William Howard Taft

Paolo E. Coletta

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT'S parents were of moderate wealth and some political influence in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was born on 15 September 1857. He graduated from Yale College in 1878 and was awarded a law degree by Cincinnati Law School in 1880. For the next twenty years he received increasingly important judicial positions from Republican hands before serving Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt as the first civil governor of the Philippines (1901–1904) and then as Roosevelt's secretary of war (1904–1908). He thus had excellent credentials for achieving his life's goal, a seat on the Supreme Court. However, Helen Herron, whom he married in 1886 and who bore him three children, sought high political office for him and obtained her wish.

More than six feet tall, weighing 332 pounds at his inauguration, Taft had an infectious chuckle and was usually even-tempered. Although thoroughly honest, he had certain deficiencies that detracted from success in politics. He was devoid of qualities of showmanship, unskilled in managing the fourth estate, conservative in his political and social views, and distrustful of the military viewpoint. In addition, he was afflicted with a craving for quiet, stability, and order that caused him to procrastinate in making decisions and forced him to devote a tremendous amount of energy to completing a task; a corpulence that made him sensitive to heat and increased his natural laziness; a lack of executive leadership, especially of the skill for achieving political compromises; and a perpetual tendency to depend for support upon others, first upon his parents, then upon Mrs. Taft, and particularly upon Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt became president, Taft parroted his ideas; such was his attachment to him that he several times declined his offer of an appointment to the Supreme Court. Yet he disliked politics, saying in 1904 that "a national campaign for the presidency is to me a nightmare."

Legislative Affairs and Tempestuous Politics

As Elihu Root's successor as secretary of war, Taft served Roosevelt less as secretary, because Roosevelt ran the army, than as a provider of sound legal advice, spokesman on the stump, and general troubleshooter. It was only natural then that Roosevelt supported him above all others as his successor because Taft appeared to be an edited version of himself, the best man to carry out "the Roosevelt policies." The most important of these included supporting the right of labor to organize, forcing capital to obey the law, reforming the currency, improving the Sherman Antitrust Act, strengthening the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) over railroads, avoiding government ownership and socialism, and keeping the tariff rates steady.

Until elected president in his own right in 1904, Roosevelt sought only moderate reforms, in order to win the support for his renomination and election by the old guard. Once in power, he followed a "middle-of-the-road, middle-class program of mild reform" and was able to add a bit of constructive legislation to the rolls by appealing to the people over the head of Congress and promising everyone a "square deal." When in 1908 he suggested more radical reforms, the old guard balked. Then, with Roosevelt's strong support, Taft easily defeated Willam Jennings Bryan.

If Taft and Roosevelt agreed on objectives, they differed greatly on methods and interpretation. Both in domestic and foreign affairs, Roosevelt wanted to make the presidency the paramount branch of government. He would act unless constrained by "specific restrictions and prohibitions appearing in the Constitution or imposed by Congress under its constitutional power." As the steward of the people, he sought to do all he could for them, above all to obtain a more equitable distribution of the national wealth. Taft wanted to keep the branches of government in equilibrium and limit government in order to give personal and property rights free rein. He would not act unless he found the power to do so in the Constitution or in law and held that "there is no undefined residuum of power which [a president] can exercise because it seems to him to be in the public interest." He would not use government as an agency to relieve the misery of the masses, whose capability for voting intelligently he doubted. Never during his term did he intervene to settle a labor strike. He depended upon southern whites to solve the blacks' many problems even though the former were racists who equated white supremacy with progressivism. He also opposed the extension of more democratic political methods, including woman suffrage. Yet he did more than any other president before him through mechanistic means devoid of humanitarianism to make the federal government "efficient."

Taft believed, as he noted in his inaugural address, that his tasks would be to "complete and perfect" the progress Roosevelt had made; quiet the popular clamor he had excited, especially among businessmen; and oppose progressive reforms achievable only by the intervention of the federal government.

The most critical domestic problems facing Taft were the obtaining of an income tax that would raise revenue but also serve as a redistributor of the national wealth, the control of big business so as to provide free competition, reform of the tariff and currency and banking systems, the conservation of natural resources, and the improvement of democratic government by the admission of more democratic methods to it that would improve its organization and operations.

To leave Taft alone to run his administration, Roosevelt went hunting in Africa for a year. With Roosevelt's dynamic spell over him broken, Taft returned to his conservative self, thus appearing to progressives as having deserted them and Roosevelt's cause. In addition, his numerous social entertainments, frequent golf games, and long traveling junkets raised the question whether he was truly serving the public or seeking personal pleasure. Another action that helped cause his later split with Roosevelt was his failure to keep Roosevelt's cabinet, which by implication, rather than pledge, he had said he would retain as his own. Of nine men, seven had studied law, five were corporation lawyers, none was a progressive or reformer, and only three had served Roosevelt. He further alienated insurgents—defined as those who rejected dictation by their congressional leaders—and progressives by depending for legislative advice upon the reactionary Joseph Cannon, the dictatorial Speaker of the House, and upon the conservative Nelson W. Aldrich in the Senate, upon his equally conservative brother Henry and half brother Charles, and upon Mrs. Taft, the last three of whom constantly fed him their suspicions of Roosevelt's desire to return to the presidency.

Taft called Congress into special session, on 15 March 1909—the first Republican president to do so since Rutherford B. Hayes—to revise the tariff rates downward and in addition create a tariff commission that would investigate and report each year on those products whose schedules should be raised or lowered. Saying that he was "god-damned tired of listening to all this babble for reform," Cannon wanted to keep the Dingley Tariff of 1897 inviolate, but of his majority of forty-seven men, approximately thirty were insurgents who threatened his control. Believing that he needed Cannon's strength in the battle for tariff reform, Taft withheld his support from the insurgents seeking to unseat Cannon as Speaker. The insurgents naturally wondered how Taft could win progressive reforms by supporting conservatives.

As usual, congressmen sought to protect the economic interests of their own states or regions. Taft failed to give directions to Aldrich or to Sereno E. Payne, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, or to threaten opponents with the use of his patronage power. Payne's committee considered four thousand items. While it lowered four hundred duties on products for the benefit of their consumers, in the end it produced a bill that pinched consumers even further. A novelty was a federal inheritance tax of 1 percent on $10,000 or more. After it was passed by a vote of 217 to 161, Taft said it came "as near complying with our purposes as we can hope." He rejected advice from Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin and others that it did not square with his platform pledge, adding that he would not interfere with Congress while it was at work; he would veto it if it did not comply with the platform.

Aldrich increased 600 of the 847 items in the Payne bill and demanded its immediate passage so that delay would not disturb business. Instead, a summer of senatorial debate ensued that, for the oratory it produced and the consequences that followed, ranks with the debates over the League of Nations and Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court. If the progressives could not move Aldrich, they widely publicized the inequities of his bill. After Aldrich read them out of their party, they told their constituents their side of the story in order to win continued political life. Taft then complained that he had been deceived by some "very astute and expert politicians," including Aldrich, whom he had trusted; but instead of berating Aldrich, he became angry with the insurgents, who were fighting his fight, because he believed that their criticism of the senator was also directed at him.

On 15 April 1909 the insurgents introduced an amendment calling for a flat 3 percent tax on individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year as a substitute for Aldrich's inheritance tax. Taft approved but said the Supreme Court would find the income tax unconstitutional and suggested a constitutional amendment for it. Congress passed such an amendment on 28 June. Moreover, he supported an insurgent amendment calling for a 2 percent tax on all corporate income except that derived from banking.

Although Cannon and Aldrich stacked the conference committee with extreme protectionists, Taft did not pressure it or appeal over its head to the public. Instead, he extended patronage to "standpatters" on the ground that his veto of its work would lose him their support for obtaining additional reforms in the subsequent regular session. The House approved the bill on 31 July by a vote of 195 to 183, with 20 Republicans voting nay and only 2 Democrats aye. On 5 August the Senate approved by 47 to 31, with 10 insurgents voting nay.

In addition to modifying the rates of the Dingley Tariff, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff gave Taft the Tariff Commission, which he wanted. It also set minimum and maximum rates and permitted the president to employ the latter against nations that discriminated, in some undefined way, against the United States. Taft concluded that while a veto of it would make him popular with the people, he would lose the support of standpatters. Moreover, he was pleased with the Tariff Commission, the increase of needed revenues, and the reductions in some rates. On 6 August he therefore signed the tariff act. He thereby ended his hundred-day honeymoon with Congress, further separated the regular and insurgent wings of his party, determined the latter to oppose his renomination in 1912, and infused new life into the Democratic opposition. Although he had done more about the tariff than Roosevelt had done in seven years, he decided to explain the new tariff to the people and thus dampen the flames of insurgency that engulfed the West, which was incensed because the tariff cuts had been made largely on western products and therefore helped the eastern manufacturers and trusts.

