The Roosevelts chose to spend March 3, 1909, their last night in the White House, with the Tafts. Arriving in the late afternoon, Will and Nellie were escorted to a bedroom suite on the second floor, later designated the Lincoln Bedroom. “It was a curious occasion,” Alice Roosevelt Longworth recalled. “There were the Tafts, about to take over, obviously being tactful, soft pedaling their natural elation.” For everyone else, “like an obscuring fog, was the inevitable melancholy of saying good-by, of closing the door on great times; the interest, the personal associations, the power—all over, gone.” Even Archie Butt, who would remain at his post with the new president, “was frankly emotional,” and Elihu Root was in such “low spirits” that tears brimmed from his eyes.
“The dinner would have been hopeless,” Archie Butt remarked, “had it not been for the President,” who lightened the mood with one entertaining story after another. Regardless of Roosevelt’s efforts, everyone seemed relieved when the meal ended. In customary fashion, couples separated, the men going to the president’s upstairs study while the women congregated in the library. Sometime after 10 p.m., Taft rose to keep his promised appearance at a Yale smoker in his honor at the Willard Hotel. His departure brought the evening to an end, leaving only Theodore, Edith, Nellie, and Captain Butt. “Mrs. Roosevelt finally arose,” Butt wrote, “and said she would go to her room and advised Mrs. Taft to do the same. She took her hand kindly and expressed the earnest hope that her first night in the White House would be one of sweet sleep.”
Taft remained at the smoker until midnight, his late return to the White House provoking a widely read spoof in the New York Sun the next day. A fictional dispatch portrayed a weary Taft trudging upstairs, whereupon a servant announced that the president awaited him. And there before him stood Roosevelt, broadsword in hand. “Thought you’d like a short bout before turning in,” Roosevelt offered. “Here, get this mask and these pads on. Here are the gauntlets.” Taft barely had time to don his equipment before Roosevelt struck three decisive blows. “Now we’ll have a little wrestling,” he suggested, and “as if by magic, the mattress was spread.” Almost instantly, Taft was on his back. Exulting in triumph, Roosevelt asked the servants to set up the rings and parallel bars. For thirty minutes, they took turns until Roosevelt mercifully declared himself the clear victor. Finally, at 3 a.m., the Sun fancied, “the two athletes went to bed!”
In fact, by the time Taft returned to the White House, the Roosevelts had long since retired. Only Nellie, too excited to sleep, had waited up. For weeks, she had been preoccupied with the inaugural festivities and everything had been meticulously arranged—everything except the weather. A soggy wet snow had been falling all day. The storm was supposed to end by morning but the wind gusting over the water “shunted it back angrier than before” and the nation’s capital found itself “bound hand and foot” by the worst blizzard since 1888. Gale winds howled, tree limbs cracked under the weight of the heavy snow, and streets were covered with a slick slush. “It was really very serious,” Nellie recalled. “Railroad and telegraphic communications were paralyzed all along the Atlantic Coast.”
ON MARCH 4, INAUGURAL DAY, the president and president-elect met for an early breakfast. “The storm will soon be over,” Roosevelt sardonically predicted. “As soon as I’m out where I can do no further harm to the Constitution it will cease.” Taft suggested a different, if equally portentous interpretation. “You’re wrong,” he told his old friend. “It is my storm. I always said it would be a cold day when I got to be President.”
The Street Department was already hard at work clearing snow from Pennsylvania Avenue, but there was no time to remove the “yellowish, slimy, shoe-penetrating mush” from the sidewalks. In front of every structure with windows on the street—“candy stores, pawnbrokers’ shops, undertaking parlors, Chinese restaurants, machine shops”—carpenters had been busy all week long building seats which the owners planned to sell at a premium. By midmorning, melancholy enveloped the proprietors of the small shops along the parade route. With wet snow still blanketing the city, prices began to plummet. Seats expected to garner five dollars sold for one; sandwiches priced at a dime could be had for three cents. Despite the severe conditions, people “stood three deep on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue,” prepared to cheer and wave as the carriage bearing the president and president-elect moved slowly toward the Capitol. Unfortunately, hardly a glimpse of the two could be seen through the windows, for a driving snow had forced the coachmen to close the top of the carriage.
