A Taft in Full

REVIEW: ‘William Howard Taft: A Great American Life’ by Walter Stahr

In December 1909, the president of the United States traveled to New York City to address a black-tie dinner promoting Christian missionary work. He was there in his official capacity, and not as his country’s most prominent Unitarian, a faith as controversial then as John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was half a century later. From the elegant ballroom the president made his way through a driving rainstorm to a Bowery shelter for homeless men, “which I hope will always help you and others over the hard places,” William Howard Taft told its residents, “the times when the Lord and everybody seems to be against you—to help you at such times to believe that there are people in the world who sympathize with you.”

History hasn’t been nearly as generous toward Taft. Sandwiched between Progressive era icons Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, his single term in the White House (1909-1913) has been likened to the sleep apnea that made the plus-size president doze off with embarrassing frequency in public. “It is a very humdrum uninteresting administration, and does not attract the attention or enthusiasm of anybody,” Taft conceded to his wife Nellie in 1912.

Walter Stahr, biographer of Lincoln’s wartime associates Seward, Stanton, and Chase, thinks Taft unduly modest. Yet even he allocates barely a fifth of this hefty volume to Taft’s “good if not great” presidency. The rest details Taft’s careers as solicitor general, circuit judge, and America’s first viceroy in the Philippines; Theodore Roosevelt’s surrogate campaigner and deputy president; builder of the Panama Canal, not to mention the original Oval Office and Lincoln Memorial; the American Red Cross president who coordinated relief following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; a global troubleshooter conducting the most sophisticated shuttle diplomacy before Henry Kissinger; and, finally, as chief justice delivering black-robed conservatism with administrative reform in the 1920s.

Drawing on untapped sources and his own legal training, Stahr rescues Taft from historical caricature as the proverbially jolly fat man henpecked by his ambitious wife into abandoning the judicial cloister for the political arena he found so uncongenial. Born in Cincinnati in 1857, Will Taft was the kind of youngster older people dote on. His formidable New England-bred mother admitted having “more pride in Willie than all the rest” of her children. Unlike most child prodigies, however, Taft had a lifelong gift for inspiring and sustaining friendship. His amiability equaled his ambition.

For over 30 years Taft calculated his chances to sit on the United States Supreme Court. But he inherited a dutiful streak from his father, a lawyer-judge who served in Ulysses Grant’s cabinet and filled diplomatic postings in Vienna and St. Petersburg. Made civilian governor of the U.S.-occupied Philippines by William McKinley, the younger Taft twice turned down court appointments rather than abandon a native population drawn to the Tafts for their solicitude and lack of racial prejudice.

Everyone knows that Taft and Theodore Roosevelt were, for a while, best friends. Why this was so remains something of a mystery. TR was a classic jingo, perfectly willing in the 1890s to subject the American East Coast to shelling by British warships, since the United States would avenge any losses by conquering Canada. The judicious Taft preferred dispute arbitration, the cornerstone of his presidential diplomacy and, later, of his proposed League to Enforce Peace, precursor to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations.

As Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Taft urged caution on his excitable boss after a group of black soldiers was accused, on flimsy evidence, of shooting up Brownsville, Texas, one Saturday night in 1906. Roosevelt was having none of it. Decrying “sentimentalists” braying for leniency, TR ordered Taft to discharge all those accused. Critics jested that TAFT stood for Take Advice From Theodore. His subsequent victory over William Jennings Bryan in November 1908 was widely seen as Roosevelt’s third term, much as the first George Bush, like Taft a well-connected Yalie who thrived in appointive positions, was elected as a kinder, gentler edition of his predecessor.

“I knew it would be a cold day when I was made president,” Taft quipped on March 4, 1909, after a blizzard forced the inauguration ceremony to be moved indoors. The new president wasted no time before wading into the quicksand of tariff reform. In the process, he alienated insurgent Republicans without endearing himself to the party’s Old Guard. As a judge, Stahr tells us, Taft loathed dissents. He brought this same prejudice to the Oval Office, sheathing his veto pen and, with it, the chance to mobilize public opinion around lower tariff rates as promised in his campaign. He made matters worse by labeling the resulting Payne-Aldrich Tariff “the best” ever passed by a Republican Congress. His credibility never recovered.

Adding to Taft’s burdens, Nellie suffered a stroke barely 10 weeks into their White House occupancy. Patiently, tenderly he nursed her back to health. Stahr dutifully catalogues Taft’s legislative achievements: statehood for Arizona and New Mexico, mandated disclosure of campaign contributions, a federal postal savings system, conservation measures building on Roosevelt’s public land withdrawals, and increased regulatory powers for the Interstate Commerce Commission. Taft promoted the 16th Amendment giving constitutional sanction to a federal income tax. Surpassing his predecessor where trustbusting was concerned, Taft and Attorney General George Wickersham dissolved John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company.

Taft’s foreign policy was distinctly his own. Sensitized by the bloody insurrection against American rule in the Philippines, he decried involvement in Mexico’s civil war without congressional approval. His pursuit of arbitration treaties with Britain and France angered TR, who had no intention of submitting his country’s vital interests to “foreigners.” Taft was disappointed, Stahr reveals, but hardly surprised. “The truth is that he believes in war and wishes to be Napoleon and to die on the battlefield,” the president concluded of his fiery predecessor.

A Taftian aversion to melodrama flattens Stahr’s account of the most famous broken friendship in American politics. As Taft and Roosevelt engaged in verbal fisticuffs over their party’s 1912 presidential nomination, the maladroit incumbent announced, “Even a rat in a corner will fight.” The author confirms both TR’s greater popular support and the legitimacy of Taft’s victory at the bitterly contested Republican convention. Resigned to defeat in the fall, Taft took solace in his faction’s control of the battered GOP organization. Gracious to the Democratic victor, Woodrow Wilson, Taft departed Washington for the life of a Yale professor, elder statesman, and newspaper sage.

If I have a criticism to make of this deeply researched, deftly written biography, it is structural. Roughly 40 percent of Stahr’s text is given over to his subject’s post-White House life. At times the narrative feels captive to Taft’s engagement calendar: Numberless train journeys lead to the next paid speaking date, honorary degree, or board meeting for such worthy causes as the HBCU Hampton Institute or National Geographic Society. Stahr quotes liberally from Taft’s post-presidential opinion pieces. Disputing Roosevelt’s “unsafe doctrine” under which a chief executive was free to take any action not explicitly prohibited by the Constitution, Taft warned readers that “ascribing an undefined residuum of power to the President” risked “results of an arbitrary character, doing irremediable injuries to private rights.”

Their shared enmity toward Wilson helped engineer a rapprochement between Taft and Roosevelt before the latter’s death in January 1919. Yet Taft strongly endorsed Wilson’s postwar diplomacy even while lamenting his stubborn refusal to consider senatorial reservations that might have secured American entry into the League of Nations. The jurist once criticized by organized labor for his strikebreaking injunctions, Taft endeared himself to the scrubwomen of Schenectady, New York, when, as co-chair of Wilson’s National War Labor Board, he demanded their wages be raised in keeping with the board’s insistence on “equal pay for equal work.”

Warren Harding’s 1920 election ushered in the final chapter of Taft’s “great American life.” As chief justice of the United States, Taft claimed to be well and truly out of politics. His assertion rang hollow with successive Republican presidents he lobbied for or against judicial candidates. On the bench Taft rethought his earlier hostility to Louis Brandeis, crediting him as “a very hard worker” who “pulls his weight in the boat.” He forced the intellectually diminished Joseph McKenna into retirement and appealed to Congress for a new Supreme Court building.

In 1925 Taft secured legislation allowing the Court to control its own docket through the certiorari process by which justices designate the cases they will consider. The Taft Court struck down an Oregon statute favored by the Ku Klux Klan that prohibited parents from sending their children to Catholic schools. On the other hand, it upheld racial segregation in public schools, unanimously extending the doctrine of separate but equal to include Chinese Americans. Most notoriously, it approved the forced sterilization of “feeble minded” patients in state institutions.

The Court’s ruling exempting professional baseball from antitrust laws still stands. So does Taft’s opinion in Myers v. United States (1926) that asserted a presidential right to fire any employee of the executive branch. Taft’s health began to fail long before his February 1930 resignation from the Court. He died a month later, popularly mourned for his integrity and self-effacing approach to public service. Yet great lawyering is not synonymous with great leadership. Those seeking Taft’s epitaph would do worse than to quote Vanity Fair‘s assessment of William Gladstone. “Were he less admirable, he would be more admired; were he a worse man, he would be a better statesman.”

William Howard Taft: A Great American Life
by Walter Stahr
Simon & Schuster, 688 pp., $35

Richard Norton Smith is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author, most recently, of Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (Harper).