The committee presented its findings before the district court in July 1884, and a trial date was set for November. Horace proudly recalled that his brother was instrumental in building the case for senior members of the committee. Will had traveled throughout Ohio compiling evidence and interviewing witnesses to document a pattern of disreputable behavior that had persisted for years. While his law practice suffered and his father feared that Campbell’s stranglehold on the judicial system would make “a thankless task” of all his endeavors, Will found the work exhilarating.
The intensity of his pursuit drained young Taft of any remnant of zeal for political campaigning. “I find that the Campbell case has robbed politics of any interest for me,” he told his father at the start of the 1884 presidential race between Republican James Blaine and Democrat Grover Cleveland. “If I can assist to get rid of Campbell, I think that I shall have accomplished a much greater good than by yelling myself hoarse for Blaine.”
As the election neared, however, he succumbed to pressure from Congressman Butterworth and agreed to serve as chief supervisor of elections in the city. He was charged with organizing forces to man the polling places, where intimidation and fraud were rampant, repeat voters numbered in the thousands, and hundreds of men “voted the cemetery.” Taft had done his job well. Republicans carried the city and the state, though Cleveland won the presidential election. “Your son Will did splendid service in the campaign,” Butterworth informed Alphonso. “He is a magnificent fellow. If he has a flaw in him I don’t know where it is. He is not only brainy, but brave, honorable and honest.” Despite such accolades, the political world held little appeal for Taft. “This is my last election experience I hope for some years to come,” he told his mother.
Campbell’s disbarment trial opened before three district court judges on November 6, 1884, two days after the election. “The investigation,” Taft explained to his father, would undertake “to prove acts at the different periods of [Campbell’s] professional career to show a consistent course of unprofessional conduct down to the present time.” Taft sat beside the senior attorneys who argued the case, providing documents, facts, and affidavits. The trial continued through December, with closing arguments slated for January 5, 1885.
On that crucial day, the senior attorney scheduled to present the prosecution’s closing summary fell ill, and William Taft was selected to take his place, “suddenly emerging from obscurity,” as Henry Pringle notes, “to play the part of a leading actor.” He took the floor for four hours and ten minutes, revealing an absolute mastery of the complex case. Point by point, Taft enumerated the charges against Campbell, reviewing the evidence presented over the previous twenty days. Emphasizing that the members of the Cincinnati Bar Association were “actuated by no other motive than a desire that the profession should be purged of a man whose success in this community threatens every institution of justice that is dear to us or necessary to good governance,” Taft offered a powerful concluding summary: “We have presented the case which we think calls for the action of your Honors in saying that the profession must be kept pure. We deny nothing to Mr. Campbell except integrity, and we say that that is the essential, the indispensable quality of a member of the Bar.”
On the final day, Campbell took the stand, delivering an impassioned and eloquent plea on his own behalf. “There was not a vindictive word uttered, and one looked in vain for any of the characteristics or manner of speech of the Thos. C. Campbell of one year ago,” the Commercial Gazette reported. “Tears were welling in his eyes, and there was a look of keen mental suffering upon his face,” as he described the pain and humiliation endured “from the first filing of these charges to the present moment.” He ascribed the “smoke of suspicion” that shadowed him largely to his active engagement in bitter political wranglings through the years in which “he had blindly made enemies who had multiplied.” He acknowledged that “the public had been worked up to the highest pitch of feeling” during the Berner case and that his decision to defend Berner had cost him greatly. He closed with a sentimental flourish, directly impugning Taft as the assassin of his character: “Mr. Taft has said that the relators deny me nothing save integrity. That is like saying, let me wound you just once with a rapier, and I will be merciful and thrust you not through the arm or the leg, but through the heart. Integrity is to a man what chastity is to a woman. When that is gone, all is gone.”
Taft anxiously waited week after week while the three judges deliberated. He believed both the reputation of the legal profession and the confidence of the public in the judicial system were at stake. Congressman Butterworth warned that “Tom Campbell controls one of the Judges absolutely and one of the others partially.” Nonetheless, few were prepared for the stunning verdict, delivered on February 3, 1885, that exonerated Campbell of all charges save a minor one which merited no suspension from the bar. “It was disastrous and disgraceful,” Taft reported to his father. “I am glad to say that this is the universal opinion.” Indeed, Butterworth observed that “whatever may be said of the full, clear, complete, technical legal certainty, the moral proof is absolutely overwhelming that Campbell and his ring represent the social, moral, political, legal rot of Cincinnati.”
“I am very glad now that I spoke,” Taft told his father. “The labor was very great and it is discouraging to have such an ending,” he avowed, but “the Public generally and the Bar are disposed to think that we tried the case as well as it could be tried.” From his faraway perch in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he had been appointed a second ministerial job, Alphonso agreed. “I was very much pleased with your argument,” he assured his son. “I think you must have a great majority of the community on your side; and you will find it will be remembered in your favor. You must not allow yourself to be discouraged by the folly and perverseness if not wickedness of men who have by some accident come into a little brief Authority.”