Rather than carefully preparing his speeches, he vacationed for a month and confessed that "I am putting off those speeches from day to day." His procrastination in the matter and his failure to employ a speechwriter or to submit his writings for editing caused him to make some disastrous gaffs. In Boston on 14 September he highly praised Aldrich. In La Follette's state, instead of thanking the insurgents for their support, he spoke of a postal savings-bank plan. As for a speech to be delivered in Winona, Minnesota, on the seventeenth, he told Mrs. Taft the night before that "it will be a close shave. Speech hastily prepared, but I hope it may do some good." He was never more wrong. While he admitted that he had agreed to some high rates in order to maintain party solidarity, he made a supreme blunder by asserting, "When I do say without hesitation that this is the best tariff bill that the Republican party has ever passed, and therefore the best tariff bill that has been passed at all, I do not feel that I could have reconciled any other course to my conscience than that of signing the bill."

Newspaper headlines, various congressmen, and even his devoted military aide, Captain Archibald W. Butt, saw that he had revealed his lack of proper preparation and ignorance of certain aspects of tariff making. More important, he was standing pat against further tariff revision and, by reading the insurgents from his party, providing them with excellent ammunition for the campaign of 1910. He then added to the animus against him by consorting openly with Cannon and other conservatives. Most important, by aligning himself with conservatives, he opened the door to demands that Roosevelt be reelected in 1912.

Even though controversy over the tariff had not ended, Taft became involved in another, over conservation policy, that engendered mountains of debate and had fantastic political repercussions. The basic argument was between those who would "preserve" what was left of the nation's natural resources for posterity, thus denying them to exploitation by corporate interests and "trusts," and those who would use them under stated conditions for mining, grazing, lumbering, and waterpower. Roosevelt believed conservation the most important contribution he had made to his domestic administration. His way was to employ scientific land-management techniques that would result in orderly resource development, to excuse federal intervention on the ground that the ends justified the means, and to invest the physical values of conservation with social and moral values. By 1908, Congress had blocked further progress in his program.

Taft agreed with Roosevelt on conservation but promised appropriate legislation to regularize various executive orders Roosevelt had used to accomplish his purposes. Roosevelt was pleased that Taft would retain his secretary of the interior, James Garfield, who had enthusiastically supported conservation, and then was disgruntled when Taft replaced him with Richard Achilles Ballinger of Washington State. For conservation, Roosevelt preferred federal control. Taft preferred state control. Taft wanted to lease national lands to private capital for exploitation and let Congress determine whether water should be under federal or state control but limit the reclamation of swamp and marginal lands to the federal government. Above all, he would regularize Roosevelt's extralegal methods, regardless of the results for conservation.

Like Taft a strict constructionist, Ballinger questioned the legality of some of Roosevelt's conservation measures, such as letting Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forestry Service in the Department of Agriculture, grant forest and mineral rights to land whose title was vested in the Department of the Interior. Moreover, Ballinger wanted to sell rather than lease coal lands and waterpower sites. Without specific congressional authority, Roosevelt and Garfield had withdrawn from settlement lands along rivers and streams in the Northwest and failed to inform Ballinger, who within ten days of his taking office stopped granting waterpower permits in the public domain and began restoring the right of private use. Taft supported him against Pinchot by saying that Congress, not the executive, could withdraw lands for conservation purposes. At Taft's request, Congress set aside, between 1910 and 1912, all valuable waterpower sites, thus legitimizing the work begun under Roosevelt yet giving waterpower magnates a lucrative opportunity to develop waterpower on the national domain. Pinchot was soon in disgrace with Ballinger, and the public quickly became interested in the personal battle between the exemplars of Roosevelt's and Taft's conservation methods and in how Taft would solve this interdepartmental squabble.

Taft's greatest political crisis in the conservation issue came over the coal-lands problem. To foil speculators who merged dummy entries on 160-acre homestead claims in order to exploit coal beneath, in 1905 Roosevelt had directed that coal lands be leased rather than sold. He then withdrew 66 million acres, 7.68 million of them in Alaska, from entry. When one Clarence Cunningham, aided by Ballinger, then a Seattle lawyer, amassed 5,280 acres, rumors began about the impending rape of Alaska's mineral resources by unscrupulous Wall Street interests. Although as land commissioner Ballinger found Cunningham's claim legal, upon the report of a special investigator named Louis R. Glavis he rescinded the approval order. After becoming secretary of the interior, he had still another investigation made. This also upheld Cunningham. Blocked at Interior, Glavis turned to Pinchot in Agriculture, saying he had damaging evidence against Ballinger. Pinchot hoped to be able to drive him from office, but by attacking strict constructionists who favored "the great interests as against the people," he earned Taft's ire.

In February 1907, when Congress verged upon taking the power to establish national forests from the president, Pinchot had helped prepare for Roosevelt a "midnight forests" proclamation covering 16 million acres and Garfield had withdrawn 4 million acres of waterpower sites in the area just before a law creating national forests in six western states went into effect. Deeming Pinchot "a radical and a crank" who utterly worshiped Roosevelt, Taft in December 1908 had refused to use a speech Pinchot had written for him and hinted that because he was not a lawyer he might use illegal methods to accomplish his purposes. Pinchot thereupon concluded that Taft would kill conservation and that Ballinger was a traitor to the cause, but for the moment he kept the argument within the family. In August 1909, Taft accepted reports on the Cunningham claim from both Glavis and Ballinger. After reading them and submitting them to still further examination by his attorney general and others, he decided that Glavis should be fired "for disloyalty to his superior officers in making a false charge against them." He then wrote Pinchot that Ballinger was a true friend of conservation who operated only "within the law and [was] buttressed by legal authority," adding that he would be sorry to have Pinchot leave government service.

In November, in Collier's magazine, Glavis publicized his report, soon copied by a number of muck-raking publications, which impugned Ballinger. While he praised Ballinger privately, Taft told Pinchot that he was determined to end "public discussion between departments and bureaus" because it was "most demoralizing and subversive of governmental discipline and efficiency." Pinchot pleased Taft by saying that he would not resign but would furnish a bill of particulars against Ballinger. The men parted amicably, yet Pinchot saw a way to keep up his fight for conservation—get himself fired and so dramatize the differences in attitude toward conservation between Roosevelt and Taft. To get himself fired, Pinchot openly attacked Taft in a speech in January 1910 and also in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture. Realizing that firing Pinchot would please those who sought to rupture his relations with Roosevelt and stimulate a "Back from Elba" movement that would be supported by the insurgents, Taft decided that others must take the initiative. On the advice of Elihu Root, who at his request read the record of the Ballinger-Pinchot dispute, he wrote Pinchot a letter of dismissal. When the letter arrived at his home, he waved it toward his doting mother and cried, "I'm fired." Eyes flashing, head flung back, and waving an arm over her head, she exclaimed, "Hurrah!"

The House of Representatives held hearings on the charges against Ballinger from 26 January to 20 May 1910. The report exonerated both Ballinger and Taft of evildoing but revealed that Ballinger's actions usually resulted in favors for private enterprise and for the exploitation of the resources desired by the West, thus contradicting Roosevelt's conservation policies. What had been a "tilt between Taft and Ted" then turned the tables on Taft by showing that he had sought to whitewash Ballinger, in part by the use of a predated document. Pressed for time, he had directed his attorney general to date certain papers "prior to the date of my opinion." Not knowing that Ballinger and the attorney general had openly acknowledged the fact, Taft denied it, thus laying himself open to the charge of being a liar and forger. The public press thereupon "convicted" him and "vindicated" Pinchot. Meanwhile, both Pinchot and Norman Hapgood of Collier's had gone to Europe to tell Roosevelt how Taft had turned away from his policies.

Proof that Taft was devoted to conservation lies in his withdrawing almost as much land from entry as Roosevelt had. He had regularized Roosevelt's conservation measures but wrecked the inter-departmental arrangements between Agriculture and Interior that had existed under Roosevelt; strengthened the power of Interior over conservation; widened the split in his party over the tariff issue by the conservation controversy; made Pinchot a martyr to progressives; furnished new ammunition to insurgents, especially westerners, who now hoped to add Roosevelt to their ranks; ensured that the House would lose its Republican majority in the elections of 1910; and provided issues for the presidential campaign of 1912. Most important, by firing Pinchot, Taft drove a deep wedge between himself and Roosevelt, who now saw him a failure as a leader.

