Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

Mr. Taft’s mother, who took an active and very intelligent interest in her son’s work and who sent him letters by nearly every mail which were filled with entertaining and accurate comment on Philippine affairs, took the suggestion of his being a Presidential possibility quite seriously. And she did not at all approve of it. Having seen a number of press notices about it she sat down and wrote him a long letter in which she discussed with measured arguments the wisdom of his keeping out of politics. At that time the idea appealed to nothing in him except his sense of humour. He wrote to his brother Charles: “To me such a discussion has for its chief feature the element of humour. The idea that a man who has issued injunctions against labour unions, almost by the bushel, who has sent at least ten or a dozen violent labour agitators to jail, and who is known as one of the worst judges for the maintenance of government by injunction, could ever be a successful candidate on a Presidential ticket, strikes me as intensely ludicrous; and had I the slightest ambition in that direction I hope that my good sense would bid me to suppress it. But, more than this, the horrors of a modern Presidential campaign and the political troubles of the successful candidate for President, rob the office of the slightest attraction for me. I have but one ambition, and if that cannot be satisfied I am content to return to the practice of the law with reasonable assurance that if my health holds out I can make a living, and make Nellie and the children more comfortable than I could if I went to Washington.”

This letter is dated August 27, 1901, and was written on a Spanish steamer which the Commission had taken from Aparri, on the north coast of Luzon, after they finished the last of the long trips they had to make for the purpose of organising civil government in the provinces.

It was just after they returned from this trip; just when things were at their brightest; when everything seemed to be developing so rapidly and our hopes were running high, that we were shaken by the appalling news of the attack on President McKinley. We had kept luncheon waiting for Mr. Taft until it seemed useless to wait any longer and we were at table when he came in. He looked so white and stunned and helpless that I was frightened before he could speak. Then he said, “The President has been shot.”

I suppose that throughout the United States the emotions of horror and grief were beyond expression, but I cannot help thinking that to the Americans in the Philippines the shock came with more overwhelming force than to any one else. Mr. McKinley was our chief in a very special sense. He was the director of our endeavours and the father of our destinies. It was he who had sent the civil officials out there and it was on the strength of his never failing support that we had relied in all our troubles. It might, indeed, have been Mr. Root in whose mind the great schemes for the development of the islands and their peoples had been conceived, but Mr. Root exercised his authority through the wise endorsement of the President and it was to the President that we looked for sanction or criticism of every move that was made. Then, too, the extraordinary sweetness of his nature inspired in every one with whom he came in close contact a strong personal affection, and we had reason to feel this more than most people. Truly, it was as if the foundations of our world had crumbled under us.

But he was not dead; and on the fact that he was strong and clean we began to build hopes. Yet the hush which fell upon the community on the day that he was shot was not broken until a couple of days before he died when we received word that he was recovering. We were so far away that we could not believe anybody would send us such a cable unless it were founded on a practical certainty, and our “Thank God!” was sufficiently fervent to dispel all the gloom that had enveloped us. Then came the cable announcing his death. I need not dwell on that.

Mr. Taft and Mr. Roosevelt knew each other very well. They had been in Washington together years before, Mr. Taft as Solicitor General, Mr. Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner, and they had corresponded with some frequency since we had been in Manila. So, in so far as the work in the Philippines was concerned, my husband knew where the new President’s sympathies were and he had no fears on that score. At the same time he was most anxious to have Mr. Root continued as Secretary of War in order that there might not be any delay or radical change in carrying out the plans which had been adopted and put in operation under his direction. All activities suffered a sort of paralysis from the crushing blow of the President’s assassination, but the press of routine work continued. We were very much interested in learning that a great many Filipinos, clever politicians as they are, thought that after Mr. McKinley’s death Mr. Bryan would become President, and that, after all, they would get immediate independence.

Then came the awful tragedy of Balangiga. It happened only a few days after the President died, while our nerves were still taut, and filled us all with unspeakable horror intensified by the first actual fear we had felt since we had been in the Philippine Islands. Company “C” of the 9th Infantry, stationed at the town of Balangiga on the island of Samar, was surprised at breakfast, without arms and at a considerable distance from their quarters, and fifty of them were massacred. About thirty fought their way bare handed through the mob, each man of which had a bolo or a gun, and lived to tell the tale. It was a disaster so ghastly in its details, so undreamed of under the conditions of almost universal peace which had been established, that it created absolute panic. Men began to go about their everyday occupations in Manila carrying pistols conspicuously displayed, and half the people one met could talk of nothing else but their conviction that the whole archipelago was a smouldering volcano and that we were all liable to be murdered in our beds any night. Of course this made the Army officers more certain than ever that the Islands should have remained under military control indefinitely, and I cannot deny that, at the time, their arguments seemed to have some foundation. It was a frightful nervous strain and it took several months of tranquillity to restore confidence. If it had been a regular engagement in which the Americans had sustained a reverse it could have been accepted with some philosophy, but it was a plain massacre of a company of defenceless men by many times their number who had gotten into the town with the consent of the American authorities, and in conspiracy with the local headman and the native parish priest, on the pretext of bringing in for surrender a band of insurrectos.

The man, Lucban, who was in command of the Samar ladrones who committed this atrocity, is now a prominent politico in Manila, and it is interesting to know that only last year, in a campaign speech, he referred with dramatic intensity to “our glorious victory of Balangiga.” He was appealing to an ignorant electorate, many of whom, as he knew, wore the scar of the awful Katipunan “blood pact,” but it is just to record that the average Filipino is not proud of the Balangiga “victory.”

Shortly before these unhappy events my sister Maria was called back to America by the illness of our mother, and I was left to face the tragic excitements of the month of September without her comforting companionship. By October I began to feel that I would have to get out of the Philippine Islands or suffer a nervous breakdown, so my husband and I agreed that it would be well for me to “run up to China,” as they express it out there. Running up to China at that time of year meant getting out of tropic heat into bracing autumn weather with a nip of real winter in it, and there was nothing that I needed more.

Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Moses were both anxious to see something of China before leaving the Orient, and as this seemed an excellent opportunity to make the trip, they decided to go with me. The Boxer Insurrection had just been suppressed and the Dowager Empress had not yet returned from the West, whither she had fled during the siege of Peking. We were used to the alarums of war and we thought we were likely to see more of China “from the inside” than if we visited the country during a period of complete calm. Then there were wonderful tales of valuable “loot” which interested us. Not necessarily illegitimate loot, but curios and art treasures in the hands of Chinese themselves who were selling things at ridiculously low figures and, sometimes, with a fascinating air of great mystery. There is some allurement in the idea of bargaining for priceless porcelains, ivories, silks and Russian sables behind closed and double-locked doors, in the dark depths of some wretched Chinese hovel. Our Army officers who had helped to relieve Peking brought us stories of this kind of adventure, and I secretly hoped that we should be able to have just some such experience. But being the wives of American officials I thought likely we should be “taken care of” every hour of every twenty-four. And so we were.