Word: roosevelts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Noting resemblances between the first and the second Roosevelt has been the pastime of many a pundit. Along about 1942, equally instructive parallels may perhaps be noted between their successors. To any such exercises, Henry F. Pringle's biography of Taft should be indispensable. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Pringle was well qualified to write about the man whom T. R. picked for President and, later, bitterly denounced. Nearly 500,000 Taft letters and papers were placed at his disposal by the Taft family. The result: a play-by-play account...
...anti-trust decision soberly took issue with a more lenient Supreme Court. As president of the Philippine Commission, he replaced military rule with the rule of law, achieved one of those enormous successes that make diffident men more diffident. Time after time his enthusiastic friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, invited "Dear Will" to return to Washington, finally got him back...
Taft himself shared the inability of the country at large to shake off the spell of the Rough Rider; but Pringle's evidence makes it clear that in certain essential particulars Roosevelt left his friend to face the music. T. R.'s liberalism had somehow avoided the high tariff; Taft had to cope with that. T. R. had swung the big stick against the trusts; Taft had to make it connect. T. R. had been supple enough to play politics with a conservative Congress without seeming to do so; Taft had to temper Uncle Joe Cannon...
...whole country go hog-wild over a headline which twisted a few forthright words in one of his speeches. The muckrakers were abroad in the land and Taft lacked T. R.'s flair for handling them. The great "scandal" of his administration, and a chief cause of Roosevelt's resentment, was drummed up by Norman Hapgood of Cottier's against Secretary of the Interior Ballinger. Taft knew, and Pringle proves, that the evidence was inaccurate. Taft stuck by Ballinger and fired Roosevelt's protege, Gilford Pinchot, for joining in the clamor...
...When Roosevelt got back in 1910, the two old friends could not face the ordeal of seeing each other alone. The split was agony for Taft, who felt only admiration and gratitude for Roosevelt and considered that T. R.'s program had been faithfully carried on. "Theodore can't hear a dog bark," he said sadly, "without wanting to try conclusions with him." When Roosevelt campaigned against Taft in 1912, Taft refuted him point by point in Boston, then went back to his train with tears in his eyes...