Although Taft well knew of the serious insurgent and progressive uprising against him, he "walked to his doom 'a gentleman unafraid,"' as William Allen White put it. Having on 4 March 1910 completed a year in office, he alleged that the no-third-term tradition would block Roosevelt. While he admitted that his party was split, he pleaded for solidarity on the grounds that a good beginning had been made in carrying out his party's platform, as instanced by the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, which he still thought was the best tariff bill ever passed; his regularization of conservation; and his undertaking of railroad regulation, an antitrust crusade, and still other reforms. He should not be judged until he had finished his work.

Nonetheless, on the basis of his record, the progressives openly declared war on him as the primaries of 1910 approached. Furthermore, upon his return home on 18 June, Roosevelt submitted to a great popular reception but declined an invitation to visit the White House. Although he said he had no intention of running again and would not take sides in the battle between the regulars and progressives, he could not support Taft for renomination and reelection, despite letters from Taft saying that he had been "conscientiously trying to carry out your policies, but my method of doing so has not worked smoothly." Mrs. Taft's illness—she had suffered a stroke a year earlier—also placed a terribly great strain on Taft. Roosevelt replied that he intended "to keep my mind open as I keep my mouth shut." He broke a promise to Root to keep quiet for sixty days after only four days and conferred with a number of progressives before accepting Taft's invitation to visit him on 30 July at Taft's summer home but excluded discussion of serious political matters, even though he held Taft responsible for splitting their party and making Democratic victories possible in November. He conceived his task to be the drawing together of the two wings of the party without supporting one against the other. "Taft has passed his nadir," he told Pinchot, but with new advisers he might redeem himself and become worthy of renomination and reelection.

While Roosevelt learned of the difficulties of drawing his party together—the president and the party's old guard defeated him when he sought a "clean-cut progressive program" in New York—Taft, irritated by his failure to keep silent, told Archie Butt on 6 July that "I do not see how I am going to get out of having a fight with President Roosevelt." Of the options available to him of helping, opposing, or bargaining with him, he chose the last. If Roosevelt would endorse him he would drop Aldrich and Cannon as advisers and let him suggest a replacement for Ballinger. If he did not agree, he would fight him.

Roosevelt replied in late August and early September 1910 by undertaking a three-week, sixteen-state western tour to announce the policies of his New Nationalism and so help elect progressives. But instead of cementing his party, he split it still further by demanding advanced social legislation, branding the Supreme Court—Taft's holy of holies—as a barrier to the achievement of social justice, and calling for federal power sufficient to obtain social justice and a president who would be the "steward of the public welfare" and place human rights before property rights. He thus ranged conservatives against himself and by comparison made Taft appear to be the conservator of all worth saving. However, in his customary way of balancing opposed forces, Roosevelt then sought support from conservatives as well as from progressives and so attempted to unite the party. He praised Taft's work on conservation, for example, and agreed to meet him to show the public that they were in harmony. Perplexed, Taft told a friend that "I don't know whither we are drifting, but I do know where every real thinking patriot will stand in the end, and that is by the Constitution," and withdrew even closer into his conservative shell.

Saying that those who had been disloyal to him must be read out of the party, Taft cited Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, Albert B. Cummins and Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa, La Follette of Wisconsin, and Hiram Johnson of California. By confusing the anti-Cannon insurgents with progressives, he made one of the worst mistakes of his political career, for he drove away men long loyal to their party and divided it by

supporting only its conservatives. Those driven out had their revenge in the primaries. Although Democrats defeated Beveridge, the victory of La Follette foreshadowed the split in the party in 1912. Of the forty-one incumbent Republican congressmen defeated, only one was an insurgent, and all the progressive senators were reelected and would be joined by three others. The insurgent uprising against Cannonism had become a progressive revolution that defeated standpat Republicanism in almost every instance and made Cannon's reelection as Speaker impossible. Moreover, Democratic victories in various eastern states, particularly the election of Woodrow Wilson as governor of New Jersey, offered new leaders of presidential stature. And with a Democratic majority in the House and a Republican majority of only twelve in the Senate, Taft would face a Congress in which either house could block his demands for legislation. With the defeat of almost all of the men he himself had supported, Roosevelt concluded that all talk about his being a candidate in 1912 would end.

Despite the tempestuous primary politics, by the end of the second session of the Sixty-first Congress, on 10 June 1910, Taft had obtained a number of progressive reforms. The House Speaker had been stripped of his most dictatorial powers, and Taft was well on his way toward achieving more reforms, with some fifty new laws, in four years than Roosevelt had won in seven. Among these were more power for the Tariff Commission; a limit on the issue of labor injunctions; postal savings-bank, parcel post, and federal budget systems; streamlining of the post office so as to put it on a paying basis; and creation of the United States Court of Commerce to hear cases arising from decisions of the ICC.

Taft viewed the functions of the ICC in judicial terms, whereas progressives, recalling what the courts had done to its original powers, saw them as economic and political. In a bill introduced by Representative James Mann, Taft tried to lift the antitrust laws and permit railroads to cooperate in drafting freight rates and passenger fares but agreed that the ICC approve the amount of stocks and bonds they issued. However, House insurgents and Democrats amended the bill to bar mergers and to prohibit a greater charge for a short than for a long haul, included telephone and telegraph companies as common carriers, and failed by only one vote to delete the Commerce Court. When progressive and Democratic senators sought to strengthen the bill and thus support Taft, he took their aid as opposition and made the original bill a test of party loyalty.

In the end, he compromised with the House: Arizona and New Mexico could become states, even though they would be Democratic, in return for a railroad bill lacking control over railroad securities. In the Senate, the insurgents deleted from the companion Elkins bill its authorization of traffic agreements and mergers. The greatly changed result, the Mann-Elkins Act, covered not only telephone, telegraph, and cable companies but railroad terminals, bridges, and ferries, and forbade a greater charge for a short than for a long haul but excluded government control over railroad securities. It passed with solid Republican support, but Taft had helped it pass by directing his attorney general to issue an injunction against the presidents of a number of eastern railroads who had joined together to raise their rates. After they rescinded the higher rates and promised to follow the new law, the injunction was dropped. Nevertheless, Taft interpreted the insurgents' attempts to strengthen the law—a great improvement over the Hepburn Act of Roosevelt's day—as opposition to him and determined to seek their defeat in 1912.

Taft pleased businessmen in general by demanding government efficiency and currency and banking reform, by taking the patronage out of politics, by increasing American investments at home, and by obtaining additional foreign markets. Yet he had no word of cheer for the political, economic, and social reforms demanded by progressives. At any rate, finding the government poorly organized and lacking a good accounting system, he reorganized some departments; improved the system of collecting customs duties; cut military appropriations; and, in order to be able to reach administrative decisions, demanded an executive budget, a central purchasing system, and a budget office. The first president to have the federal administration studied in detail—by the Commission on Economy and Efficiency (1911–1913)—he was able in 110 reports to show Congress how the government could save money and the time and energy of public officials. He wanted to reduce federal spending and the number of public employees, stop pork-barrel legislation, use the best accounting systems adopted by the business world, reorganize and reduce government agencies, and devote a minimum of expenditures to social welfare projects—the last a sore point with progressives.

Desiring to keep its power of the purse, Congress refused to provide the president authority to prepare a federal budget. Saying that his constitutional authority denied Congress power in the matter, Taft, in his budget for fiscal 1914, asked not only for appropriations but for authority to change laws, management procedures, organization, business methods, and even the personnel of the executive branch. Because Congress refused to act, the United States remained the only important nation in the world as yet without a federal budget. What reorganization Taft accomplished, as in the Department of State in 1909, was only mechanistic, because he conceived of administration in terms merely of structure and failed to give it the leadership and spirit good management requires. During his last days as president, he approved the act creating the Department of Labor, theretofore a division of Commerce, and again asserted the need for a thorough reorganization of the executive structure.

While the Payne-Aldrich Tariff was the most generous American one to apply to Canada since a reciprocity treaty of 1854 had been abrogated by the United States in 1866, Taft told the Senate on 26 January 1911 that Canada would have to decide whether to stay out of American markets or become a commercial friend. He then tried to jam a Canadian reciprocity treaty through Congress. By appealing over the head of Congress for popular support for "the most important measure of my administration," he obtained a House bill that lowered some rates of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff and greatly pleased Democrats because it portended the fall of the extreme protectionist system. When the Senate balked at revising the tariff, Taft called Congress into extraordinary session for 1 April 1911.

On the surface, reciprocity promised many benefits. The United States could look for increased sales of manufactures, greater access to Canadian raw materials, and cheaper foodstuffs—at the cost of American farmers, producers of raw materials, and fishermen. Canada would enjoy greater sales of agricultural products to the United States, lower prices for American manufactures, and a drop in taxes—at the cost of increased prices for food and agricultural implements, the destruction of benefits derived from the British imperial preference system, and the end of subsidies for industry. Once the Senate agreed with the House on lower duties, the "legislative agreement" (rather than treaty) had still to run the gauntlet of two national legislatures.