At the Capitol, more than 10,000 hearty souls waited to take their seats in the open stands to witness the inaugural ceremony. Inside, the Inaugural Committee debated whether to move the ceremony to the Senate chamber for the first time since President Jackson’s second inaugural. Reluctant to disappoint the eager crowd, Taft fought to keep the ceremony on the Capitol Plaza. “If so many spectators could endure the cold merely to see the sight,” he argued, “he certainly could endure it.” The president-elect relented only when advised that the elderly chief justice and several members of Congress and the diplomatic corps might be imperiled by the exposure. The disheartening news was blared to the expectant crowd through megaphones: “All exercises will be conducted in the Senate chamber, and no one will be admitted there unless he has a ticket.” No longer an open, public ceremony, the inaugural was attended by members of Congress, high government officials, Supreme Court justices, and ambassadors.
Cheers erupted when Roosevelt and Taft entered, walking “arm in arm” down the aisle. “Hale and hearty as Mr. Roosevelt looked,” the Sun reported, “he was dwarfed by Mr. Taft’s generous proportions.” Appropriately, William Howard Taft took the oath of office on the same Bible used for decades to swear in Supreme Court justices. Then, speaking in “a slow, distinct voice, which carried to the furthest reaches of the chamber,” he delivered his inaugural address. “For the first time in a century,” correspondents observed, the assembled guests could actually hear the president’s words.
While he felt the “heavy weight of responsibility” to preserve and enforce regulatory reforms initiated by “his distinguished predecessor,” Taft simultaneously reassured those businesses companies “pursuing proper and progressive business methods.” He pledged to secure amendments to both the anti-trust and interstate commerce laws that would make a distinction between “legitimate” combinations “and those formed with the intent of creating monopolies and artificially controlling prices.” Pressing Roosevelt’s agenda, he urged Congress to pass new conservation laws, consider a graduated inheritance tax, establish a postal savings bank system, and provide added protections to members of the working class. “The scope of a modern government,” he maintained, “has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old ‘laissez faire’ school of political writers, and this widening has met popular approval.” Finally, stepping into uncharted territory for his party, Taft called for a downward revision of the tariff and announced that he was summoning Congress into special session on March 15 for this purpose.
When Taft finished, Roosevelt jumped up and climbed the steps to the raised platform. “The new president turned to meet him,” reporters observed, “with a smile that irradiated his face; the departing president grinned all over.” Then, “with hands on each other’s shoulders,” they talked for several minutes. “God bless you, old man,” Roosevelt exclaimed, calling his address “a great state document.” Witnesses of the emotional scene “applauded like mad.”
Rather than ride together back to the White House, as custom dictated, the two men parted. Months earlier, Roosevelt had decided to go straight from the inaugural ceremony to Union Station. There, he bid adieu to thousands of well-wishers with a short, heartfelt speech. A band played “Auld Lang Syne” and, amid “deafening” cheers, Roosevelt and Edith departed for Oyster Bay.
Since Roosevelt had abandoned tradition, Nellie followed suit, deciding to do what “no President’s wife had ever done”—accompan
y her husband from the Capitol to the White House. “Some of the Inaugural Committee expressed their disapproval,” she recalled, “but I had my way and in spite of protests took my place at my husband’s side.” Although a bitter wind still scoured the streets, the snow had stopped and the new president insisted the carriage top remain open. Drawn by four horses, the carriage elicited “a continuous cheer” from the thousands of visitors unable to witness either the oath of office or Taft’s address. “Three cheers for the first lady,” a voice shouted along their route. Seeing his wife’s radiant smile, Taft took up the cheer himself and soon the entire crowd was hailing the first lady. “That drive was the proudest and happiest event of Inauguration Day,” Nellie recalled. “My responsibilities had not yet begun to worry me, and I was able to enjoy, almost to the full, the realization that my husband was actually President of the United States.”
