The True Flag by Stephen Kinzer

Author:Stephen Kinzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

8

What a Choice for a Patriotic American!

Scion of political royalty in Ohio, obese and widely admired, William Howard Taft enjoyed a remarkable rise. At Yale he had been a heavyweight wrestling champion. Back home, partly through the influence of his father, a former attorney general and secretary of war, he was named a prosecutor and then a judge. At the age of thirty-two he became the youngest-ever solicitor general of the United States. A decade later, in January 1900, he was serving on the United States Court of Appeals in Cincinnati and dreaming of a seat on the Supreme Court when he received an enigmatic telegram from President McKinley.

“I would like to see you in Washington on important business within the next few days,” it said.

The dramatic escalation of the Philippine War had shocked McKinley. By the time he wired Taft, seventy thousand American soldiers were in the Philippines, fighting a war that anti-imperialists had foreseen but few others expected. He had to decide how to govern the islands while “rebellion” raged. The United States was new to the business of ruling foreign lands, and McKinley asked one of his confidants, Senator John Spooner of Wisconsin, for advice. Spooner studied various options and recommended that McKinley do what Jefferson had done after purchasing the Louisiana Territory: appoint a civilian governor to rule alongside the military commander. McKinley liked the idea.

“Judge, I’d like you to go to the Philippines,” he told Taft as soon as their White House chat began.

Taft was taken aback. Later he wrote that McKinley “might as well have told me that he wanted me to take a flying machine.” He was at heart a jurist, not adventurous by nature, and he worried that the tropics might not suit a man of his constitution.

“Why, I am not the man you want,” Taft protested. “To begin with, I have never approved of keeping the Philippines.”

McKinley surprised him by saying he agreed. “But we have them,” the president reasoned, “and in dealing with them, I think I can trust the man who didn’t want them better than the man who did.”

An awkward silence followed. Sensing Taft’s reluctance, Secretary of War Elihu Root, who had been listening quietly, offered a different kind of nudge. He appealed to Taft’s sense of patriotism and manly duty.

“You have had an easy time of it, holding office since you were twenty-one,” Root said. “Now your country needs you. This is a task worthy of any man. This is the parting of the ways. You may go on holding the job you have in a humdrum, mediocre way. But here is something that will test you, something in the way of effort and struggle. And the question is, will you take the harder or the easier task?”

Still Taft resisted. To close this deal, McKinley had to produce the high card he had been saving.

Everyone in the room knew of Taft’s desire for promotion to the Supreme Court. Go to the Philippines, McKinley promised, and “if I last and the opportunity comes, I will appoint you.

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