When the new Speaker, Champ Clark, outlined the legislative program, he avoided reciprocity but called for reductions in the tariff that would render ineffective any reciprocity agreement with Canada. The Ways and Means Committee supported him, but he then bungled by saying that "I am for this [reduction] Bill, because I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole." In any event, the House passed the bill on 21 April, but on the twenty-fifth it began debating a farmers' free list and wholly disregarded Taft's stentorian call for reciprocity.

In the Senate, Republican insurgents Cummins and La Follette opposed reciprocity because it would hurt American farmers and help the trusts by giving them cheap raw materials. Assuming that the American Congress could not reach agreement before the end of July, the Canadian Parliament on 19 May adjourned for ten weeks. While Taft pressured opposed senators, the House continued to lower agricultural tariff duties, yet on 22 July the Senate passed the Canadian reciprocity bill by a vote of 53 to 27—with Democratic support. It was now Canada's turn, but Taft was also on the spot because the Senate passed bills reducing the rates on various agricultural products and the House went along. Taft thereupon vetoed the bills.

The Canadian Parliament opened on 18 July, but because the majority could not force closure on the question, it was dissolved and new elections were set for September, thus delaying the meeting of Parliament again until 1 October. Taft, on 15 September, began a long tour in which he spoke mostly about the tariff. A week later he learned that Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Liberal party premier, who favored reciprocity, had been defeated by one who opposed it. Taft, the "father of reciprocity," had thus been repudiated by his northern neighbor.

During the special session Taft called to deal with Canadian tariff reciprocity, Congress admitted Arizona and New Mexico as states, reapportioned the House, provided for free trade with the Philippines, and enacted a number of progressive measures, approving postal savings banks, publicity for campaign contributions, creation of the Industrial Bureau and the Bureau of Mines, an eight-hour day for workers on federal projects, compensation for workers injured on interstate railroads, increased power of the ICC over railroad rates, and a strengthened Pure Food and Drugs Act. Taft vetoed the admission of Arizona because its constitution provided for the recall of judges; he also vetoed several tariff revision bills and was lukewarm toward the popular election of senators. Although the direct-elections bill passed the Senate by only one vote more than the required two-thirds, its popularity was revealed when the House passed it by a vote of 296 to 16.

In January 1911 Senator Aldrich offered recommendations for reforming the currency and banking system distilled from a two-year study. Briefly, he sought to create a great central bank with Reserve Association branches, all under the direction of private bankers, and issue untaxed asset currency. He was attacked by those who variously decried the concentration of lendable funds in the largest cities, demanded public rather than private control, wanted government rather than bank currency, and urged that credit facilities also be provided farmers. Taft approved Aldrich's conclusions after treasury officials were added to the board of directors of the central bank, but he did not push for the plan very hard, and after Aldrich retired from the Senate later in 1911, four standing committees of the House began work on the subject. The Federal Reserve Act, adopted by the succeeding Wilson administration, was based on a report made by a subcommittee of the House Banking and Currency Committee, headed by Carter H. Glass.

Taft's attitude toward the civil service was ambivalent, yet he wished to extend the merit system to all but the most important administrative offices of government and also called for a civil-service pension plan. When Congress balked, he extended the merit system in the postal and consular services and to skilled workers in navy yards.

Taft continued the antitrust cases Roosevelt had begun, adding that he would enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act, pending improved legislation designed to prevent monopoly. He had no quarrel with big business as long as it behaved itself, and he recommended that "good" trusts with a capitalization of $100 million or more incorporate under a new federal law, thus exempting them from suits brought by states. When a law embodying his ideas was introduced in both houses on 7 February 1910, it was spurned by Democrats and insurgents because it would have destroyed the Sherman Act. Although Taft's unrelenting antitrust crusade far exceeded Roosevelt's—seventy-five suits in four years, compared with forty suits in seven years—by misunderstanding Roosevelt's antitrust policy, he was to cause himself and Roosevelt great personal embarrassment.

On appeal, the Supreme Court on 15 May 1911 decided against the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and on the twenty-ninth, against the American Tobacco Company. Roosevelt had entered suit in both cases. But in the Standard Oil case the Court announced a "rule of reason" by which it could decide whether a restraint of trade was "reasonable" or not and what restraints of trade were allowable. More important in expanding the break between Taft and Roosevelt were suits against the United States Steel and International Harvester companies.

During the Panic of 1907, J. P. Morgan and other bankers wished to prevent additional business failures and to shore up confidence in Wall Street by letting United States Steel acquire many shares of the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCI). Fearing an antitrust suit, United States Steel's Elbert H. Gary suggested that the president or the Department of Justice grant approval for the purchase of TCI shares. On 4 November, Gary spoke with Roosevelt, who said that "while he could not advise them to take the action proposed, he felt it no public duty of his to interpose any objection." Wall Street and the nation had thus been saved.

Congressional hearings held on the matter in June 1911 revealed that Gary and George Perkins of United States Steel and International Harvester not only defended the steel company's taking over TCI but disliked the Sherman Act and advocated federal control over industrial corporations and even control of their sale prices—the latter of which Taft saw as state socialism. Asked to testify on the part he had played in the TCI affair, Roosevelt, on 5 August, assumed full responsibility for what had transpired, adding that the result had "justified my judgment." But Taft's entering of a suit against the corporation on 26 October implied that Roosevelt had fostered monopoly and been deceived about the facts of the transaction. This marked the final break between Roosevelt and Taft. Thereafter, while Roosevelt called for a law that would tell businessmen exactly where they stood with respect to the Sherman Act or, better still, a law granting the federal government power to regulate and supervise business engaged in interstate trade, Taft insisted that the Sherman Act was "clear," thus alienating conservative interests, damaging himself politically, and giving rise to a clamor for Roosevelt to enter the ring against him in 1912.

Roosevelt was also involved in the suit Taft brought against International Harvester, or the "farm machinery trust," in April 1912. Both Taft and Roosevelt had awaited the decision impatiently because each would make it a leading issue in the contest for the presidential nomination. Lacking an agency to control corporations, Roosevelt had not sued Harvester, a "good" trust, but Taft viewed the situation as meaning that he had granted gross executive favoritism to a Morgan interest and was now defending Perkins. But when Taft was secretary of war, he had approved Roosevelt's action; he had then waited three and a half years, until Roosevelt contested the presidential primaries with him, before entering a suit.

Various plans for controlling corporations had been considered by a Senate committee in November 1911, including a plan favored by Roosevelt and Perkins that would "regulate" big business, and Taft's plan, which would have "exterminated" it under what he insisted was the "clear" meaning of the Sherman Act. In consequence of Taft's stand, the voters turned to presidential aspirants who were more friendly than he to big business. In December 1911, Taft sent Congress a special message in which he made three "sanely progressive" proposals that appealed to Wall Street and found favor in all political quarters: (1) that the Sherman Act not be amended; (2) that a supplemental law should be enacted "which shall describe and denounce methods of competition which are unfair and badges of the unlawful purpose denounced in the Anti-trust law"; and (3) that government control of trusts be strengthened by federal incorporation and by the creation of a "special bureau of commission" in the Department of Commerce and Labor.

By highlighting the minatory rather than the reform aspects of these suggestions, he made it diffi-cult for Congress to comprehend his meaning. Moreover, the first regular session of the Sixty-second Congress, which met in December 1911, would not sit until the eve of the national conventions. Last, it could not be expected that the strong Democratic majority in the House and small Republican majority in the Senate would pass any measures he demanded. Congress amended those patent laws that supported monopoly and hindered the enforcement of the Sherman Act, but it did nothing to pass the antitrust laws he demanded. Taft had thus failed to fulfill his platform plank on the matter and driven Perkins and many other businessmen from his side and toward Roosevelt.

Foreign Affairs

Taft differed greatly from Roosevelt in his conduct of foreign, as well as domestic, affairs. Taft's experiences in the Philippines and in the cabinet should have provided him an excellent background in the conduct of diplomacy, but he shunned both Roosevelt's method of proceeding with as much executive action and as little congressional consent as possible and his realistic policy of peace through strength to protect the nation's interests.

