It’s Election Season—Be Careful What You Don’t Drink

In the fall of 1909, President William Howard Taft under took a tour of 33 states by train. In New Orleans he attended a football game, despite worries among bodyguards that anarchists would target him. (“Oh, fiddlesticks,” Taft replied.) In Birmingham, “several thousand little schoolchildren” lined the route of his motorcade to cheer him. At the DeSoto Hotel in Savannah, Taft was fêted at a banquet attended by 350 guests, at which 20 white doves were released when he rose to speak.

But it was in Savannah where he attracted what may have been the most exaggerated attention of his tour, and all because of a drink.

Taft was a guest at a sumptuous breakfast in Savannah the day after the banquet. There was pomp, there was ceremony, and his every move was chronicled by the press. The meal featured an array of southern delicacies—roast possum, grits—and at one point he was presented with a Georgia julep.

The julep had been prepared “with consummate skill,” noted a reporter, “in a green-topped glass that had perfect barnacles of frosting on the outside.”

Taft gave the julep his utmost consideration. “He consented to hold a Georgia julep in his hand and to inhale its odors,” according to the reporter’s account. But “it remained untasted.” He set it back down without a sip.

Did this slight go unnoticed? No, it did not. Not by the Georgians who proffered it, nor by the reporters who attended, and thus not by the entirety of the nation itself.

Did this slight go unnoticed? No, it did not. Not by the Georgians who proffered it, nor by the reporters who attended, and thus not by the entirety of the nation itself. “Georgia Julep is Refused by Taft” read a front-page headline in the St. Louis Globe Democrat, a newspaper 800 miles away. Other papers picked up on Taft’s snub, and ran it through the interpretation mill. One Atlanta paper suggested Taft refused it because he suspected the mint was imported—a shot at the president’s trade policies. Another paper somewhat grandly saw his rejection as “the fracturing of the last straw that binds a patriotic people.”

That the julep rejection was big news is odd, and not only because of how low it resides on the seismic scale of presidential gaffes—but also because Taft was a known teetotaler, and had been since 1906.

Taft was famous as a man of gargantuan appetites. He was known for his eight-course breakfasts. And he was the heaviest president ever to hold office, weighing 354 pounds the day he was inaugurated. After he was elected, the White House staff ordered the largest tub ever made to accommodate him.

Taft was keenly self-conscious of his girth, and wanted to set a better example of good health for the American people. (He also disliked being lampooned by editorial cartoonists.) He had a years-long correspondence with a British nutrition expert, who prescribed a low-fat, low-calorie diet that allowed only one glass of “unsweetened wine” each day. His weight fluctuated widely, but while on this diet he complained about being perpetually and ravenously hungry.

This wasn’t the first time that a drink had become entangled with a teetotaler’s political career.

This wasn’t the first time that a drink had become entangled with a teetotaler’s political career. Two years earlier, Charles Fairbanks, President Theodore Roosevelt’s vice president, hosted a lunch for the president in his hometown of Indianapolis. Just before lunch service began, he realized he’d overlooked a cocktail, and sent out for 40 Manhattans from a nearby club. This got a small mention in a newspaper, and then, for unknown reasons, it received a large mention. (“Fairbanks Cocktail is Brought Forward as a Result of Vice President’s Exploit,” read a headline in the Muncie Evening Press.)

An avowed abstainer of drink, Fairbanks had been known as “Buttermilk Charlie” for the product he often advocated for in lieu of alcohol. After the Manhattan affair, he was mocked as “Cocktail Charlie.” His church in Indiana was so bothered that it sought to have him expelled. Roosevelt marveled at the oversized reaction to this undersized action. “I drank a cocktail out at Vice-President Fairbanks’s home,”Roosevelt wrote, “where upon all the members of your church landed on that gentleman and almost rode him out of the organization. That treatment was so uncalled for that, if it were not altogether ludicrous and preposterous, I would say it was simply outrageous.”

The Chicago Record-Herald brought up l’affair Fairbanks after the Savannah imbroglio, and noted Taft might not have “snubbed the Georgia julep had he remembered the experience of Mr. Fairbanks with the Indiana cocktail.” All this is to say that it’s not just what you drink that can be important, but what you don’t drink. As the current presidential campaign season moves into the trench warfare phase, and with at least one of the candidates a teetotaler like Taft, keep an eye out for the smallest of embers that, thanks to the winds of both social and mainstream media, can turn into the largest of conflagrations.

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