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Roosevelt; he kept repeating how much he was looking forward to a new phase of life. The feeling wouldn’t last long. Within weeks of the election Roosevelt began to have serious misgivings. Publicly he continued to say supportive things about Taft. Privately, his opinion changed like a fickle wind. Roosevelt fretted about every Taft trait, from his conservative instincts to his lethargic energy. Roosevelt’s main fear was that Taft would retrench on the progressive programs Roosevelt had initiated.
    His fears proved right on almost every account. The first signs of a rift came when Taft recanted on his promise to retain most of the people within Roosevelt’s administration. Besides the Secretary of the Navy, the only other person Taft wanted to continue on was the Military Aide, Archie Butt. Archie was not inclined toward a re-appointment – he had tremendous attachment and loyalty to Roosevelt and his opinion of Taft, while respectful, was not enthusiastic. Still, he felt duty bound to stay on through a transition period.
    On March 4, 1909, a day marked by raging blizzards in Washington D.C., William Howard Taft took the oath of office and became the 27th President of the United States. The ceremony had to be moved into the Senate Chamber because the traditional inaugural area in front of the Capitol building was enveloped in a blinding snowstorm.
    Archie was overwhelmed with sadness. “I felt about as depressed as I have ever felt in parting with anyone in my life,” he wrote, “save only my own mother.” Roosevelt tried to comfort his former aide with a curious, enigmatic aside. “It isn’t goodbye,” Roosevelt murmured. “We will meet again, and possibly you will yet serve me in a more important capacity than the one you have now.”
    A tumultuous era had passed. Most people believed that Taft and his prudent manner would usher in calmer waters for the United States. They did not foresee the treacherous rapids ahead.
     
     

CHAPTER 4
     
    1909
     
    New York stank. The big, teeming, strapping, brawny city belched out a variety of perfumes. Its universal fragrance arose from the street – a bouquet of horseshit mixed with the noxious fumes spewing from the newfangled automobile. Co-mingled with that base scent were the smells of each specific neighborhood. While along Fifth Avenue the aroma of shit and gasoline was blended with French perfume, travel a few blocks east and the unmistakable odors from the eastside gashouses swirled over the short city blocks. Go south to Second Avenue on the Lower East Side and the stink of an overrun, new world ghetto broiled with the stale stench of sweat-soaked-bodies, standing sewage, and the brine of pickle barrels. Hell’s Kitchen smelled like bloody death from the slaughterhouses that lined 42nd Street and 11th Avenue. The German section on the Upper East Side reeked sickly sweet of fermenting hops and yeast from Adolph Ruppert’s breweries. Wafting through the narrow cobblestone streets of Greenwich Village was the aroma of cigar smoke, coffee and alcohol. While in northern Manhattan, bubbling brooks meandered through verdant farmlands and thick forests, as they did centuries earlier.
    Though many tongues and accents were heard throughout Manhattan, there was one very common language that every New Yorker shared – the language of money. For some, the acquisition of money was the measuring stick of success; for most, it was the thin lifeline of existence. Within the feeding chain of wealth was the criminal element, which asserted its influence from the mean neighborhood streets all the way to City Hall. Crime and corruption were part of daily life, as ubiquitous as the clatter of the new subway. In the Italian districts of East Harlem and Little Italy, the Sicilian Black Hand extorted protection money from local stores and businesses with an unambiguous message of a broken storefront window and a sinister black hand sitting amid the rubble. Jewish gangsters prowled