NEWSPAPERS PREDICTED THE GENIAL NEW president would usher in an “era of good feelings.” Taft “has no enemies of his own making; he is not taking over any of the enemies of his predecessor,” observed Walter Wellman. The change of administration signaled “peace and reassurance” rather than the atmosphere of “vituperation and denunciation” that had marked the final months of Roosevelt’s tenure. While progressives trusted Taft to continue his mentor’s work, conservatives took comfort that “judicial poise had succeeded erratic temperament,” that decisions would now be made with deliberation, not drama. “Never did any man,” the Sun editorialized, arrive at the White House “with such universal good will.”
Already questioning his own competence for the nation’s highest office, Taft found such grand expectations unnerving. Asked a week after his inauguration how he liked being president, he confessed that he remained disoriented. “I hardly know yet. When I hear someone say Mr. President, I look around expecting to see Roosevelt, and when I read in the headlines of the morning papers that the President and Senator Aldrich and Speaker Cannon have had a conference, my first thought is, ‘I wonder what they talked about.’ So you can see that I have not gone very far yet.”
Roosevelt’s departure for Africa on March 23 signaled opportunity as well as anxiety for Taft. For years, Archie Butt observed, Taft had “been living on the steam of Theodore Roosevelt,” propelled by the outsized personality and ambition of his friend and chief. “He will have to find his own fuel now,” Butt conjectured, “and, like a child, will have to learn to walk alone. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that he will learn to walk alone and will walk possibly all the better but it is going to be a readjustment just the same.”
Initially, Captain Butt had hesitated to accept Taft’s offer to remain in the White House, fearing he would not be able to serve the new president with the same devotion he continued to feel toward his predecessor. “The influence of Mr. Roosevelt over those around him is masterful and his friends become fanatical, e.g. to wit—I,” he told his sister Clara. He had great admiration and liking for Taft, however, and considered Nellie “an intellectual woman and a woman of wonderful executive ability.” He had been in the Philippines when Taft was governor general and had seen how the Filipino people had responded to the warmth and openness of the big man’s personality. While Butt acknowledged at the start that he missed Roosevelt’s “marvelous wit,” he found his new chief a most enjoyable companion. “He is essentially a gregarious animal,” Butt reflected. “He likes to have someone in the car with him when he is reading or studying, and if he is at work, he works better if he has someone in the room with him.”
Despite Taft’s initial reservations, his first two months in office augured well for the new administration. Early on, he decided that his White House would be open to all: he would not, like Roosevelt, compile a “list of undesirables”; there would be no “abrupt and stormy attacks” on fellow politicians. Reflecting on the animosity between the president and Congress that had consumed the country since the previous December, Taft resolved to end such recrimination. “I hope that I shall never be called upon ever to say anything in disparagement of Senators and members of the House. I have no desire to belittle them.”
As governor general of the Philippines, Taft had welcomed every political group at Malacañan Palace, making it “a rule never to pay any attention to personal squabbles and differences.” He hoped to institute the same policy as president. Aware that access to the White House was an enormous political asset, Taft announced a series of a half-dozen formal dinner parties designed to unify “all the warring factions” in the House and Senate. “I am rather proud of these lists,” he told Archie Butt. “I do not believe there were given six dinners at the White House where more thought has been expended than on these six.” He was careful to include Senator Joseph Bailey, despite the fact that just a month earlier the Texas Democrat had pronounced Taft wholly unsuited for the presidency. And Bailey appeared to appreciate the gesture. “I have come to pay my tribute and respects to a most agreeable personality,” Bailey declared at the event. Taft also lifted Roosevelt’s ban on Senator Tillman of South Carolina and invited dozens of rank-and-file congressmen who had not previously attended a White House dinner. Where Roosevelt had dispensed White House invitations “to pay for favors already performed and loyalty which had been proven,” Taft hoped his magnanimity would induce future cooperation.