As the weeks went by, Taft managed to recover a measure of optimism. “It is the beginning of an era of reform,” he excitedly told his father. “The trial of his case has shorn [Campbell] of that veneer of respectability. . . . Everybody knows he was guilty. He and the Court have gone down together.” He also reported a curious shift in his own perception of the matter and the man: “I can hardly explain to you the change in my feeling in regard to him. I have no personal animus toward him. He is no more to me than one of the thieves or bunks men whom I know. He hates me with a perfect hatred but I am indifferent to his feeling toward me.”
Taft’s satisfaction with his own performance in the case was certainly justified. And in an ironic turn of events, his involvement also aided his judicial ambitions. Taft’s unlikely benefactor would be Campbell’s ally, Joseph Foraker, who, much to Taft’s disgust, became the Republican gubernatorial nominee several months after the trial. “I should not bow my head in tears,” Taft confessed, “if the Democratic candidate defeated him.” Despite Taft’s grave reservations about the “double-faced Campbell man,” Foraker won the election and was returned to the governor’s office two years later.
In May 1887, during Foraker’s second term, a vacancy arose in the Ohio Superior Court when Judge Judson Harmon decided to retire with fourteen months left on his elected term. To Taft’s astonishment, Foraker offered to appoint him to fill the temporary vacancy until he could run for a full term. Considering Taft’s manifest antipathy toward Foraker, Foraker’s choice of a young man who was not yet thirty remains an enigma. In a memoir written after Taft became president, Foraker’s wife, Julia, claims that an “instant sympathy” had developed between the two men when Taft, a cub reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial, covered cases over which her husband presided. “Foraker liked Taft’s smile, liked his agreeable manner, liked his type of mind,” she wrote. Foraker also recalled his own prescient respect for the young man after Taft had risen to eminence. Despite his youth, Foraker avowed, he “knew him well enough to know that he had a strong intellectual endowment, a keen, logical, analyti
cal, legal mind, and that all the essential foundations for a good Judge had been well and securely laid.”
Taft would surely have denied this “instant sympathy” with a man he roundly disliked. It is more likely that in appointing a young lawyer with Taft’s reputation for honesty and sincerity, Foraker sought to mollify reformers who called for the restoration of integrity on the Ohio bench. The Weekly Law Bulletin praised the appointment, noting that despite a mere seven years before the bar, Taft was “a very bright young man, who already enjoys great popularity and personal respect.” In a letter to Foraker, Taft acknowledged his profound appreciation. “Considering the opportunity so honorable a position offers to a man of my age and circumstances, my debt to you is very great,” he wrote. “The responsibility you assume for me in making this appointment will always be a strong incentive to an industrious and conscientious discharge of my duties.”
To Taft, who would become the youngest judge in the state of Ohio, this appointment represented “the welcome beginning of just the career he wanted.” His work as court reporter, prosecuting attorney, litigator, and counsel for the Bar Association had prepared him well, giving him an intimate acquaintance with varied aspects of the law. The golden chance to sit on the superior court represented the establishment of a judicial career that would eventually lead, after a painful detour as president, to his ultimate destination—chief justice of the United States.
WHEN THEODORE ROOSEVELT TOOK UP the study of law, he was not sure where it would lead, nor whether he even wanted to be a lawyer. Foremost, he was about to be married and had a responsibility, despite the inheritance his father left him, to support his wife and family. Within two weeks of entering Columbia Law School on October 6, 1880, he acknowledged that he had his “hands full attending to various affairs.” While mornings were spent in school, his afternoons and evenings were devoted to wedding arrangements. The marriage was scheduled to take place at Chestnut Hill on October 27, his twenty-second birthday. “It almost frightens me, in spite of my own happiness,” he revealed in his diary, “to think that perhaps I may not make her happy; but I shall try so hard; and if ever a man love woman I love her.”
The wedding was celebrated at noon on a balmy autumn day at the Unitarian church in Brookline before a large crowd, including Theodore’s childhood friend Edith Carow. After a sumptuous reception at the Lee mansion, the young couple spent the night in a hotel suite and then headed to Oyster Bay. They remained two weeks at the family’s country home, where their every need was attended to by a cook, maid, and groom. “Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about,” Roosevelt asserted in his diary, then proceeded to detail idyllic days spent driving their buggy, roaming through the woods and fields, playing “equally matched” lawn tennis, and reading poetry before blazing fires at night.
On November 17, Roosevelt resumed his law school classes. He set forth shortly after 7:30 a.m. from his mother’s house on 57th Street, where he and Alice would spend the winter, to begin the three-mile walk to the four-story law building on Great Jones Street at the corner of Lafayette Place. At Columbia, as at Harvard, he stood out as “an energetic questioner of the lectures,” his intensity provoking a mixture of resentment and admiration in his classmates. Though the pleasure he took in his studies is amply expressed in his journal, he was troubled that “some of the teaching of the law books and of the classroom seemed to me to be against justice.” He noted critically that “we are concerned with [the] question of what law is, not what it ought to be.” Nevertheless, more than 1,000 pages of handwritten notes during his two years of study testify to his diligence, and he impressed professors with his amazingly deft grasp of materials.
