TLS signed “Wm. H. Taft,” four pages, 8 x 10.5, personal letterhead, August 30, 1919. Headed at the top, “Confidential,” a letter to Gus Karger, in part: “I was wicked enough to note, with some degree of satisfaction, the bitter controversy between McCumber and Fall, and still more the bitter controversy between Knute Nelson and Fall. When Fall intimated as he did, though he tried to withdraw it subsequently, that Knute Nelson was in his second childhood, he made one more vote, if there was any doubt about it before, against the committee amendments. Unless I mistake Knute Nelson’s temperament, that old Scandinavian does not forget a thing like that, and if Knute goes, Frank Kellogg will gain courage. Fall is a bombastes furioso, whom I had to dress down once at Albuquerque before New Mexico came in. He swaggers and blusters and must disgust members of the Senate other than the gang of the Foreign Relations Committee. At this distance it is a little difficult to judge, but it would seem as if Knox and Lodge and Borah and Johnson and Brandegee and Fall were digging the hole they are in deeper and deeper. They really run the danger of compelling their own party to disassociate itself from the responsibility for them in their course…I presume you have notes that in Carnegie’s will he gives me $10,000 a year during my life…I can say to you that I am a good deal disturbed about the matter…I don’t care to accept money from a man like Carnegie as a pension for public work done, because I think pensions ought to come from the Government and not from a private source. I have never been tendered formally the income from the ex-presidential fund…I saved a clean $100,000 out of the Presidency, and since I left the Presidency I have saved and invested…something more than $100,000. This latter experience has been a most enjoyable one to me, because I never had been able to accumulate money before, and it was a great pleasure from my savings to create a fund from the income of which my family could live after I had gone.” Taft has made several small handwritten corrections to the text, and has added a brief postscript below his signature, “I am delighted to hear that Mrs. Karger is on the high road to recovery—Charley & wife and baby daughter are to be here tonight if all goes well.” In very good to fine condition, with rusty paper clip marks to the top corner of each page.
As World War I drew to a close, Woodrow Wilson was encountering tough opposition from Congress about the United States joining the League of Nations. Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Hiram Johnson, and William Borah were strongly against the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. Despite Wilson’s best efforts, the United States never became a member. Beginning in 1912, Andrew Carnegie offered a $25,000 annual endowment to all former presidents, a precursor to the The Former Presidents Act, which was enacted in 1958. A magnificent letter which captures the battle between Wilson and Congress over the League of Nations. Pre-certified PSA/DNA.
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