On the domestic stage he became more and more the radical leader. He had early stolen the thunder of the populists and the reformers. The demagogue in him made him adapt his slogans to the demands of his audience. He got the wildest applause when he lambasted “malefactors of great wealth.”
Fighting Bob
The voter was in revolt. From the Atlantic to the Pacific righteous men were speaking out against political corruption and the highhanded behavior of captains of industry. Reform leaders were convinced that the cure was to make the machinery of selfgovernment more effective.
The first reform had been the adoption of the secret or Australian ballot. In Oregon U’Ren’s People’s Power League passed a corrupt practices act, put through a referendum borrowed from Switzerland, instituted the recall of public officials, popular election of U. S. senators and a system of preferential primaries for the nomination of presidential candidates which it was hoped would take the party conventions out of the hands of the bosses. In Ohio there was an epidemic of reform mayors. In Colorado Judge Ben Lindsey and his friends fought the utilities. In California the Lincoln-Roosevelt League was gradually shaking the state Republican Party loose from the hired men of the railroads.
It was the day of the young firebrands in politics. From the governor’s mansion in Madison Bob La Follette was proclaiming the Wisconsin idea.
Born in a sure enough log house five years after his family moved out from Indiana in covered wagons to take up a tract of farmland some twentyfive miles out from the state capital, La Follette grew up with the country. His people were literate hardworking borderers, farmers and schoolteachers of Huguenot and Scotch-Irish stock. His father made the farm succeed but died while Bob was still an infant. His mother, who had been brought up a Baptist, married a Baptist deacon reputed to be the leading citizen of the little town of Argyle. The deacon was an opinionated old man who didn’t believe in sparing the rod, or the rawhide whip either.
His mother’s remarriage when he was seven left little Bob very much on his own. He worshipped the image of his father. He picked up some skill at carpenter work by using his father’s set of tools, helped out the family by huckstering produce from house to house in Madison. His stepfather mismanaged the farm, kept petitioning the court to sell off strips of La Follette land; his business ventures failed.
Bob had to pay for his own schooling. At an early age he learned to shave and to cut hair and picked up a little money acting as barber at the Argyle hotel. He was a smart wrestler and a clever mimic, the darling of the elocution teachers. Even his stepfather said he had a career ahead of him. He early developed a knack for public speaking.
Already the farmers were in revolt against railroad barons, and the lumber barons who strangled their market in a network of monopolies. Bob La Follette listened eagerly to speeches of Grangers and agrarian radicals. He read Henry George. He cut his teeth on the Shakespearean style.
When he was seventeen his stepfather died and left him the head of the family. He was a wiry handsome youth with lustrous dark eyes full of ambition to forge ahead. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be an actor or a lawyer.
Determined to go to college, he rented the farm to his brotherinlaw and moved the family into Madison. His schooling had been so sketchy he had to take preparatory courses for a year at the Wisconsin Academy. He never did learn to spell. He taught school. He coached debaters. He edited and mostly wrote The University Press, the college paper, which he distributed at enough profit to pay for his college course. All this, and acting in amateur plays, kept him so busy his grades weren’t of the highest.
When he fell in love with Belle Case he won over her family by his readings from Hamlet. His graduation would have been doubtful if he hadn’t won first prize in an interstate contest by a speech on the character of Iago which for years was the pride of midwestern oratoricals.
Probably his fiancée influenced him towards studying law. He’d hardly passed his bar exam before he was running for district attorney. Riding from house to house with horse and buggy, the way he’d sold vegetables as a boy, he became an irresistible campaigner.
He stood for the people against the interests.
In 1884 he ran for the House of Representatives and at twentynine became the youngest member of the Fortyninth Congress. Belle and her small children moved with him to Washington. He served three terms, learned everything there was to know about the lawmaker’s profession. In a day when politicians were supposed to serve business for retainers his independence made him enemies. In 1890 he was defeated. The opposition of the state Republican machine threw the election to the Democrats. He went back to the practice of law but politics was his world.
New forces were stirring in the Republican Party. He became friends with T.R. but McKinley was his chosen leader. In 1896 La Follette and Roosevelt were McKinley’s two most effective campaigners. While Bryan thundered for the common man among the Democrats, Progressivism raised its voice among the Republicans.
In 1900 La Follette was elected governor of Wisconsin. With a large following, based on the student body at the university and on the farmers he visited on his famous horse and buggy circuits, or harangued from a spring wagon at country fairs, he started a systematic restoration of the processes of selfgovernment. If the people knew, he passionately believed, the people would vote right.
The Animated Feather Duster
In New York the sword of righteousness which T.R. had brandished as police commissioner and then as governor, fell into the hands of an austere young man named Charles Evans Hughes.
Born in a tiny frame house in Glens Falls in the spring of 1862, the man who was to be reform governor of New York was the only son of a raven-haired Welshman, who emigrated to the United States in the middle fifties eager to do God’s work. By dint of preaching and teaching he managed to dig himself out an education in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and to find himself a blueeyed bride from an upstate farming family. Raised a Baptist Mrs. Hughes soon convinced her husband that the Baptist faith was nearer to the primitive religion of Christ’s disciples to which they both aspired, so it was as a Baptist that they brought up their son.
