Los Angeles herald., 1910-02-18

sy 2s his fame as the most extern
| l4 HSSal sive speechmaSer who ever
| ia NzN sat in the presidential chair
lzzsz1a Already three volumes of
principal speeches and ad-
| dresses have been published and
! fourth viii soon appear. But they form
only very small percentage of the
! speeches he has delivered since becom-
| ing the head of the Philippine govern
| ment. When it is stated that he de-
| livered All speeches in the last presi-
Dental campaign and 275 on his trip
| last fall it will he S, IN that Mr.. Taft
Is really a great speechmaker With
three years in the White House before
| him, and a prospect of four years
more beyond that it is estimated that
if he continues to deliver speeches and
| addresses at the same rate 1T will
eventually require some thirty-odd vol
umes to contain them.
Already there are sixteen volumes of
Taft speeches preserved at the White
House office building. During all his
| speechmaking Mr. Taft has had with
him one of his assistant secretaries,
Wendell w. Mischler, who is pot
| hook artist of the master class. He
has caught every speech just as it
came from the presidential lips. At
the end of a trip he takes out the
pages OF his note book and pastes them
in great scrap book in the order of
their delivery. When Mr. Taft wants
to know exactly what he said at any
way station on his trip he simply calls
Mischler, and in minute the secre-
tary is reading to him what he wants
to know Any one who has practiced
stenography knows how hard it is to
read notes after they become "cold,"
but Mischlers word signs and phras-
ings seem to be as plain to him as the
printed words, even after the passing
of months.
AS he gets time from the pressing
duties of an assistant secretary to the
president, Mischler has his notes
transcribed and files the typewriter
copies away. When enough accumu-
lates he sends them to the printer and
has them bound. In this way he has
made up the sixteen volumes which
constitute the record of six years of
speechmaking. These volumes con-
tain an average of 400 letter size pages
each ana as perhape half of the pages
are written single-space, there prob
ably is an average of 400 words per
page. This would make some 64O0
pages of typewriter matter in the set
of books-nearly 100000 words. The
first volume begins with speeches de-
livered at Manila. and the succeeding
ones embrace all that have followed.
All of these speeches will not be
published at an early date, but when
the works of William H. Taft are col
lected and published in years to come
they probably will appear in full The
works of six or eight of the presidents
have been collected and published. In
the case of washington they embraced
more letters than speeches, as speech
making was not so popular as 1t is
today. Up to the time of Theodore
Roosevelt the record as a maker of
presidential literature was held by
Thomas Jefferson, with twenty vol
umes. But even Jefferson's efforts
have been made to appear brief beside
the printed works of Mr.. Roosevelt
and he is not yet through. No other
president has talked upon or written
about such a wide variety of subjects
as Mr.. Roosevelt. While Mr.. Taft may
exceed the Roosevelt record, so far as
the volume of his speech making Is
concerned, he can never hope TO rival
his predecessor in the range of sub
iects or the picturesqueness Of presen-
tation.
The speeches delivered by Mr.. Taft
have been delivered before all sorts of
audiences and at all conceivable times.
At high noon and at midnight, in the
banquet hall and from the rear plat
form of q train at water tank stop,
DelO1e IlOSe WIZ SSC anu ~ iAlO'9S NhC
are blind-even to the deaf. On his
last trip he addressed a school for the
deaf at Jackson Miss. The pupils
seemed to comprehend every word the
president spoke, although they looked
at him more than at the signs of the
interpreter.
In the case of many of the earlier
presidents all of their letters which
could be found were embraced in their
published works. For instance, in the
case of Washington, one finds IN ms
published works letter to his stepson
who was attending school at Annapo-
lis. The boy had written him asking
to whom he should look for pin money,
The frugal old patriot replied that he
had been supplied with six pounds.
and that with such liberal supply OF
spending money such question ought
not agitate his mind. 1t manifestly
would be impossible ever to publish all
the letters of modern president, even
the ones dictated by himself The
White House mail ranges anywhere
from 500 to 1000 letters a day, ana
o,,ar.z ono ie answered directly or IN