Book release today: William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Administration

Thanks for the Taft link. I always like to see what's out there. History has dumped on Taft, and this particular one is full of it. For ease for anyone else reading this, here's an excerpt from it:

Taft stumbled dramatically on two important occasions as president. The first misstep occurred when he called a special congressional session to revise the tariff downward. This move activated a concerted effort by the protectionist majority in the Republican Party to persuade Taft to back off on tariff reform. In the struggle over the tariff, Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island and Representative Sereno E. Payne of New York, representing big business, succeeded in pushing through a tariff (the Payne-Aldrich Tariff) that actually raised rates. The confused president first denounced the bill and then signed it into law—a move that greatly alienated Roosevelt and his progressive followers.
The second misstep involved his dismissal of Roosevelt's friend, the chief forester of the United States, Gilford Pinchot. The affair stemmed from Taft's appointment of conservative businessman Richard Ballinger as head of the Department of the Interior. Ballinger, having convinced Taft that Roosevelt had put too much land irreversibly in the public domain, opened up valuable federal lands to private ownership—including rich coal lands in Alaska that Roosevelt had previously designated not for sale. Pinchot launched a public attack on Ballinger, and indirectly on Taft, leaving the president with no alternative but to dismiss Pinchot. The resulting explosion tore the Republican Party apart and drove an inseparable wedge between Taft and his once beloved friend and mentor, Theodore Roosevelt.

A couple things:

1) The special session for the tariff was called for in the 1908 platform. Somehow, this article blames Taft for bungling things by following his platform.

2) The Payne-Aldrich tariff, historians now largely agree, was a downward revision. Not dramatic, but it was a cut. More importantly, and historians ignore this, it had many lateral changes in tariff categories that unto themselves represented large change from the Dingley tariff. The Payne tariff was a far better instrument than Dingley, as Taft rightly claimed.

3) Aldrich was a Taft ally, and without him Taft could never have approached that substantial part of the 1908 platform, aka the "Roosevelt legacy," which Taft achieved. The real thorn was Robert La Follette, who imagined himself the nation's saviour. His self-serving and hyperbolic (I caught him at a few outright lies) autobiography is a principal origin for much of the historical misunderstanding of Taft.

4) Roosevelt had nothing to do with the tariff. Rather the opposite: he avoided it like the plague (more than automobiles, in fact). TR's fright at tariff revision felled it upon Taft. Afterwards, TR never made an issue of the tariff.

5) Regardng things Taft, Gifford Pinchot, the "father of forestry," was a fraud. Pinchot was good with trees, but he was a demagogue, and a socialist, and he ought never have played politics. Sadly, he's been deified by the left.

6) Richard Ballinger was not, as the article states, "a conservative businessman." He was a lawyer, a mayor of Seattle, and served in the Roosevelt administration's Land Office. After Henry Pringle's 1939 book on Taft, FDR's Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, a Pinchot-fan and progressive, reassessed the Ballinger-Pinchot affair and concluded that Pinchot was a scoundrel, and that Ballinger had been unfairly and harshly attacked and misrepresented. Ickes called Ballinger "The American Dreyfus."

Well, these are the sorts of things I'm up against in my book. Hope I hit a couple doubles, at least.

CONGRATULATIONS!!!! I hope this is a good seller for you. What bookstores have this in stock? I need a good read for a long trip I am taking in October.

Now let's stop fooling around and get back to that tale of a dark night in a Georgetown Bar. "She gave him the sort of look that should have stood out of his back at least six inches." - Raymond Chandler.

Best Regards,

Thanks for the clarification. I loved this period since I was a kid and saw old newsreels. It can't have been more pleasant than the present, but it looked so exciting to be around when automobiles, airplanes, movies, records, and the rest were just getting started. Good luck once again with your book.

Oh, and try not to get on Teddy's bad side ...

.. if anyone can come back from the dead and wring necks, It has to be TR ...

An Evening in December, 2000, A Bar Somewhere Near 34th & Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. ...

There was a momentary scuffle at the front door, and then "she" walked in the room, surrounded by her own guard of "black suits". "That's the bitch who did me in in New York!" he screamed. "This is the fat as**d pig who stole every campaign dollar out of California too!" "I needed that goddamned money!"

She gave him a look that Medusa would have envied. "You don't get it do you, punk. I live here now" she said in a voice like flying shards of glass hitting soft flesh. "You're f**king up MY neighborhood pal" she sneered. "Get out of Cheney's house you f**king loser".

