(Back): Christopher Morley C. C. Lane Donald Scott
(Middle): Henry Seidel Canby Simeon Strunsky Arthur Pound Allan Nevins Charles McD. Puckette
(Front): Franz Schneider Royal J. Davis W. O. Scroggs Edwin F. Gay
EDITORIAL COUNCIL, 1922.
Toward the seven years of Roosevelt’s Presidency the attitude of the Evening Post had to be a constant alternation of hostility and friendliness. It disliked his love of excitement and sensation, but liked his energy. It attacked his demands for a big army and navy, but admired his brilliant conclusion of peace between Russia and Japan. It believed him indifferent to constitutional and legal methods, censuring his tendency to ride rough-shod over Congress and curse the courts; but it valued his ability to get things done, and recognized the immense constructive achievement of his administration—his work for conservation and irrigation, his railway rate legislation, his pursuit of land thieves, postal thieves, and rebate-granting railways, his successful fight in the Northern Securities case. Above all, it recognized in him an awakener of the national conscience:
A great upheaval of moral sentiment took place during his administration. He was not the sole cause of it, but he utilized it and furthered it mightily. An account of stewardship of the rich was vigorously demanded. Business dishonesty was held up to abhorrence. Corporation rottenness was probed. All this, in spite of excesses of denunciation and legislation, was highly salutary. It was full time that people who had been mismanaging corporations and exploiting the public were called sharply to book.... The quickening of the national conscience, the rousing of a people long dead in trespasses and sins, with such concrete results as the reform of the insurance companies and the restrictions upon predatory public service corporations, is a service the value of which can scarcely be overlooked. (March, 1909.)
Having been outraged by the McKinley tariff and done its best to further the political revolt which that measure produced, having been equally denunciatory of the Dingley tariff, the Evening Post hoped in 1909 for a genuine revision downward. Throughout the campaign of 1908 it had regretted the lukewarmness of Taft’s utterances on this subject. The day after his election Mr. Ogden gave him a grave warning, which now appears as a prophecy justified:
To Mr. Taft we look for the fulfillment of those solemn promises—particularly for reform of the tariff—to which he and his party are committed. Notwithstanding the returns from the polls, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the recklessness and extravagance which have been encouraged by twelve years of unbroken Republican ascendency.... More menacing yet has been the open alliance between the protected manufacturers and the Republican politicians for the exploitation of the farmers and the vast mass of consumers. It is not conceivable that this sinister partnership can continue as in the past. The new and radical element which is gaining control of the Republican organization in the west will fight the stolid stand-patters like Aldrich and Cannon, and it may be set down as a certainty that if Mr. Taft does not join with them in the task of setting the Republican house in order and in casting the money-changers out of the temple, some man of foresight and power will come forward to wage the battle in behalf of the people. The great cause will produce the champion, as it produced Lincoln, and later Cleveland.
The Taft administration was but a month old when the Evening Post warned it again that the Payne-Aldrich bill contained provisions that would drive it from power unless the President intervened vigorously to remove them. When Dolliver led the attack of the West upon the tricks and robberies of the bill, charging that hoggish manufacturers had obtained permission from Aldrich to write their own tariff clauses, the editors rejoiced that never before had the public been so awake to greed and dishonesty of protection. When it found that its appeals to Taft to take action were in vain, it was totally disgusted with the President. His Winona speech it thought indefensible. Like the rest of the country, it soon discovered that he had marked deficiencies for his great office. In its view, Taft was wrong in the Ballinger affair, and in his initial advocacy of the remission of Panama tolls. He was not merely a poor politician, in the sense that he could not keep an effective party following, but he lacked foresight and energy. “He has shown himself devoid of the higher imagination in public affairs, too little prescient, without the touch of quick sympathy and popular quality which would have enabled him to take arms against a sea of troubles,” wrote Mr. Ogden as the administration ended.
Yet the Evening Post did not believe that Taft’s administration was the black betrayal and wretched failure which many said in 1912 it was. The country had many services to thank him for, it said, and his reputation would certainly benefit by the lapse of time. As between Taft and Roosevelt in 1912, it decidedly preferred Taft. In an editorial as the year 1911 closed, “A Square Deal for Taft,” it accused the former President of hitting below the belt. “Roosevelt is deliberately allowing himself to be used against the President, and allowing it ambiguously, equivocally, and not in the honorable and manly fashion which he has been forever advocating.... Why does he not frankly state the grounds of his opposition to Taft?” When Roosevelt did throw his hat into the ring, the editors deemed his cause in many respects weak. They felt that his denunciation of Taft was malignantly overdone. Recognizing many fine qualities in the Progressive movement, they believed that no new party could come into being without some one compelling moral or economic issue; that a program of all the virtues might be attractive, but did not afford a sound political basis, at least when coupled with the fortunes of an ambitious self-seeker. Parts of the Roosevelt program, notably his proposal for the recall of judicial decisions, and his plan for regulating the trusts by commission, struck the Post as thoroughly unsound.