The volatile guest list for the first of these affairs, which included Old Guard Republicans and their progressive antagonists, northern Democrats and southern Populists, created “the liveliest interest” in the capital. Fortunately, one reporter noted, ladies had been invited to keep these “belligerent Congressmen apart.” Even with their mollifying influence, some suggested, the situation might “require all of President Taft’s diplomacy to keep things going smoothly.” In the end, good food, good wine, and the music of the Marine Band made the first dinner a notable success, setting an agreeable precedent for the five events planned for the future. “It is undoubtedly Mr. Taft’s purpose to conciliate,” observed a northwestern paper. “He doesn’t like discord. He thinks it will be possible to get all the good men of the country together on a common platform—the Roosevelt men and the anti-Roosevelt men.”
During the weeks that followed, reporters kept a tally of “the undesirables” once again “finding their way” to the White House. Democratic senator Augustus Bacon of Georgia was “pleased as a boy” with his first invitation in seven years. Senators Hale, Aldrich, Payne, “and a lot of other ungodly standpatters” were again welcomed in the president’s home, as were the most fervent Roosevelt men. Rather than wielding the “big stick through the press” to prod legislative action, Taft hoped that “personal appeal,” reasoned arguments, and a spirit of hospitality would prevail.
Reporters too delighted in the “startling contrast” evident in Taft’s method of handling the hundreds of audience-seekers from that of his predecessor. Senators, congressmen, and all manner of officials appeared during the morning hours between ten and twelve. To expedite matters, Roosevelt had kept his door open, entertaining a dozen or more callers simultaneously with his snappy banter, sending them “on their way out almost before they realized they were in.” One visitor described his experience as being “caught in a strong draught.” Taft possessed none of Roosevelt’s “terminal facilities.” He invited callers individually into his office, closed the door, and reportedly made everyone feel “so much at home” that they were inclined to linger all morning. At the pace he conducted business, Archie Butt worried, Taft would “be about three years behind” on the final day of his term.
Taft extended the window for callers an additional hour and a half, interrupting the flow of visitors only to take his lunch. Unlike Roosevelt, who famously invited people from all walks of life to his table, Taft generally ate alone. Forever struggling to lose weight, he limited his midday meal to an apple or a glass of water. One visitor, having reportedly waited three hours to see him, was finally invited into the president’s office with an unceremonious greeting: “
I am glad you have come in,” Taft told him, “but you will have to wait until I have had my luncheon.” When the weary caller asked how long it would be, Taft’s only reply was to pick up a pitcher of water and pour himself a glass. When he finished drinking, he returned to his desk: “Now I am through, what do you want to tell me?”
Meetings with governmental officials and lawmakers often stretched until five o’clock, after which Taft, like Roosevelt, took time to exercise. “There the resemblance ended,” one White House correspondent remarked. Roosevelt took strenuous hikes or played in vigorous tennis matches; Taft much preferred a leisurely round of golf. As a horseman, Roosevelt “jumped hurdles, forded creeks, and sought out unused bridle paths,” another reporter noted, while the new president trotted “along the river front or around the ellipse.” Before long, even these placid forays were replaced by late afternoon spins in one of the three new White House automobiles. Roosevelt had displayed no interest in what critics called “devil wagons,” but “Taft fell in love with them on the first whirl.” In short order, he converted the stable, which had held Roosevelt’s “jumpers, pacers, and calipers,” into an oversized garage for his Model M steam touring convertible (capable of seating seven passengers); a Pierce Arrow Limousine; and a Baker Queen Victoria electric, which Nellie learned to drive.