April 15, 1910—One of the happier days of—and great precedents set by—William Howard Taft occurred when he became the first President to throw out the ceremonial opening-day pitch for the start of the baseball season.
It turned out to be an even better day because the Washington Senators had on the mound Walter Johnson, which was the next best thing for the average baseball fan to having money in the bank. The “Big Train” then proceeded to deliver practically a seminar on big-league pitching—a one-hit, complete-game, 3-0 shutout of the Philadelphia Athletics.
Everybody ended up smiling that day. Probably none needed it more than Taft, who could use the cheers after his morning paper gave him an unpleasant reminder of what happened 24 hours before.
The New York Times reported on the 15th that the previous day, Taft’s address to a group of suffragettes at Washington’s Arlington Hall had started with applause but ended with hisses. It was not hard to see why: he began by saying that as a youth, he’d been persuaded by John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women that adult females should be given the right to vote, but he’d changed his mind since then.
Poor Big Bill (we won’t call him fat in this space)—he just had no instinct for pleasing voters (or, in this case, progressives who believed in extending the franchise). As amiable a man who ever sat in the Oval Office, the President possessed quite a bit of intellectual firepower (eight years after leaving the White House, he got the job he had really wanted all his life—Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), but, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember names and faces. At one rally, he told one voter: “They tell me I ought to remember you, but bless my soul, I cannot recall you at all.”
All this was in contrast to Taft’s predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, a phenomenon in American politics.
Here’s a wrinkle on this whole affair: In his time in office, TR became famous for either a series of historic firsts or for doing something more than anyone else (e.g., the first President to visit a foreign country while in office—Panama, the first great conservation President, the first President to ban smoking from federal government offices).
Now, here’s the thing: Roosevelt was interested in sports, for sure: Five years before, he had even called together representatives of the “Big Three” college powers (Harvard, Princeton and Yale) and persuaded them to set up rules to make football less brutal.
But baseball? Though sons Kermit and Quentin played the game avidly, and TR was even the first President to be issued a lifetime pass by major-league baseball, he couldn’t bring himself to attend a game throughout his time in the White House. Maybe it had something to do, as daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth suggested afterward, with the fact that he regarded it as a “mollycoddle game”—not as tough as tennis, polo, lacrosse, boxing, and, of course, football.
Yet here was Taft, one year after succeeding Roosevelt in office, having fun at was already the national pastime--a place where (unlike today) it was as easy for the common man to purchase a ticket as, say, a Wall Street tycoon.
So you’re TR, taking this all in. I bet he’d be a bit jealous that he hadn’t come up with such a crowd- (and voter-) pleasing idea, don’t you?
It turned out to be an even better day because the Washington Senators had on the mound Walter Johnson, which was the next best thing for the average baseball fan to having money in the bank. The “Big Train” then proceeded to deliver practically a seminar on big-league pitching—a one-hit, complete-game, 3-0 shutout of the Philadelphia Athletics.
Everybody ended up smiling that day. Probably none needed it more than Taft, who could use the cheers after his morning paper gave him an unpleasant reminder of what happened 24 hours before.
The New York Times reported on the 15th that the previous day, Taft’s address to a group of suffragettes at Washington’s Arlington Hall had started with applause but ended with hisses. It was not hard to see why: he began by saying that as a youth, he’d been persuaded by John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women that adult females should be given the right to vote, but he’d changed his mind since then.
Poor Big Bill (we won’t call him fat in this space)—he just had no instinct for pleasing voters (or, in this case, progressives who believed in extending the franchise). As amiable a man who ever sat in the Oval Office, the President possessed quite a bit of intellectual firepower (eight years after leaving the White House, he got the job he had really wanted all his life—Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), but, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember names and faces. At one rally, he told one voter: “They tell me I ought to remember you, but bless my soul, I cannot recall you at all.”
All this was in contrast to Taft’s predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, a phenomenon in American politics.
Here’s a wrinkle on this whole affair: In his time in office, TR became famous for either a series of historic firsts or for doing something more than anyone else (e.g., the first President to visit a foreign country while in office—Panama, the first great conservation President, the first President to ban smoking from federal government offices).
Now, here’s the thing: Roosevelt was interested in sports, for sure: Five years before, he had even called together representatives of the “Big Three” college powers (Harvard, Princeton and Yale) and persuaded them to set up rules to make football less brutal.
But baseball? Though sons Kermit and Quentin played the game avidly, and TR was even the first President to be issued a lifetime pass by major-league baseball, he couldn’t bring himself to attend a game throughout his time in the White House. Maybe it had something to do, as daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth suggested afterward, with the fact that he regarded it as a “mollycoddle game”—not as tough as tennis, polo, lacrosse, boxing, and, of course, football.
Yet here was Taft, one year after succeeding Roosevelt in office, having fun at was already the national pastime--a place where (unlike today) it was as easy for the common man to purchase a ticket as, say, a Wall Street tycoon.
So you’re TR, taking this all in. I bet he’d be a bit jealous that he hadn’t come up with such a crowd- (and voter-) pleasing idea, don’t you?
And don’t you think that this reminder of all the opportunities he was missing now that he was no longer in the White House might have contributed to the decision, within two years, to “throw his hat into the ring”—i.e., make a try for a third term and take on his old friend “Will” Taft—a split that presaged the liberal/moderate-conservative divide in the GOP for the next century?
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