Young Charles was precocious. His parents started training him for the ministry from the time he started to read at the age of three and a half. He was literally raised in church, because there was no one to leave him with at home while his father was preaching and his mother was playing the organ.
At fourteen Hughes was ready for college and was sent to board at the Baptist seminary in Hamilton, New York, which later developed into Colgate University. “Pray for me,” he wrote back to his doting parents, then living on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan, where the Reverend Hughes was secretary of the American Bible Union, “that I may be a useful servant in God’s vineyard.”
Already secular interests were crowding into God’s vineyard. As a precocious youngster living in the heart of Boss Tweed’s New York Hughes came to know something of the savagery and sin of the old brick seaport where masts and yards and steamboat funnels crowded in a forest about the wharves at the end of each crosswise street.
He honed to strike out on his own. He argued theology with his father in his letters home. In spite of their differences in points of doctrine his father loyally helped him transfer to Brown University where he obtained a small scholarship and, as a minister’s son, had his room free of rent.
At Brown his horizons broadened. He found he had inherited a Welshman’s flair for public speaking. He helped edit the magazine. For pocket money he tutored the duller students or occasionally wrote their themes for them for a price. He graduated in 1881, a slight, lively, smoothfaced lad of nineteen, the youngest in his class and third in scholastic standing.
A generation earlier he might well have been attracted to a career in the ministry, but growing up into the bustling moneymaking confident eighties, the law appeared to be the avenue to success for an able and impecunious young man.
Eking out the
slender allowance his parents were able to spare him with teaching jobs and clerking, he passed his bar examination with record high marks at twentytwo, and was taken into the office of a successful attorney named Walter S. Carter. Not many years went by before Hughes, with the boss’s enthusiastic consent, was marrying the boss’s daughter.
During his college years he had missed out on many a good teaching job on account of his youthful and beardless appearance. Now he encouraged a bushy mustache and soon supplemented it with a neatly trimmed beard.
He worked himself down to skin and bone. He was so thin no company would give him life insurance. When Cornell offered him a professorship in law he jumped at the chance.
Hughes enjoyed teaching. He liked the country life and the walks over the hills overlooking Lake Cayuga. He gained weight. The life insurance company no longer turned him down for a policy. His courses were popular with the students.
A new baby was born. Responsibilities were multiplying. He hadn’t been able to sell his New York house and the mortgage payments were a drain. In spite of a heavy teaching load and a new course in international law he was induced to undertake, all Cornell could offer him for a salary was three thousand a year. Hughes loved Ithaca; he stoutly turned down an offer of five thousand from the New York University Law School; but at last his fatherinlaw’s cajoling letters and firm promise that by 1900 the business would be netting a hundred thousand dollars a year decided him to go back to New York … “if there is anything in this big money-making world I can win I’ll win it for wife and babies,” he wrote his wife. “I have no business to be out of the great rush.”
He taught the young men’s Bible class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, and was elected a trustee. This was different from the impoverished meeting houses he had known as a boy. John D. Rockefeller was president of the board of trustees.
His work was all absorbing. He was the lawyer’s lawyer. Attorneys and even judges consulted him on knotty points. Outside of his profession he was unknown. “My dear,” he told his wife, who was complaining that though all the other lawyers’ names were mentioned in connection with a notorious lawsuit she couldn’t find her husband’s in any of the papers, “I have a positive genius for privacy.”
It wasn’t until after his fatherinlaw’s death when he was heading the Carter lawfirm that Hughes suddenly emerged into the light of the front pages as counsel for a committee of the state legislature which was investigating the gouging of the public by the company that furnished the city’s gas.
The early nineteenhundreds were the heyday of muckraking. In a moment of annoyance at the scandalmongering which had become habitual in newspapers competing desperately for the public’s pennies, T.R. had pulled the term out of a quotation from Pilgrim’s Progress.
The “better element” had worried for decades over the corruption of boss rule in the cities, but now the general public took up the cry. The exposure of corruption became profitable. S. S. McClure was presenting Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities in his magazine. Ida Minerva Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company was bringing home to people the political and economic power inherent in vast aggregations of capital. Muckrakers rose to fame and fortune. Pulitzer and Hearst sold their penny newspapers to hundreds of thousands by exposing the male-factions of the politicians in cahoots with unscrupulous businessmen. Every editorial page had its David slinging his pebbles at the Goliaths of the vested interests.
Skillfully and decorously Hughes began pulling such a story of corruption and extortion out of reluctant witnesses that the featurewriters were delighted.
Reporters, who at first had complained of his austerity and of the chilly personality they found behind his whiskers, now fell over each other to make a public figure of him. The Evening Mail, the house organ of the Roosevelt Progressives, described him as “a large man, not burly but with the appearance of one who is built on broad lines. He looks strong. His shoulders are square, his limbs solid, his teeth big and white and his whiskers thick and somewhat aggressive.” Pulitzer’s New York World described his whiskers as being “broader, braver, bigger, bushier” than they appeared in the cartoons … “In action they flare and wave about triumphantly like the battleflag of a pirate chief.”
