Renovo at 150 – The President Visits Renovo

by Lou Bernard

Fifty-six words.

That was the entire length of a Presidential speech in 1910. Just fifty-six words.  Today, we’re used to the president talking for half an hour just to explain that he has nothing to say about the situation. But in 1910, a president gave a speech that was record setting in its shortness.

The president was our twenty-seventh president, William Howard Taft.

The location was Renovo, Pennsylvania.

It was a Sunday afternoon, a hundred and six years ago. June 5, 1910. The weather was bad, rainy and chilly. Miserable, not to put to fine a point on it. But that didn’t stop the people of Renovo from coming out in droves to see the president’s train pass. Taft had been in Jackson, Michigan, and was headed back to the White House by train. Renovo being a big railroad area at the time, the train was routed through Renovo, and Taft had agreed to stop and say a few words there.

A very few words.

The Record reported on it, at the time. The headline blared,”Nearly 2000 Renovo People Greeted President Taft.” This means that there were over thirty-five times as many people attending as there were words in the actual speech. Hell, this article will have about twelve times as many words as that speech, and I’m barely even paying attention to what I’m doing right now.

Everyone was gathered around the railroad station to see the president come by. There was palpable excitement in the air. In early afternoon, about one-thirty, the train pulled into the station to great cheering and celebrating.

The article in the Record, which ran the following week, read,”Nearly 2000 Renovo people greeted President Taft at the railroad station Sunday afternoon at 1:30 o’clock. A stop of five minutes was made and he came out to the rear platform of the special car Colonial and made a brief address.”

Brief indeed. Fifty-six whole words. The President of the United States is clearly a busy guy, and Taft was pretty honest about the fact that he wasn’t going to waste much time messing around in Central Pennsylvania.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the Renovo spirit in coming out on such a rainy day to see me,” said President Taft. “My journey has been very tiresome. I am on my way to Washington to meet with Congress tomorrow. Of course you don’t expect me to make a speech on Sunday. Goodbye and thank you very much.”

Bam. Fifty-six words.

That was not an excerpt. That was the entire speech.

And then he went into the train car again, and the train took off. Taft’s entire stop in Renovo had taken about five minutes. The assembled crowds, perhaps feeling that they’d come out in the rain and they were, by God, going to drag it out as long as possible, continued to wait there at the station, cheering and applauding until the presidential train car had disappeared from sight.

The Record ran the article that week, and it was a fairly short article for a presidential visit. There just wasn’t too much to work with; they reprinted the entire speech verbatim and still had to stretch the whole thing out. I will give Taft some credit, however—At least he was alive at the time. When McKinley’s funeral train went through Renovo in 1901, McKinley was technically on it, but was dead. And Roosevelt, who was also on the train, didn’t even stop.

William Howard Taft died on March 8, 1930. I’d like to think his eulogy went on for longer than fifty-six words. But you never know, do you?