I threw myself to the floor as a chair crashed against the wall, making the bottles behind the bar rattle like glass castinets. Things were going down hill fast, and thanks to D.C.'s laws, everybody had a gun but me.

....

... "you fool!" she cried. "It’s all planned. It’s all set. And you can't change it."

"What?" he cried, dropping his pipe, groping for the gun he gave up years before... She stared at him plainly, without expression.

"A fall guy has to fall."

"Me?"

"You."

He slumped against the bar, limp and defeated.

"It’s O.K.," she said, without sympathy, and giving me a "shut up" glare from the corner of her eye. "We’ll take care of them. We’ve set it all up. Barely nine months into the next Administration, the sky’s gonna fall. You don’t want to be there for that, believe me. It’s all set. There’s nothing you can do."

...

Forget the biographies. Get to work on the next "great American novel."

Best Regards,

(A belated) thanks for the pink, Michael.

The paper’s [New York Times] general aspect was pro-business, vehemently anti-tariff, and otherwise purposefully non-partisan ....

Ah, what erosion of noble aims the passage of a few decades can cause.

I'm back from a month in the Maine woods ....

Argh! (said in her best pirate intonation.) One of my fondest dreams is to spend six months in the deep Maine woods, with nothing but: provisions enough for that amount of time, ten miles of desolate dirt road on which to run outside the cabin door, a porch surrounded by sufficient trees to block off any hint of civilization (but with an opening in their canopy to allow a view of the stars), a typewriter and ribbons, reams of paper, boxes of pencils, a bookcase full of specified books, and a piano. You just realized at least what appears to be approximately one-sixth of that dream – give or take a piano and a pencil or two. I am indescribably jealous. (You weren’t anywhere near Moosehead Lake, were you? If you were, don’t tell me. I am a lovely shade of pale green already. I don’t look good in darker greens.)

If your first two pages are any indication, your stint in the woods .... and the months/years in which the book was taking shape .... were well spent.

Did I say 'congratulations!'? If not, I'm sayin' it now – heartily and sincerely.

Did I say 'welcome back!'? If not, I'm sayin' that, too.

~ joanie

Oh, Joanie, It's nice of you to say! I was thinking of you today. My son wants to take up the violin. He's 11, and not very musical, but he wants to do it (his sister is a couple years into the flute, and good at it). I started to kick myself for not having started him years ago. Anyway, this somehow brought me to thoughts of you, and of real musicians.

There's too much to say about Maine. Here's a link to something I wrote about it, that you might enjoy, on an ATRW thread. I'll work on a fuller description for you.

So glad to have conjured you up today -- Thanks so much! And I hope you are well.

- Nicollo

P.S. We have an old, beaten, organ at the camp in Maine. I bet you could make it sing with the loons!

When I published my first book, I felt dumb talking it up, hitting up everyone I knew, and so on, including posting a thread here on it. On top of it, the industry hates pesky, self-promoting authors. Then I got a letter from a man who told me that he was very glad for my notice because he felt that authors should climb the tallest tree and yell, especially if they believe in what they wrote.

I'm just launching my 2nd book, and I've decided to drop all modesty and self-respect about it...

So, good for you on the release of your book! Here, folks: Snake65's novel "Way of the Wolf" in stores now (semi-vanity and shameless self-promotion alert) I'm glad you've got good distribution. While my books are published by direct-mail and library/university press, and therefore don't find space in stores, I do know that the key to resonance at the retail level is making noise elsewhere. You've gotten some fine reviews, as posted on your site. Keep it up!

My publishers won't sell to retail because of the price point (50 bucks on both) and because they refuse to play the returns game of the big houses and retailers. Books delivered doesn't mean books sold. Snake65, I hope yours all go to new homes with customers!

Nicollo unmasked: Bromleyisms here

I don't believe this!

ABC Journalist John Miller in a May 1998 Interview with Osama bin Laden:

In America, we have a figure from history from 1897 named Teddy Roosevelt. He was a wealthy man, who grew up in a privileged situation and who fought on the front lines. He put together his own men - hand chose them - and went to battle. You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt.

Yikes!

Wow! I was always a bit leery of that Miller interview, since it came in '98, full into the Al Queda movement. Talk about leche-queue.

Just goes to show the power of emotion in history. T.R. was brave in all that in the Span-Am war, but he was no George Washington (or Che Guavera, it would seem from Miller), and neither did he build his own army.

Nor did he slaughter innocents. What an ass, this Miller. It's sickening.