthesia, Roosevelt climbed onto the operating table and turned to the doctors with a smile. “Gentlemen, you are formal; I see you have your gloves on.” The surgeon jested in answer: “It is always in order to wear gloves at a president’s reception.” If Roosevelt muttered in pain under his breath a few times during the procedure, he reportedly “said nothing that was distinct except to ask for a glass of water before the needle was removed.” Carried out on a stretcher, he received strict orders to stay off his leg for several weeks, forcing cancelation of his remaining campaign itinerary.
As renovations to the executive mansion were still not complete, he was taken to the temporary White House at Lafayette Square. “Tell it not in Gath, but really I have enjoyed this nine days’ seclusion,” he told Senator Orville Platt the following week. “I see Mrs. Roosevelt all the time, as she has come on here to take care of me. I read everything from Pendennis and Our Mutual Friend down to the last study of European interests in Asia. I do not have to see the innumerable people whom there is no object in seeing, but whom I would have to see if I were not confined to my room with my leg up, and I am able to do all the important work.”
Capitalizing on his enforced leisure, Roosevelt appealed to Herbert Putnam, the librarian of Congress, for books that would feed his wildly eclectic intellectual appetites—a history of Poland or something on early Mediterranean races. “Exactly the books I wished,” he told Putnam several days later. “I am now reveling in Maspero and occasionally make a deviation into Sergis’ theories about the Mediterranean races. . . . It has been such a delight to drop everything u
seful—everything that referred to my duty—everything, for instance, relating to the coal strike and the tariff, or the trusts, or my power to send troops into the mining districts, or my duty as regards summoning Congress—and to spend an afternoon in reading about the relations between Assyria and Egypt; which could not possibly do me any good and in which I reveled accordingly.”
BY EARLY OCTOBER 1902, THE coal strike to which Roosevelt referred had become “the most formidable industrial deadlock in the history of the United States.” The previous spring, more than 140,000 anthracite coal miners had gone on strike in Pennsylvania to protest low wages, harsh working conditions, and long hours. While the five-month-old strike had caused no serious problems during the hot summer months, panic was setting in as cold weather approached. Coal was then the chief fuel source for heating homes, schools, and businesses. By September’s end, schools in the Northeast began closing due to the shortage. Hospitals and government buildings were threatening to shut their doors. Confrontations in the coal fields were becoming increasingly violent, and mobs commandeered coal cars as they trundled through villages and small towns. An all-out social war seemed imminent.
John Mitchell, the charismatic president of the United Mine Workers (UMW), believed that if the American people could truly see “the sorrows and the heartaches of those who spend their lives in the coal mines,” they would sympathize with the strikers’ decision to stop work. To “the average magazine or newspaper reader,” however, the lives of those “who delve in the bowels of the earth; removed from the sight of their fellow-beings,” remained as darkly hidden as the work itself, while the hardships generated by their strike were too immediately apparent.
Some years earlier, Sam McClure had tried to expose the suffering of the industry’s workers, commissioning the realist author Stephen Crane to write a piece entitled “In the Depths of a Coal Mine.” Crane described a sinister system that brought children “yet at the spanking period” into the mines as breaker boys. There, they worked ten hours each day, separating out pieces of slate and other impurities from streams of coal speeding by on conveyor belts. Earning 55 cents a day, a breaker boy rarely set foot in a schoolhouse. His highest ambition was to rise to door-boy, then mule-boy, laborer, miner’s helper, and finally full-fledged miner. If he reached that zenith, having survived “the gas, the floods, the ‘squeezes’ of falling rocks, the cars shooting through little tunnels, the precarious elevators,” and the peculiar miner’s lung disease, he started “on the descent, going back to become a miner’s helper, then a mine laborer, now a door-boy; and when old and decrepit, he finally returns to the breaker where he started as a child.”