He was invited to run for mayor on a reform platform. Instead he went mountainclimbing in Switzerland with the children, but soon he let himself be called back for a new investigation, this time of the life insurance companies. By the time he had grilled a choice assortment of capitalists and revealed the highhanded way in which the men who ran the companies paid off the politicians and handled the public’s funds as if they were their own, Hughes was a national hero.
Legislation followed which cut the insurance companies down to size. Ida Tarbell gave him the accolade: “Charles E. Hughes is engaged in a passionate effort to vindicate the American system of government.”
Even though Hughes had given the chief financial backer of T.R.’s presidential campaign, George W. Perkins, a bad quarter of an hour, forcing him to admit that in a four million dollar bond deal he had represented both New York Life, which was the buyer and J. P. Morgan and Co., which was the seller, Theodore Roosevelt began quietly pushing Hughes as a Republican reform candidate for the governorship of New York.
The World proclaimed that he had “restored faith in legislative committees as a means of bringing the truth to light,” and described him as a man “who has a service of the highest order to give to the public and who can be neither intimidated or betrayed.” “Why not make him governor?” asked Ida Tarbell in the American Magazine.
To run against him Boss Murphy, who had been much bespattered by the reformers, put up William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had all the money in the world to spend and was a reformer, an extremely noisy one, to boot. It was an exciting campaign.
T.R. wrote Hughes from Washington … “You are an honest fearless square man, a good citizen and a good American first and a good republican also … If I were not president I’d be stumping New York from one end to the other for you.”
Hughes turned out an unexpectedly effective campaigner. His election put the quietus on William Randolph Hearst’s political career. He successfully served two terms as governor and became one of Taft’s chief assets in his campaign for the presidency in 1908.
Billy Possum
William Howard Taft had been Roosevelt’s Secretary of War. In the Cabinet he was the President’s most faithful lieutenant. Such was T.R.’s prestige at the end of his second term that he was able to impose Taft’s nomination on the Republican Party in spite of the big man’s mumbled protest that as a Unitarian he could never be elected. Roosevelt considered Taft the man most certain to carry out his progressive policies.
It was only when T.R. saw his dear friend, in spite of innate modesty, willynilly taking the center of the Washington stage as President-elect that his enthusiasm for him began to cool. Now he talked as if Governor Hughes, whom in impatient moments he’d scornfully referred to as “that animated feather duster,” might be the man on whom the mantle of his strenuous Republicanism would fall when he disappeared from the Washington scene. To distract himself from the acute pain it gave him to leave the White House he was planning a public massacre of the lions and leopards and elephants of the African wilds.
In Taft’s inaugural parade, beset by a famous blizzard that almost froze out the proceedings, Governor Hughes reached the peak of his political popularity. In silk hat and frock coat he risked pneumonia by riding at the head of the New York militia.
“Thinking an overcoat too clumsy” Hughes wrote in his notes, “I had protected myself with a chamois vest But my hands inside my gloves were very cold and I had to dig them into the horse’s flesh to keep from freezing. As we came down the hill from the Capitol our horses almost slid on the icy street. My horse had always been in the ranks and it was with some difficulty he could be persuaded to take his place at the head of the procession. But with the cheers of the crowd as
we came to the large stands, he seemed to realize that this was his day and he went along at the head, proudly arching his neck and acting his part as a well trained horse of the Commander in Chief should. I made my bows with all the grace I could command and managed to get through without mishap. I dismounted,” he added, “with a keen sense of relief.”
Mr. Hughes was being modest. The Washington Post reported that he had aroused the wildest enthusiasm. According to the New York Tribune “a continuous roar of applause … greeted him from one end of the avenue to the other.”
When Hughes stepped down as governor, Taft gratefully appointed him to the Supreme Court.
Once the ex-President was off harrowing the great carnivores in Africa, Taft, though he showed almost pathetic eagerness to carry out T.R.’s instructions, found himself straying from the straight path of progressivism. No continuous roar of applause greeted his administration.
President Taft was a corpulent humane slowmoving man with a sharp streak of intellectual honesty that made public life far from easy for him. He had the judicial temperament to a high degree and seems to have been forced to undergo the hazards of politics largely because he was a Cincinnati Taft and because his wife and the family expected it of him.
Politics with the Tafts was an avocation. The President’s father, Alphonso Taft, moved out to Ohio from Vermont in the early eighteen hundreds to grow up with the country. He served as Secretary of War and then as Attorney General in Grant’s cabinet and, in his declining years, as American minister to the courts of Vienna and St Petersburg. He left the family not only rich but leaders of a group of literate and cultured people who early made Cincinnati one of the intellectual centers of the middlewest. President Taft’s older halfbrother Charles started schools and endowed his home city with an art gallery and a symphony orchestra. The Tafts were the embodiment of public spirit.