Never bellicose, Taft sought to settle international disputes by peaceful means, particularly through the use of the Hague Court of Arbitration or by international commissions of inquiry if diplomatic efforts failed. Pacific means served to settle the Pribilof Islands pelagic sealing question that had for years disturbed the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, and Japan; the fisheries dispute with Newfoundland; and the United States-Canadian boundary. Roosevelt agreed to the arbitration of questions not involving national honor or vital interests, whereas Taft agreed to unlimited arbitration and in April 1911 told Archie Butt that a treaty of this kind with Great Britain "will be the crowning jewel of my administration . . . but also the greatest failure if I do not get it ratified." He failed to take into account a Senate extremely jealous of its prerogatives in the treaty-making process and Roosevelt, who countered that, Britain excepted, "the United States should never bind itself to arbitrate questions respecting its honor, independence, and integrity."

On 3 August 1911, Taft won popular applause when he submitted to the Senate unlimited arbitration treaties with Britain and France. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee deleted the paragraph permitting the referral of arbitral matters to an international commission apart from the Senate, declared that no such commission or court could tell it what was subject to arbitration, and added a long list of items not subject to arbitration, including immigration policy and the Monroe Doctrine. Passed by the Senate mainly to embarrass Taft, the treaties had to be rewritten before being resubmitted to Britain and France, and Taft's appeal to the people in a speaking tour merely strengthened the Senate in its resolve to hold its ground.

Moreover, Taft overlooked the fact that he had refused to arbitrate with Britain over the Panama Canal tolls and thus damaged the principle of arbitration itself. In contrast he agreed to arbitrate the question of the ownership of the Chamizal tract on the Texas-Mexican border, which had hung fire since 1897 and would not be settled until the late 1960s.

Because dictator Porfirio Díaz welcomed foreign investments in Mexico, conservatives, including Taft and his minister to Mexico, disliked the nationalistic and reformist principles of his opponent in the presidential elections of 1910, Francisco Indalecio Made-ro. While Taft sent military forces to the Mexican border and ships to protect American lives and property during the civil war that broke out between Díaz and Madero and, after the murder of Madero, General Victoriano Huerta, Taft consistently honored his promise not to intervene. Rather than present the incoming Wilson administration with a fait accompli by recognizing the new Huerta regime, he bequeathed it the Mexican problem.

Taft's secretary of state, Philander C. Knox, was an excellent lawyer but an abominable statesman. Moreover, for his first assistant secretary he chose a man who equaled his capacity for antagonizing people, Francis M. Huntington Wilson. In any event, on Knox's advice Taft reorganized the State Department by creating several new positions and the now familiar geographic desks. As for policy, Taft and Knox agreed upon the need for the strategic defense of the Panama Canal, then under construction, by promoting peace in the Caribbean and Central America; support of the Monroe Doctrine; and "dollar diplomacy," the policy of actively encouraging American investments abroad with the object not only of earning profits but of promoting economic and political stability in the areas of investment and thereby world peace. As Taft put it, he was substituting "dollars for bullets." While his strategic and commercial objectives were the same as Roosevelt's, it was hard to believe his saying that dollar diplomacy also appealed to "humanitarian sentiments." On the other hand, conditions south of the border occasionally menaced American interests. Particularly in Central America, politics were corrupt, economic development lagged, financial indebtedness was prevalent, and revolutions were endemic in those countries that did not have oppressive dictators.

The best examples of the working of dollar diplomacy were in Colombia, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Bitter toward the United States because of its rape of Panama and seeking compensation for the loss, Colombia wanted to arbitrate differences. Taft offered $10 million and a statement sounding like an apology. When Colombia refused, he raised the ante to $25 million, which was also refused; he left office without solving the problem.

To help Honduras liquidate its large foreign debt, Taft suggested a loan to be secured by American control of its customhouses. While various American bankers were willing to assume the great risks involved, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee refused to approve the loan. When a revolution broke out in July 1911, Taft sent warships that landed troops and a special envoy to arbitrate differences. When he offered a new loan arrangement, Honduras refused, thereby leaving this problem also unsolved.

Nicaragua was ruled by an unscrupulous dictator, Europeans held much of its debt, and Washington did not want its alternate canal route to fall into unfriendly or foreign hands. Following a revolution in October 1909 in which two Americans serving with the insurgents were executed, Washington instituted what was popularly called the "Hard Knox Policy." Naval vessels sped to both Nicaraguan coasts, recognition of its government was withdrawn, and a hundred Marines were stationed in its capital, Managua. Nicaragua's request for a loan in September 1910 opened the door for dollar diplomacy, and Taft recognized a new government. The American loan would stabilize Nicaragua's finances, the canal site would be safe, Nicaragua could pay off its foreign debts, and American control of the customs would remove them from the grasp of revolutionaries. Taft therefore concluded that the new financial arrangement and peace treaties with Nicaragua's neighbors would provide "a complete and lasting economic regeneration . . . of inestimable benefit to the prosperity, commerce, and peace of the Republic." But bad luck brewed.

During disorders in 1912 in which insurgents seized some American properties, Taft sent several warships and about twenty-seven hundred Marines to protect American lives and property. When the Senate rejected his financial plan, the new Nicaraguan president asked for $3 million in return for an option on the canal route and certain concessions that would make Nicaragua virtually a financial protectorate of the United States and even permit intervention in its internal affairs. No action was taken in the matter before Taft left office. Taft's dollar diplomacy had generated much ill will south of the border. Arbitration proved useless, Pan-Americanism made no progress, and the Lodge Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine further angered Latin America. (The 1912 corollary blocked the sale of a part of Baja California to a private Japanese syndicate, an act considered a threat to California and the Panama Canal.) Equally poor success marked dollar diplomacy in China. Knowing that he could not get all the nations with spheres of interest therein to abide by the Open Door, Roosevelt had mediated between Russia and Japan in 1905 in great part to prevent Japan from becoming the primary power in the Far East and thus able to close it. He further salved Japan, in return for understandings arranged by Taft as secretary of war that it had no designs on the Philippines, by permitting it to acquire sovereignty over Korea. However, Taft and Knox tried to use the Open Door to increase the export of American surplus goods and to allow America to acquire financial supremacy in China and Manchuria. They thereby challenged vested European and Japanese interests in China and greatly exacerbated Japanese-American relations.

American trade with China was only about 10 percent of its total overseas trade, yet Taft wanted the United States to become a Pacific power. He and Knox agreed to try to buy the Russian and Japanese railroads in China; if Japan would not sell, a competing road would be built with funds provided by the American Banking Group, which American bankers established for China at the request of the State Department. China was of course anxious to have Taft defend it, particularly from Great Britain and Japan, and to grant it loans for railroad construction, currency reform, education, and other undertakings.

Determined to prevent Japan from monopolizing foreign investments in China, Taft asked Japan to let the United States join a Chinese-Japanese mining venture in Manchuria and a British, French, and German railroad consortium—the Hukuang loan. Blocked by the Europeans and China, he took a very unusual step and appealed directly to the Chinese prince regent for equal American participation in the Hukuang loan and, after almost two years, won his point in May 1911. There was also a scheme to build a railroad from Chinchow to Aigun by an international consortium and a plan for still another consortium to acquire, and thus neutralize, all foreign-dominated railroads in China. Although Knox spoke about these measures as attempts to keep the Open Door open, it was easily seen that he was using the Open Door as a financial weapon, and he was defeated by China, Russia, Japan, and the interested European powers.

How well had Taft and Knox aided China? While the Hukuang and currency-reform loans went through, they helped spark a revolutionary outbreak in China and failed to push American capital where it would not go of its own accord. In fact, American exports to China declined from $58 million in 1905 to $15.5 million in 1910. Perceiving Taft and Knox as using the big stick in seeking an economic penetration of China, the Russians, the Japanese, and their respective allies formed a close defensive alliance against the United States.

Although Taft would not give up American extra-territorial rights in China or permit the naturalization of Chinese in the United States, he kept a close eye on attempts by various native reformers to change the Chinese imperial government into a constitutional democracy. When the call for a constitutional convention came late in 1912, he was faced with deciding whether to recognize a Chinese republic unilaterally or in concert with the other five major powers operating in China. He opted for concerted action, but by this time the shadow of the incoming Wilson administration lay over Washington. Taft followed Roosevelt's policies with respect to Japanese landownership and immigration. A renewed Japanese-American treaty of commerce and navigation that went into effect on 5 April 1911 contained nothing about the right of Japanese to own land in the United States and did not change America's Japanese exclusion policy.

The Election of 1912

If Taft was satisfied with what he had accomplished by 1912, the country was not. Although he now shared the patronage and other party honors with progressives and so appeared to be their leader, the insurgents could not forget how he had hounded them in 1910. In addition, La Follette had established the National Republican League, which sought to restore the government to the people by reforms that would provide more democratic procedures not only in government but in political party organization as well. Believing the league to be La Follette's instrument for seeking the presidential nomination, Roosevelt had refused to join it, but on 21 January 1911, La Follette and others had created the National Progressive Republican League, which grew so rapidly that both Taft and Roosevelt had to take it seriously into account.

