The day our largest president came for breakfast
by Jack Neely
The weather was a disappointment that morning. The red, white, and blue bunting was running in the cool drizzle, and American flags hanging over the streets were soggy. But a crowd turned out as the train rolled in from the west. At 8:25, the Memphis Special halted at the Southern station, and people standing on roofs along Jackson and Depot craned their necks for a glimpse into the luxury car marked IDEAL.
The first one anybody recognized inside the car was presidential secretary Charles Hilles. Then, there was the dashing young military aide, Major Archibald Butt; when he appeared, wearing his army coat like a cape, the audience cheered. Then entered a third who was impossible to miss, even at a distance.
He was the largest president, ever, and here he was in Knoxville. It was the final stay on his famously long tour of America, which had commenced late in the summer.
Over two dozen policemen, some of them mounted, formed a protective double line from the railroad car to the waiting automobile. James Sloan, his secret-service man, stayed close by; as the president remarked himself, he made an easy target. The audience cheered and blew whistles as the largest president strolled with his party into the car. The car drove a few yards to the Hotel Atkin, where the president got back out of the car and went inside, where a president-sized breakfast awaited. It was a multi-course affair, beginning with grapefruit a la Melba. Then broiled halibut, maitre d'hotel. Then broiled squab a la Venitienne, and potatoes O'Brien. Then some waffles and Vienna rolls with honey, with coffee.
Afterward the president loaded himself into an automobile for an 11-car motorcade down Magnolia Avenue to the wonder of the era, the Appalachian Exposition. The rain had let up some, and along the way, residents stood out on their wet lawns and waved flags and handkerchiefs. He smiled behind his handlebar mustache.
They arrived at Chilhowee Park to see the Mineral and Forestry Building, which was, unfortunately, on the top of a hill. A quarter of the way up the steps, alongside the house built of coal, the president stopped. "His breathing came in rather short gasps," one reporter observed. The president suggested that they skip the stairway and follow a roundabout path up. At the top, he noticed Cal Johnson's racetrack off to the south and made an inquiry about betting there. Inside the exhibit, he showed "great satisfaction and intelligent interest," especially in the asphalt displays. But Congressman Richard Austin kept boasting about Tennessee's reserves of pig iron. Finally the president responded, "Austin, why don't you go into the pig-iron business, if so much wealth is to be obtained from it, instead of remaining in politics?"
Back in town, the motorcade proceeded down Gay Street to the new auditorium at Main. The big man smiled and doffed his top hat. Inside, the rows up front were reserved for Civil War veterans. Behind, "white and colored were seated side by side, unconscious of each other, so intent were they in the desire to see and hear the president."
Mayor Sam Heiskell spoke first, welcoming the Republican president, but reminding him that Knoxville was still a
Democratic city."
Then Republican Judge Edward Terry Sanford offered a far more flattering introduction, calling the conservative president one of the greatest men alive, "a tower four square to all the winds that blow."
The president spoke for over an hour about world peace. "I am not a peace crank," he insisted, reiterating his opposition to making the Panama Canal an international zone. "We have made it part of our coast," he said. However, he proposed a general disarmament of Europe, which he said had become "an armed camp"—and called for the creation of "an international court of arbitration."
"Is it not more honorable to have the moral courage to pass a fight by, for the benefit of the world," asked the president, "than to fight?"
"May God speed the time of universal peace," he closed to a roaring applause. He asked to visit the widow of the famous Parson Brownlow. She still lived in the big house on East Cumberland where the incendiary Unionist editor and Reconstruction governor, had died 34 years earlier. There, he "expressed his admiration of the Parson...."
Then they returned to the Atkin for a luncheon banquet, with toasts to the president; "his face lit up and his countenance was enwreathed in a broad smile." A speech by George Otis Smith, director of the Geological Survey, touted the future of water power in Tennessee.
The president didn't know that in his changing room, two impish Knoxville girls were trying on his enormous pants, wearing each leg like a cloak.
The sun had come out by the time the presidential party re-boarded the car marked IDEAL. As Knoxvillians on roofs waved goodbye, they left to their disparate fates. Five months later, Maj. Archibald Butt would drown with the Titanic.
In the '20s, the largest ex-president in history and the Knoxville judge who so extravagantly introduced him here would both be members of the U.S. Supreme Court. By another remarkable coincidence, William Howard Taft and Edward Terry Sanford would both die in 1930, on the same day. Washington papers compared it to the weirdly simultaneous deaths of Jefferson and Adams.
November 7, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 25
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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