Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster Read Free Book Online Page B

was devastated, for he was the most devoted of sons. His mother, widowed when he was twelve, had taken a library job at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, to help pay college fees for Archie and his younger brother, Lewis. She had died in England while visiting his older brother, Edward, and this distance made it even harder for Archie. He eventually hand-carried her ashes by train to Augusta, Georgia, for burial in the family plot. Later he would write to Clara that “each day I seem to miss Mother the more and the awful fact that I will not see her again almost paralyzes my brain.”
    The Roosevelts were extremely kind to Archie in his grief and the first lady arranged a cruise down the Potomac on the presidential yacht for his first day back. The president and his family, however, were soon packing up to leave the White House following the November election of William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s anointed successor. Butt had met Taft when he was governor of the Philippines, and it didn’t take long after the inauguration for Archie to be embraced by the new first family. “The big man,” as Archie called Taft, would come to regard his military aide “as if he were a son or brother.” Taft was a keen horseman and golfer, despite his three-hundred-pound girth, and Archie joined him in these pursuits and on his daily walks. He also accompanied the president, his wife, Helen “Nellie” Taft, and their teenaged daughter, Helen, when they sailed on the presidential yacht Mayflower and during visits to their summer home in Beverly, Massachusetts. One White House staffer nicknamed Archie “The Beloved,” and Taft came to rely on “The Beloved” even more after Nellie Taft suffered a stroke in May of 1909 and was unable to shoulder many of the first lady’s duties for some months afterward.
    In 1911 Archie used his closeness to Taft to try to mend the rift that had developed between the new president and his predecessor. Right after Taft’s inauguration in March of ’09, Roosevelt and his son Kermit had departed for an African hunting expedition, and the former president did not return to America until June of 1910. In the midterm elections that November, the Democrats seized control of both the House and the Senate, which raised serious doubts about Taft’s ability to carry the White House for the Republicans in 1912. Taft soon became convinced that Roosevelt would challenge him for the nomination. The tireless Teddy was not a man for the sidelines and couldn’t stifle his disappointment at Taft’s timid continuance of his progressivist policies. Archie paid a peacemaking visit to Sagamore Hill on January 28, 1912, and afterward wrote to Clara that he didn’t think that Roosevelt would run. But only weeks later Roosevelt announced, “My hat is in the ring.”
    It is often written that the strain of trying to preserve his allegiances to both men pushed Archie to the brink of a nervous breakdown in early 1912. His letters, however, reveal that the reason for his low mood was a physical ailment brought on by stress and overwork. Archie had been at Taft’s side during a grueling precampaign swing through twenty-eight states in the fall of 1911. According to his own tally they were on the road for fifty-eight days and had made 220 stops, with 380 speeches by Taft, who had been seen by “3,213,600 ear-splitting citizens.” (Archie was particularly incensed by “saucy little brats” who yelled out “Hello Fatty” to the president.) As he declared to Clara, “Do you wonder that our nerves have been disintegrated and that our innards are all upside down?” Archie’s innards were actually in serious trouble from “auto-intoxication,” a stress-induced illness that left him unable to digest food properly and caused ever-increasing levels of toxins to be released into his bloodstream. It was this illness that had caused the weight loss of twenty pounds that he had mentioned to the New York Times