Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

The New Year’s Reception was followed in quick succession by the Diplomatic, Congressional, Judicial and other state functions; the winter passed like a dream; the Garden Party season was upon us; then came the greatest event of our four years in the White House, our Silver Wedding.

Twenty-five years married and all but a single year of it spent in the public service. It did not seem unfitting to me that this anniversary should be spent in the White House or that we should seek to make it an event not to be forgotten by anybody who happened to witness it. I thanked the happy fate that had given me a summer wedding-day because I needed all outdoors for the kind of party I wanted to give. That silver was showered upon us until we were almost buried in silver was incidental; we couldn’t help it; it was our twenty-fifth anniversary and we had to celebrate it.

I am not going to try to remember or to take the trouble to find out how many invitations we issued. I know there were four or five thousand people present and that a more brilliant throng was never gathered in this country.

It was a night garden party with such illuminations as are quite beyond description. Every tree and bush was ablaze with myriads of tiny coloured lights, the whole stately mansion was outlined in a bright white glow; there were strings of bobbing, fantastic lanterns wherever a string would go; the great fountain was playing at its topmost height in every colour of the rainbow; while on the gleaming point of the Monument and on the flag stretched in the breeze from the staff on the top of the White House shone the steady gleam of two searchlights.

My husband and I received the almost endless line of guests under a large tree about midway between the South Portico and the fountain; the entire house was thrown open and was filled constantly with people seeking the refreshment tables laid in the dining rooms and vestibule. I have a right to be enthusiastic in my memory of that party because without enthusiasm it could not have been given at all. And why should not one be frankly grateful for success?

With the passing of another season, in no way different from those that went before, I come to the end of my story. There is another story to tell, longer and fuller, but it does not belong to me. It belongs to the man whose career has made my story worth the telling.

After Mr. Taft was renominated, or rather after the second convention in Chicago when the Republican party was divided, I began to make plans for the future in which the White House played no part. I stopped reading the accounts of the bitter political contest because I found that the opposition newspapers made so much more impression on me than those that were friendly to my husband that I was in a state of constant rage which could do me no possible good.

Mr. Taft had never been subjected to bitter criticism and wholesale attack until his term in the Presidency and I suppose I had formed a habit of thinking that there was nothing to criticise him for except, perhaps, his unfortunate shortcoming of not knowing much and of caring less about the way the game of politics is played. Such criticism of him as Mr. Bryan’s supporters were able to create for their use in 1908 amounted to nothing. His record of twenty years’ uncriticised service stood, and he stood on it. I think we both avoided much perturbation after we became convinced of the unfairness and injustice of much that was said by hostile newspapers, by not reading it. Mr. Taft took much satisfaction from those words of Lincoln’s which Mr. Norton, his Secretary, had photographed and placed in a frame on his office desk:

“If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”

I wanted him to be re-elected, naturally, but I never entertained the slightest expectation of it and only longed for the end of the turmoil when he could rest his weary mind and get back into association with the pleasant things of life. Fortunately we are a family that laughs. Both Mr. Taft and the children manage to get some fun out of almost everything, and I and my matter of factness have afforded them lifelong amusement. They like now to tell a story about me which doesn’t impress me as being particularly funny.