La Follette made great gains in the Middle and Far West by lambasting Taft's lack of policy and direction, but he could not shake off the feeling that his leadership of the league would be lost to Roosevelt if he claimed it and well knew that Taft would control the delegates to the Republican National Convention. Moreover, in an extensive tour in September and October 1911, Taft criticized Roosevelt while nailing down southern delegates. When Roosevelt changed his mind and threw his hat into the ring, Taft felt betrayed and predicted his own defeat in 1912. He nevertheless decided to fight him because "I believe I represent a safer and saner view of our government and its Constitution than does Theodore Roosevelt, and whether beaten or not I mean to continue to labor in the vineyard for those principles."

The delegates to the first National Progressive Republican Conference, held on 16 October, endorsed La Follette and his ideas for returning the government to the people, highlighting presidential primaries, and criticized Taft's antitrust policies. On the twenty-seventh, Roosevelt also opted for presidential primaries and criticized Taft for siding with business and the old guard and never once saying anything "in consonance with humanity." In December, when Roosevelt discounted the no-third-term tradition, it was clear that he was open to a draft. Headquarters for him were opened in important cities, and in February 1912 he announced his platform and hinted to several reform governors that they should ask him to run. This they did, and he promptly accepted. After saying that human rights should be placed above all others, he went on to demand a "fair distribution of property," direct voting methods, and the recall of judicial decisions involving constitutional questions on the state level—the last soon perverted into the recall of judicial decisions. "Nothing but death can keep me out of the fight now," said Taft. It helped Roosevelt that an ill and anguished La Follette broke down while delivering an address in February, even though he did not withdraw from the race.

Thoroughly angered, Taft fought hard in a meeting of his national committee and won convention officers friendly to him. The first president to stump in a primary campaign, he struck hard at Roosevelt, saying that he fought to preserve the Constitution and saw nothing that disentitled him to stand for a second term. So believing, he rejected all progressive demands for direct political action by the people, defended the independence of the judiciary, and spoke contemptuously of the Democratic party. The old guard naturally supported this "regular" conservator of constitutionalism against the "progressive" Roosevelt.

By the end of March, with southern delegates giving him half of the majority he needed, Taft was virtually impregnable, even if many delegates chosen elsewhere were contested by Roosevelt men. By May, Taft began referring in personal terms to Roosevelt and telling his audiences that he was going to "fight him," though he confessed privately that to do so wrenched his soul. After a particularly vicious attack, he blurted out that "Roosevelt was my closest friend," and wept. Roosevelt replied in kind, saying that "it is a bad trait to bite the hand that feeds you" and that this was "a fight to the finish." In any event, the thirteen states using presidential primaries went heavily to Roosevelt, thus making him appear the truly popular choice, whereas states using the convention system generally went to Taft.

By steamroller tactics the national committee gave Taft 235 of the 254 contested delegates, whereupon Roosevelt took the unprecedented step of going to Chicago and personally assuming direction of his lost cause. With Roosevelt's men not participating in the proceedings, Taft was named on the first ballot. On the next day, shouting "We Want Teddy," Roosevelt supporters organized their own party in the greatest revolt against the Republican party since the Silver Republicans had been defeated in 1896. Roosevelt declared himself a presidential candidate and announced the formation of the National Progressive, or "Bull Moose," party. In Baltimore, Democrats chose the progressive Woodrow Wilson as their candidate for president. Since the Democratic platform closely paralleled the Progressive, Taft remained a lonely conservative.

Taft campaigned openly and honestly as a conservative, but by avoiding histrionics he failed to excite his followers. In contrast, Roosevelt's delegates, who met on 5 August at what was more a religious revival than a political meeting, spoke of the need for "social brotherhood" and "representative government" and said they would "Pass Prosperity Around." After naming Roosevelt and, for vice president, Hiram Johnson of California, the "Moosevelt" party adopted the most progressive political and social platform in American history. Roosevelt stumped the West and South; Wilson, the East and Middle West; and Taft abandoned his party. The elections gave the Democrats their greatest victory since 1892—the presidency, both houses of Congress, and twenty-one of the thirty-five gubernatorial contests. The split between Taft and Roosevelt made Wilson a minority president, with the most spectacular gains made by the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs. That the country had not gone Democratic was proved because Taft and Roosevelt together polled 1,311,444 more votes than Wilson. But adding the votes of Debs, Roosevelt, and Wilson showed that 75.26 percent of the vote was progressive. Wilson received 435 electoral votes, Roosevelt 88, and Taft a mere 8 in the worst drubbing a presidential candidate had yet received.

Little was accomplished in the second and last sessions of the Sixty-second Congress by men already repudiated by the public, yet Taft had the pleasure of announcing the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment and congressional approval of the Seventeenth. Meanwhile, he had accepted a professor-ship of law at his alma mater, Yale University.

As president, Taft had revealed himself to be a conservative conservator. In his book Popular Government (1913), he questioned the validity of enlarging the suffrage and of more democratic methods of achieving political, economic, and social democracy, and in a book published in 1916 he revealed his very restricted view of presidential power. Meanwhile, in March 1913, he went to Yale as Kent Professor of Constitutional Law and served until 30 June 1921, when President Warren Harding fulfilled Taft's lifelong hope by naming him the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Taft took over a bench that was far behind in its work, so badly divided that dissents were offered in about one-fourth of the opinions handed down, and in need of new quarters. He obtained a new building and, by creating a conference of senior circuit judges to work with him, brought the business of the court almost up to date by the time he retired from the court in February 1930 because of heart trouble. As for his own decisions, on the whole he was conservative in his interpretation of the law. In Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company, for example, he held that Congress infringed upon the rights of the states and improperly used the tax power when it taxed the products of child labor that went into interstate trade. In the Coronado Coal Company case, he denied federal jurisdiction over coal mining because such mining was not interstate commerce; as for the United Mine Workers, who had struck the company, they had unlawfully used for strike purposes the funds they had accumulated. On the other hand, his most important dissent was against a majority opinion invalidating a 1918 law that fixed a minimum wage for women in the District of Columbia (Adkins v. Children's Hospital ). All in all, he showed a preference for federal, rather than state, control of business, while advocating broad federal power under the commerce clause of the Constitution. Although no leader in judicial thought in the same sense as Oliver W. Holmes, Louis Brandeis, or Benjamin N. Cardozo, he was a good administrator. When he died on 8 March 1930, the new Supreme Court building seemed likely to remain his most enduring monument.

Conclusions

What did Taft accomplish? No great scandal or corruption marred his term, he did not take any steps backward, and his legislative record included many solid achievements: the first tariff revision since 1897, the placing of conservation on a legal basis, improvement of railroad regulation, and an antitrust crusade. To these should be added the building of most of the Panama Canal and, despite cabinet, congressional, and family advisers who counseled against reform measures, the passage of more than fifty minor progressive acts. Two amendments were added to the Constitution, and he had economized on spending yet made government more efficient. He also had peacefully settled a number of international disputes, launched the most ambitious attempt yet made to obtain world peace, and steadily maintained a policy of neutrality toward Mexico.

Against Taft's accomplishments must be weighed several failures: his gaff with respect to the Payne-Aldrich Tariff; his inability to obtain Canadian reciprocity and general arbitration treaties; his poor handling of the Ballinger-Pinchot affair; his failure to follow the Roosevelt policies; and his treatment of the insurgents, which split his party and allowed Democrats and progressive Republicans to win Congress in 1910 and the presidency and Congress in 1912. Liberals were appalled at his refusal to do anything for blacks or to grant independence to the Filipinos. Last, his dollar diplomacy in Latin America and the Far East greatly added to ill will against the United States and failed to earn profits for American business or obtain economic and political stability or peace in the countries to which it was directed, and his "shopkeeper mentality" irritated Britain, Japan, and Russia. Last, in part because of his parsimoniousness, he did little to strengthen the military power of the nation.

Whether Taft was a good, rather than bad, president calls for an examination of personal characteristics that may explain his lack of additional accomplishment. An unpretentious man with singular charm and simple personal desires, high-minded, just-minded, and clean-minded, he was in no way devious or demagogic. A sensitive man, he craved affection and approval, and often deprecated himself in favor of those he thought better men. He was not a competitive or congenital politician like Roosevelt; he simply had no political ambition and could not become another Roosevelt. He took color from those last around him. He lacked the sense to lead the people along the paths they wished to travel. Very lazy, loving tranquillity, no renovator or innovator, he was more suited to inhabit the cloistered serenity of a high court, particularly when he was better at judicial than legislative interpretation.