During his first year in law school, Roosevelt assumed several positions formerly held by his father on the boards of charitable organizations. Hopeful this philanthropic work might prove fulfilling, he found himself ill-suited to follow in his father’s footsteps. “I tried faithfully to do what father had done,” he confessed to his reporter friend, Jacob Riis, “but I did it poorly. . . . [I] joined this and that committee. Father had done good work on so many; but in the end I found out that we have each to work in his own way to do our best.” Despite his relative youth, Roosevelt demonstrated a confidence and clear-minded assessment of his own interests and capabilities, making him far more successful than Taft in refusing endeavors he found uncongenial.
During this hectic phase of his life, Roosevelt even managed to try his hand as an author. As a senior at Harvard, he had embarked on a project that would become his first published work, The Naval War of 1812. His interest in the war had been sparked by a volume in the Porcellian Club library by the reigning British authority on the subject, William James. Angered by the biased, boastful approach of the author, who appeared “afflicted with a hatred toward the Americans,” Roosevelt searched out American historians of the war, only to find their accounts equally distorted by jingoism.
With the goal of writing an impartial history, he began research into the official papers and records on both sides of the conflict. By the spring semester of his first year at Columbia, he noted: “I spend most of my spare time in the Astor Library on my ‘Naval History.’ ” In the reading room—“a wonderfully open two-story-high hall surrounded by gilded balconies and books arranged in double-height alcoves”—he pored over official letters, logbooks, original contracts, and muster rolls.
With the same inordinate concentration he gave to law lectures in the mornings, Theodore spent his afternoons at the library compiling figures to compare warring ships in terms of tonnage and guns, and researching the number of officers and men on each side as the war began and ended. He concluded that in most of the battles at sea, the American fleets overpowered the British, but that American historians, desiring to embellish the valor of the commanders, minimized the difference; British historians retaliated with even greater exaggerations. With his fierce utilization of every waking moment, Roosevelt stole time to write both before and after a full round of social engagements, including formal balls, nights at the theatre, large receptions, and more intimate parties. “We’re dining out in twenty minutes,” Alice light-heartedly complained, “and Teedy’s drawing little ships!”
On May 12, 1881, the day after classes ended, Theodore and Alice sailed off on their delayed honeymoon to Europe. His diary tells of joyous days crowded with visits to castles, cathedrals, and museums, with sailing excursions on inland rivers and carriage rides through the Alps. “Alice is the best traveling companion I have ever known,” Theodore marveled. “Altogether it would be difficult to imagine any two people enjoying a trip more.” But when they reached Zermatt, Theodore pursued a solo adventure: the irresistible challenge of climbing the dangerous Matterhorn. “I was anxious to go up it,” he acknowledged to Bamie, “because it is reputed very difficult and a man who has been up it can fairly claim to have taken his degree as, at any rate, a subordinate kind of mountaineer.” In the company of two guides, finding the climb “very laborious” but with “enough peril to make it exciting,” he reached the summit.
Roosevelt managed to work on his naval history throughout the trip, lugging his books and papers from country to country. “You would be amused to see me writing it here,” he told Bamie. “I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me. I wonder if I won’t find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell.”
Returning home from Europe, he resumed his law courses in early October. “Am working fairly at my law,” he reported a few weeks later, “and hardest of all at my book.” In early December, he delivered a 500-page manuscript to Putnam’s. Recalling this maiden literary voyage, Roosevelt acknowledged years later that some of the chapters “were so dry that they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.” Nonetheless, uniformly favorable reviews hailed his accomplishment, noting flashes of the muscular tone and vigor that would mark his mature prose. “The v
olume is an excellent one in every respect,” noted the reviewer for the New York Times, “and shows in so young an author the best promise for a good historian—fearlessness of statement, caution, endeavor to be impartial, and a brisk and interesting way of telling events.”
It was an auspicious beginning. He learned early on the rewards attendant upon painstaking research and the meticulous deployment of facts. The boldness with which he challenged entrenched opinion was refreshing to critics, although one reviewer remarked that his running criticisms of the British authority suggested “a comparison with those zealous sailors who ‘overloaded their carronades so as to very much destroy the effect of their fire.’ ”
In the years ahead, even as he turned his prodigious energies and talents to the world of politics, Theodore Roosevelt never stopped writing. Though he may never have realized his dream of writing a book that would rank “in the very first class,” he produced a substantial body of excellent work, forty books in all, in addition to hundreds of magazine articles and book reviews. He covered an astonishing range of subjects, including narratives of hunting expeditions, meditations and natural histories on wolves, the grizzly bear, and the black-tailed deer, biographies of public figures, literary essays, commentaries on war and peace, and sketches of birds. His four-volume history of the American frontier would win high praise from the eminent historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who termed it “the first really satisfactory history of the field . . . a wonderful story, most entertainingly told.”
Roosevelt’s many-sided writings would prove an invaluable resource during his presidency, passionately linking him with hunters, naturalists, bird lovers, historians, biographers, conservationists, educators, sailors, soldiers, and sportsmen. “Everything was of interest to him,” marveled the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, “people of today, people of yesterday, animals, minerals, stones, stars, the past, the future.”