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The 1908 presidential campaign made technological history, and part of that history was made in the mountains of Virginia.
That year’s campaign — which saw Republican William Howard Taft and Democrat William Jennings Bryan vie to succeed Theodore Roosevelt — saw both sides look for new ways to get their message to voters. With help from Thomas Edison, both men turned to a technology that was starting to revolutionize the distribution of music: The phonograph. Edison helped both candidates make recordings of their speeches, which were then distributed to a wider audience. Bryan was recorded at his home in Nebraska, while Taft was recorded in Hot Springs, which Roanoke Valley historian Warren Moorman says could make Taft the first person in Virginia to make a vinyl record. (I’m indebted to Moorman for alerting me to this and supplying some of the sources I’m about to cite. I’m also indebted to Belinda Harris for helping me turn up some old newspaper accounts.)
Another relatively new technology whose popularity was increasing in 1908 bedeviled Taft, though: He got stuck in a phone booth at The Homestead and had to be sawed out.
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In a recent column, I wrote about how Bryan came to Roanoke in 1906, as he plotted his political comeback after two presidential campaign losses, and delivered a speech whose themes later became the cornerstone of his third and final campaign in 1908.
Bryan returned to Roanoke in January 1908, officially to visit his daughter, Grace, at Hollins Institute (now Hollins University) but unofficially to speak to Roanoke Democrats. He had an afternoon reception at the Hotel Roanoke, where a local “messenger boy” named Gwaltney arrived to deliver a telegram to Bryan but was shy about the matter. “Mr. Bryan caught the boy’s look of wonder” and gave him “a hearty handshake,” The Roanoke Times said. “That was too much for the boy who could hardly wait until he reached the sun parlor (where several envious companions were awaiting him) to emit a whoop of joy and gratification.” That evening, Bryan spoke at the Assembly Hall, which The Roanoke Times reported was “jammed to suffocation.” It took 15 minutes for Bryan to make his way through the throng. He devoted his speech to what was a standard Bryan topic: blaming the nation’s troubles on Wall Street. The Roanoke Times reported: “We have one man, Mr. Bryan said, whose fortune is estimated at five hundred millions of dollars. No man can earn such an amount honestly. Such fortunes do not represent a service to society.”
The energetic Bryan went on to win the Democratic nomination easily that July and embarked on one of his trademark whistlestop tours of the country. The more leisurely Taft, who was about to step down as secretary of war, won the Republican nomination in June — and then promptly took a two-month holiday at The Homestead in Bath County.
The archives of The Homestead (which was also helpful in this research) paint a colorful account of Taft’s time at the resort. He, his wife, Nellie, and son, Charlie, arrived shortly after midnight on July 3. “Especially large horses have been brought in” for Taft, the archives show. Taft, who had been a heavyweight wrestling champion at Yale, was a famously large man. At one point during his presidency, he weighed in at 354 pounds. Multiple newspapers across the country that summer reported that early in his stay at The Homestead, Taft went into a phone booth to take a call — and got stuck. “He was stuck hard and fast,” reported the Akron Beacon Journal. “A hurry call was sent to the office of the telephone company, and the company’s carpenter, with saw and hammers, started out to release Judge Taft.” (Taft had previously been a federal judge and was often referred to with that honorific.) The Southern Bell Telephone Company then decided to build a new phone booth at The Homestead that could accommodate Taft’s girth. It, the Akron Beacon Journal reported, “eclipsed anything in size south of Mason and Dixon’s Line.”
Taft’s time at The Homestead was a working vacation. He had “4 rooms for business, a reception room, private office, secretary’s office and file room.” A day-by-day account of his two months at the hotel shows he spent much of his time meeting with visiting politicians and writing letters to various officials — as well as riding horses and playing golf. Taft especially liked to play golf.
On July 12, Taft wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt: “I hope you are enjoying the summer. For me, I have been playing eighteen holes of golf every day in a fairly hot sun, and sweating the poisonous remains of a Washington winter out through my pores, and feel greatly the better for it after a week. Hot Springs is not noted for its cool temperatures in mid-summer but it is 2,500 feet up and the nights are always cool. The country about is very beautiful. The Hot Springs Hotel Company has invested very large sums of money in the improvement of the neighborhood. The golf links are as well kept as any golf links I know.” He found the course short but hilly. “In going over the links, one has to climb many hills and that sort of exercise of the heart is prescribed by a physician and is excellent whether one is well or ill. My tailor tells me that my waistband has already gone down with the effect of one week’s work.”
Taft also told the president: “The summer season is not the season for the fashionable people.” They came during the spring and fall. As a result, Taft felt he got a good deal on the hotel’s rates, which were half the spring and fall rates. “In other words, I rejoice that I am enjoying something which the predatory rich have paid for at the regular season.”
Taft wrote, “I have my horse here and ride about in the mountains in the afternoon whenever I have the time but I find my mail is so heavy, and the necessity of preparing my speech so pressing that I don’t get as much time as I should like.” The speech he referenced was his speech accepting the Republican nomination; this was an era when presidential candidates didn’t attend their conventions — that was seen as being too grasping.
Besides meeting with a parade of Republican politicians who passed through, Taft hosted a dinner “for 40 political writers and reporters.” Some appear to have also spent much of the summer at The Homestead to report on whatever Taft might have to say. There were frequent baseball games between the reporters and the politicians, who took the name “The Steamrollers.” The New York Times reports that the reporters always won, partly because Taft’s 10-year-old son took their side, and he was a good hitter. Often actual news was low. When Taft broke 92 on the links, that merited coverage in The New York Times. So did the news that he had defeated “a well-known local golf pro.” The press ferreted out the news that Taft had been thrown from his horse (but was not injured) during a 16-mile ride.
Sometimes there were press questions about his current weight; at one point The New York Times reported that he had lost 5 pounds and showed up unannounced in the ballroom that evening to dance a waltz with the wife of an Ohio supporter. (Some of you might be thinking that press coverage then was as focused on trivial details as some of it is now.) One day Taft got in 36 holes of golf, then sat on the veranda with future diplomat John Hays Hammond and invoked an Aesop’s fable about a donkey to respond to criticism that he was playing so much golf. For a few days, Taft took a side trip over the mountains to the Greenbrier County Horse Show in White Sulphur Springs, where he stayed at The Greenbrier (and led the dancing that night). The New York Times reported that Taft had used the occasion to buy a horse big enough for him to ride. This was incorrect. Taft denied the report, but “hundreds of offers of horses large enough for him to ride began to pour in.”
At least twice, Taft attended church at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Hot Springs. This was noteworthy because Taft was a Unitarian, and Bryan, a fundamentalist Presbyterian who was outspoken in his religious views, had been making an issue of Taft’s faith. The Homestead’s chronology of Taft’s time notes several days when he was busy writing letters about the religion issue and how to handle it.
Other days were taken up by discussion of how to handle the touchy issue of Prohibition (Taft took no position but had previously written that it was foolish to pass a law that couldn’t be enforced), how to handle squabbling Republican politicians in one state after another, a briefing on labor issues, and consultation over how to respond to certain press reports. (The New York Times had interviewed Taft’s Unitarian pastor in his native Cincinnati; the pastor disclosed that as a child, Taft had once portrayed a fairy in a church play — when he weighed a svelte 175 pounds.) Taft also expressed private displeasure that the Republican convention had nominated New York Rep. James Sherman as his running mate. He decided to return one controversial campaign contribution and vowed not to accept any corporate donations.
Virginia was a staunchly Democratic state in those days (Roosevelt had won just under 37% of the vote in the state four years before), so there were few local Republican officials for Taft to meet with. There was one, though: Rep. C. Bascom Slemp of Lee County was the state’s only Republican congressman. He visited, bringing with him a delegation of Shenandoah Valley Republicans. A delegation of politicians from the Philippines (then a U.S. territory) came to visit. Among them: Manuel Quezon, who later became president there.
Taft labored over his acceptance speech. His frame wasn’t the only thing that was overweight. The first draft of his speech came in at 10,000 words. He wanted to get it down to 3,500 (although the final version measured 12,057 words).
A letter that William Howard Taft sent to President Theodore Roosevelt from Hot Springs. Courtesy of The Homestead. 
A letter that William Howard Taft sent to President Theodore Roosevelt from Hot Springs. Courtesy of The Homestead. 
A letter that William Howard Taft sent to President Theodore Roosevelt from Hot Springs. Courtesy of The Homestead. 
A letter that William Howard Taft sent to President Theodore Roosevelt from Hot Springs. Courtesy of The Homestead.
On July 22, Taft left for New York and, eventually, Cincinnati, where he delivered his acceptance speech in his hometown. On July 30, he returned to Hot Springs, where he resumed his golfing, his political meetings and his letter-writing. On Aug. 3, he had a decidedly non-political visitor: the inventor Thomas Edison. Edison had recorded Bryan talking for 2 minutes and 6 seconds on railroads in May. Now he had arrived to record Taft, who spoke for 2 minutes and 14 seconds on “the rights of labor.” Seeking to bid for working-class votes, Taft endorsed the right to unionize and strike — with certain conditions. These recordings, distributed on cylinders, were sold for 35 cents apiece — about $11.98 today. According to The Wall Street Journal, they “sold in huge quantities at a time when it was still a novelty for presidential candidates to make any sort of personal appearances.”
The next day, Taft spoke to the Virginia Bar Association, which was holding its annual meeting at The Homestead. While there weren’t many Republican office-holders in Virginia at the time, there were still enough Republicans that on Aug. 21, some 4,000 of them crowded into Hot Springs to hear Taft deliver a campaign speech. Seeking to straddle a middle ground, Taft criticized certain excesses of big business but also warned that social legislation should be studied with “care and caution.” A band played “Dixie.” On Aug. 28, Taft finally left Hot Springs, bound for Cincinnati, intending to spend much of the campaign there.
Taft won the election, although Bath County showed him no particular love, giving him just 39.59% of the vote. Taft, though, seemed to have a love for Bath County. Four days after the election, the president-elect returned to Hot Springs and stayed for a week — playing more golf and meeting with a new parade of politicians, including his running mate, whom he didn’t particularly like. Taft returned to The Homestead on Nov. 18, and this time stayed longer — for three weeks, into early December. Yes, more golf, more politicians. This time there were more foreign dignitaries — from Cuba, the Philippines and some Canadian parliamentarians from the opposition Conservative Party. Taft golfed with them. During one round of December golf, Taft finished the round just as it began to snow. Within an hour, up to 3 inches of snow blanketed the ground. He wrote a letter to the St. Andrews Golf Society in New York to congratulate the group on its 20th anniversary: “Preceding the late election campaign there were many of my sympathizers and supporters who depreciated its becoming known that I was addicted to golf, as evidence of aristocratic tendencies and a desire to play a rich man’s game. You know and I know that there is nothing that furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint, nothing which puts one on an equality with one’s fellows or, I may say, puts one lower than one’s fellows than the game of golf.” Two days later, on Dec. 7, he set out for Washington.
Taft’s single term as president was not a happy one. His wife, Nellie, suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed on one side and unable to speak for a time. The president spent several hours a day helping her learn how to speak again. Taft had always been a reluctant politician, and it showed. Roosevelt thought his successor was too conservative and eventually turned against him. Roosevelt had been interested in civil rights, controversially hosting Booker T. Washington at the White House and appointing Black officeholders. Taft was not; he removed most Black officeholders in the South, the beginnings of a Republican “Southern strategy” to appeal to white Southerners. He backed immigration at a time when the political mood was turning against it. Roosevelt ran a third-party campaign, and that doomed Taft; he finished a weak third in a race won by Woodrow Wilson.
The Thomas Edison National Park says something else may have hurt Taft besides politics. In 1912, Edison wanted to build on the recording cylinders of 1908 by recording Taft in a newer technology — a talking movie. “Edison thought it could be released to theaters nationwide and be seen by millions of voters,” the park says. Taft declined.
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