With a mechanistic view of government, President Taft acted like an engineer trying to make the agencies of government work together. A conservative by education and choice, he did not understand the dynamics of pressure groups and never learned how to mobilize power in the political system, how to balance (as Roosevelt did) the advocates of reform against those of reaction, or how to forgive those who crossed him in politics. Unlike Roosevelt, he sought advice from very few men, disdained publicity, and lacked the flair for engaging the public's emotions. In consequence, he got a bad press. Roosevelt thought of the impact his words would carry; Taft procrastinated in preparing his speeches and too often said the wrong thing. His view of the presidency and of the Constitution was narrow and defensive, and he had high regard for the rights of the business community. In sum, he concerned himself with materialistic rather than social or moral matters, and he was praised most for his great service "to the cause of conservative constitutionalism, which he defended steadily against the assaults of direct democracy." Even when one grants the tempestuous politics of his tenure, his administration alone can be held responsible for the breakup of the Republican party.

Taft's contemporaries placed him "far from the bottom, though not near the top." Neither a Washington nor a Grant, he was as average as Madison or Monroe, a conclusion upheld in several studies of the presidency. Particularly when viewed between the progressive presidents Roosevelt and Wilson, he remains a constitutional conservator.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, 2 vols. (New York, 1939), remains the best full biography of his subject. Paolo E. Coletta, The Presidency of William Howard Taft (Lawrence, Kans., 1973), is a study of Taft dealing only with his presidency. Donald F. Anderson, William Howard Taft: A Conservative's Conception of the Presidency (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), accounts for Taft's conservatism and details how his conservative approach affected his dealings, particularly with the insurgents and progressives. Judith Icke Anderson, William Howard Taft: An Intimate History (New York, 1981), deals less with Taft's personal relations than with a psycho-historical account of how his obesity contributed to his laziness, thus decreasing his efficiency.

William Howard Taft, Popular Government: Its Essence, Its Permanence, and Its Perils (New Haven, Conn., 1913), questions the validity of enlarging the suffrage and of more direct methods of achieving political, economic, and social democracy. Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers (New York, 1916) is of all Taft's writings on the office of the president—and he wrote about it more than any other president did—the most noteworthy because it reveals his very restricted view of the chief executive's power.

Walter V. Scholes and Marie V. Scholes, The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration (Columbia, Mo., 1970), stands in a class by itself because it is the only study devoted entirely to the subject, although it does not completely cover it. Paolo E. Coletta, "The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft," in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport, Conn., 1981), is an evaluation and analysis of the genesis and implementation of the foreign policies of both Roosevelt and Taft that shows divergencies between the two presidents. L. Ethan Ellis, Reciprocity, 1911: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (New Haven, Conn., 1939), is a study of the differing approaches to the subject of tariff reciprocity in both the United States and Canada. Wilfrid Hardy Callcott, The Caribbean Policy of the United States, 1890–1920 (Baltimore, 1942), though dated, provides an excellent overview of the determination of policy and its implementation in the area covered. Charles Vevier, The United States and China, 1906–1913: A Study of Finance and Diplomacy (New Brunswick, N.J., 1955), concludes that Taft's objectives in China were purely materialistic and criticizes his "shopkeeper mentality."

Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), shows that conservation was heartily adopted by Theodore Roosevelt as part of his drive for efficiency in government and that only at the end of Roosevelt's term did it acquire political and especially moral overtones. Elmo R. Richardson, The Politics of Conservation: Crusades and Controversies, 1897–1913 (Berkeley, Calif., 1962), provides a well-balanced account that includes thorough research into the attitude of the West on conservation. Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (New York, 1947), gives Pinchot's version of the conservation controversy in terms extremely critical of Taft.

William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York, 1946), tells of a Republican newspaper editor who opposed Populism but then became a major supporter of insurgency and especially of progressivism. Kenneth W. Hechler, Insurgency: Personalities and Politics of the Taft Era (New York, 1940), though dated, provides what may still be considered the best study of the insurgency movement under Taft. Alpheus T. Mason, Bureaucracy Convicts Itself: The Ballinger-Pinchot Controversy of 1910 (New York, 1941), tries to steer a middle course between Taft and Roosevelt, and Ballinger and Pinchot, even though the last permitted use of his papers.

William H. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1961; rev. ed., 1975), is still the best extant full biography of the subject. George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York, 1958), relates Roosevelt's relations to contemporaneous affairs for more than a decade. George E. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (Madison, Wis., 1946), is a superb scholarly study of Roosevelt's shift from mild reforms to full progressivism. William Manners, TR and Will: A Friendship That Split the Republican Party (New York, 1969), is a very readable popular account of the conflicts in the personalities and politics of Roosevelt and Taft from 1910 through 1912.

Frank K. Kelley, The Fight for the White House: The Story of 1912 (New York, 1961), covers all parties and personalities of the campaign of 1912, with an evaluation of the election results. Robert M. La Follette, La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (Madison, Wis., 1913), relates his contributions to the growth of the insurgent and progressive movements and how Roosevelt took the presidential nomination of the National Progressive Republican League away from him. Archibald W. Butt, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1930), is the correspondence of one who, having served Roosevelt before Taft, was caught between being loyal to Taft or to Roosevelt, whom he preferred (unfortunately, his observations end with 1912, for he went down with the Titanic ). Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan: Political Evangelist, 1860–1908 and William Jennings Bryan: Progressive Politician and Moral Statesman, 1909–1915 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1964, 1969), detail the liberal Democratic approach that caused Bryan to support both Roosevelt and Taft when he thought they were right and to oppose them when wrong. Claude Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era (Boston, 1932), tells how Beveridge opposed Taft in most instances but supported his quest for the Tariff Commission.

Recent works include William H. Taft, Four Aspects of Civic Duty; and, Present Day Problems, ed. by David H. Burton and A. E. Campbell (Athens, Ohio, 2000).

For further sources consult Paolo E. Coletta, comp., William Howard Taft: A Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 1989).

William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft (1857-1930), as twenty-seventh president of the United States and a chief justice, failed to rise adequately to the challenges of the times, despite his many strong qualities.

William Howard Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sept. 15, 1857, into a family of old New England stock. Both his father and grandfather had served terms as judges, and young Taft aspired to a judicial career. A bright but unimaginative youngster, he attended high school in Cincinnati, and at Yale University he finished second in a graduating class of 121 in 1878. Two years later he graduated from the Cincinnati Law School.

An outsize, congenial young man with a tendency to procrastinate, Taft took an active interest in Republican politics. He was rewarded with appointments to various offices. Between 1880 and 1890 he served successively as assistant prosecuting attorney for Hamilton County, Ohio, collector of internal revenue for Cincinnati, and judge of the Superior Court of Ohio. Named solicitor general of the United States in 1890, he distinguished himself for his thorough preparation and won 15 of the first 18 cases he argued in the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, in 1886, Taft had married Helen Herron of Cincinnati. Eventually they had three children. A driving, ambitious woman, she wanted her husband to follow a political rather than a legal career. When a Federal judgeship opened in 1891, she protested that his appointment would "put and end to all your opportunities … of being thrown with bigwigs." And she twice influenced him to reject offers of a Supreme Court seat during Theodore Roosevelt's first administration in order to maintain his availability for the presidency.

Federal Service

Disregarding his wife's admonitions, Taft accepted appointment to the Sixth Circuit Court in 1892. Though he again distinguished himself for thoroughness and technical command of the law, he was inhibited by his lack of imagination. Yet he was in no sense a reactionary and in some respects not even a conservative. He broke new ground in employers' liability cases and revitalized the Sherman Antitrust Act. He also upheld labor's right to strike. He disapproved of secondary boycotts, however, and by insisting on enforcing the injunctive power he acquired a somewhat exaggerated reputation as an antilabor judge. His written opinions, like his oral arguments, were learned but verbose.

In 1899 Taft turned down the presidency of Yale University, partly because he believed his Unitarianism would offend traditionalists. Then, in March 1900, he reluctantly acceded to President William McKinley's request that he become president of the Philippine Commission. The 4 most creative years of his life followed. Overriding the will of the autocratic military governor, Gen. Arthur MacArthur, he instituted civil government and became in 1901 the archipelago's first civil governor.

In the Philippines, Taft established an educational system, built roads and harbors, and negotiated the purchase of 400, 000 acres from the Dominican friars for resale on generous terms to the Filipinos. He also pushed limited self-government rapidly. Taft's conviction that the Philippines should be administered in the interests of its citizens, coupled with his open, conciliatory presence, won him respect and affection. And though he failed to prevent the islands from entering into an economic relationship with the United States which adversely affected their development in the long run, his tenure was probably the most enlightened colonial administration to that time.

Secretary of War

On Feb. 1, 1904, Taft succeeded Elihu Root as U.S. secretary of war. The duties again proved surprisingly congenial, largely because he became one of President Roosevelt's most intimate advisers and his principal troubleshooter. Continuing to supervise administration of the Philippines, he assumed responsibility for starting construction of the Panama Canal and represented the President on various missions. His most important mission was to Japan; it culminated in the secret recognition of Japan's suzerainty over Korea. He also helped suppress a threatened revolution in Cuba in 1906.

Although Taft still yearned to join the Supreme Court, he allowed his wife and brothers to kindle presidential aspirations. Impressed by Taft's "absolutely unflinching rectitude" and "literally dauntless courage and willingness to bear responsibility, " as he phrased it, Roosevelt decided in 1907 to make Taft his successor as president. Both men believed mistakenly at the time that they agreed totally on public policy. Yet by February 1908, after several thunderous messages to Congress had revealed the real depth of Roosevelt's progressivism, his wife urged him not to "make any more speeches on the Roosevelt policies."

Nevertheless, the presidential campaign of 1908 was waged mainly on the "Roosevelt policies." Though Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan handily, his plurality dropped about 1, 500, 000 votes below Roosevelt's in 1904. Moreover, the election of numerous Progressive Republicans and Democrats shifted the balance in Congress.

The Presidency

Whatever Taft thought about Roosevelt's objectives, he never had approved of his freewheeling, often extralegal, procedures. This was especially true of conservation, a field in which Roosevelt and his subordinates had consistently interpreted the law loosely in order to protect the public interest. Taft decided, accordingly, that his mission was to consolidate rather than push forward—to give the Roosevelt reforms, as he privately said, "the sanction of law." To this end he surrounded himself with lawyers. At the same time, he underestimated both the temper of the times and the zeal of the Progressive Republicans in Congress. Worse still, he proved incapable of giving the nation the kind of moral, intellectual, and political leadership it had grown accustomed to under Roosevelt.

Taft's troubles started early. True at first to his campaign promises, he called a special session of Congress to revise the tariff. The resultant bill was not a bad measure by Republican standards, but it failed abysmally to meet expectations. Disguising his disappointment, Taft called it "the best bill that the party has ever passed" and signed it into law. This alienated many insurgent Republicans, most of whom were already seething over his refusal to support their effort to reduce the powers of Joseph "Uncle Joe" Cannon, the czarlike Speaker of the House.

Taft's replacement of Roosevelt's secretary of the interior contributed to the polarization of the party. The new secretary, Richard A. Ballinger, was a moderate conservationist and a strict legal constructionist in the manner of Taft himself." I do not hesitate to say, " the President wrote, that the presidential power to withdraw public lands from private use "was exercised far beyond legal limitation under Secretary Garfield." With Taft's endorsement, Ballinger insisted on opening much valuable land to private entry while the Geological Survey completed surveys. Angered by this and other inhibiting policies, Roosevelt's intimate friend, Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, finally charged Ballinger with a "giveaway" of Alaskan mineral lands to the Guggenheim-Morgan financial interests. Taft thereupon removed Pinchot from office. Although Ballinger was eventually exonerated, Taft was fatally, and somewhat unfairly, stamped as anticonservationist.

Ironically, Taft's relentless prosecution of trusts further exacerbated his relations with Roosevelt. Unlike the former president, he believed that dissolution rather than regulation was the preferred solution. He gave Attorney General George W. Wickersham free rein to institute proceedings, and by the end of 4 years almost twice as many actions had been initiated as in 7½ years under Roosevelt. Among these were proceedings against the U.S. Steel Corporation, which had absorbed the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company during the Panic of 1907 with Roosevelt's tacit approval.

In Congress, meanwhile, a coalition of Progressive Republicans and Democrats drove through half a dozen reform measures. Some were supported warmly by Taft, some halfheartedly, and others not at all. But all owed their passage to the Progressive ferment Roosevelt had done so much to create during his presidency and after his return from abroad in 1910. They included amendments for an income tax and the direct election of senators, the Mann-Elkins Act to increase the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission, creation of the Children's Bureau, a corporation tax, safety standards for mines, Postal Savings and Parcel Post, and workmen's compensation legislation.

Foreign Affairs

Taft's conduct of foreign policy was governed by an uncritical extension of the concepts behind the Open-Door Notes of 1899 and 1900. Disregarding Roosevelt's warning that the United States should accept Japanese preeminence in eastern Asia and abandon commercial aspirations in Manchuria and North China, he pursued a policy of "active intervention to secure for our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment."

In the Caribbean, Taft was even more ingenious than Roosevelt in devising means to protect the Panama Canal. He put American troops into Nicaragua in 1912 to install and maintain in power a conservative, pro-United States party. And in what came to be termed "dollar diplomacy, " he encouraged American capital to displace European capital elsewhere in the region. The end result was security for the canal and ultraconservative and often repressive government for the Caribbean peoples.

By 1912 Taft had so isolated himself from his party's Progressive and was under such heavy fire from Roosevelt and Senator Robert M. La Follette that the Progressives were prepared to support either Roosevelt or La Follette for the presidential nomination. Taft lost to the former president by more than 2 to 1 in the 13 state primaries that winter and spring. However, his control of Republican party machinery gave him enough delegates to win renomination in convention. Embittered further by Roosevelt's decision to run on the Progressive ticket, Taft waged an angry, defensive, and ineffectual campaign. He finished behind Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt.

Taft's best qualities, especially his capacity for disinterested public service, again became dominant after he left the White House and accepted the Kent chair of constitutional law at Yale. His views on World War I were closer to President Wilson's than to those of interventionist Republicans like Roosevelt and Lodge, and he generously backed the President during the period of neutrality. His work as joint chairman of the War Labor Board contributed greatly to the relatively smooth course of labor-management relations during the war. He afterward gave broad support to Wilson's plan for the League of Nations Covenant.

Chief Justice

On June 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding fulfilled Taft's "heart's desire" by appointing him chief justice. Taft brought to his new position a consuming belief in the rule of law, an unshakable conviction that the protection of property rights was crucial to orderly government, and a driving determination to perfect the administration of justice. He further brought a fierce resolve to mold the Court in his own moderately conservative image. In 1916 he had bitterly opposed Wilson's nomination of Louis D. Brandeis. Now, as chief justice, he discouraged Harding from considering men like Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, and Henry Stimson because they might "herd" with the liberals, Holmes and Brandeis. Yet, he also said, it would be equally unwise to have too many men as reactionary as James McReynolds. He was largely responsible for the selection of Pierce Butler in 1922.

As chief justice, Taft compiled a mixed record. Although he succeeded in massing the Court along generally conservative lines, few of his opinions ring down through the years. One exception was his dissent in 1923 from the majority finding in the Adkins case that a minimum-wage act interfered with freedom of contract. Otherwise, as a careful student of Taft's chief justiceship writes, "Taft endorsed decisions, sometimes writing the majority opinion, that seemed to fasten both the national government and the states in a strait jacket." He wrote the majority opinion in the second child-labor case. He ruled, again for the majority, that a Kansas statute for compulsory arbitration of wage disputes was unconstitutional. And he declared, once more for the conservative majority, that an Arizona limitation on the use of injunctions against labor violated due process. He also held in the famous Coronado case that labor unions could be sued under the antitrust laws.

Conversely, Taft sanctioned the exercise of broad regulatory powers by the Federal government under the commerce clause. He also sustained the presidential power to remove executive officers.

As an administrator, Taft ranks with Melville W. Fuller and Charles Evans Hughes; he was notably successful in effecting administrative reforms. He wrote more opinions than any other member of his Court, expedited the hearing of cases, and won congressional authorization to create a conference of senior circuit judges. He also shaped and influenced passage of the Judge's Bill of 1925, which gave the Court wide discretionary power and enabled it to reduce the number of unimportant cases that came before it. In addition, Taft was preeminently responsible for the decision to construct the Supreme Court Building. However, he made little enduring impression upon constitutional law. He retired in February 1930 and died in Washington on March 30.

Taft's reputation among contemporary historians is somewhat higher as president and somewhat lower as chief justice than it was in his lifetime. More than any other major figure of his times, perhaps, he exemplified the conservative virtues and weaknesses. Yearning always "for the absolute"—for a system of law devoid of vagueness—he failed in the end to find or to fashion it. He also failed in the main to adjust creatively to the social and economic changes induced by the industrialization of the nation.

Further Reading

The standard work on Taft is Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (2 vols., 1939). A brief account of Taft's presidential years is in George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912 (1958). Alpheus Thomas Mason's penetrating study William Howard Taft: Chief Justice (1965) offers a revealing account of Taft's chief justiceship. