Why President Taft Came to Sewanee

Why President Taft Came to Sewanee. From the Heritage Center. Archibald Willingham Butt (1865-1912) might well be one of Sewanee's two or three most important alumni in national governmental service. A century ago he served officially as military aide to President Theodore Roosevelt, beginning in April 1908, and to President William Howard Taft, from his inauguration on March 4, 1909, onwards., If Major Butt had not lost his life in the sinking of the steamship "Titanic" on the night of April 14, 1912, it seems likely he would have continued to play a vital role in our nation's turbulent history., The best biography available in the University's DuPont Library is the two-volume Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide (Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1930). Here is a capsule summary to begin with:, "Born in Augusta, Georgia, on September 26, 1865, Archie Butt was graduated in 1888 from the University of the South. He was a reporter in Louisville, Kentucky, and Macon, Georgia; then correspondent in Washington for a group of southern newspapers. After enlisting in the Spanish-American War, he became quartermaster captain of volunteers in 1900 and received his commission in the regular army. Service in the Philippines and Cuba was followed by his appointment as military aide at the White House. In that capacity he was a constant companion of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft, both of whom bare witness afterward that he had won their friendship as well as their appreciation for extraordinary service." (pp. ix-x), Nearly all of the letters in these two volumes 852 pages were written to "Dear Clara," Archie's sister-in-law, Mrs. Lewis F. Butt, of Augusta, Georgia. Published two decades after his death, these letters form a lively depiction of the Major's public and private life; they were the memoirs that this ex-newspaperman never got the chance to write., Try to imagine, for example, the exhausting number of public occasions that Taft, Butt and Company provided constituents, as described in a letter dated November 20, 1911: "We have actually traveled on railroads 15,270 miles and at least 3,000 miles by motor and side trips. We have been on the go for 58 days, and 14 nights we have spent off the train. We have visited 28 states, entertained as many governors, and been flooded by their ridiculous staffs and yapped at by all the Congressmen and ward politicians from Beverly to the Coast and back again. We have made 220 stops and the President has made 380 speeches. We have carried the figures farther and estimated that he has addressed 1,614,850 persons in auditoriums and halls and from platforms and has been seen by 3,213,600 ear-splitting citizens. Do you wonder that our nerves have been disintegrated and that our innards are all upside down?" (p. 765), One of these stops, on November 10, 1911, was made at Sewanee, as reported rather splendidly by the Sewanee Purple (Thursday, November 16, 1911). The weekly student newspaper printed Taft's entire speech, delivered on the unfinished porch of All Saints Chapel, to an umbrella-wielding crowd. An accompanying article paid tribute to "the little train, after its labored pull up the steep mountainside, rolled into Sewanee station and came to a stop, panting and hot, flushed and proud, as it were, in the cognizance of its privilege-that of bearing the greatest American of all - when this little train arrived at 8:15 on last Friday morning" (See note 1), As with all presidential-type speeches, Taft's included some crowd pleasers, singling out local celebrities like Sewanee's own Colonel Willian Gorgas, and his role in fighting yellow fever-the construction of the Panama Canal would have been impossible without Colonel Georgas" but there was a surprising amount meaty policy statement about the President's advocacy of an "international arbitral court sustained by all nations" to bring about and sustain world peace:, (continued on next panel)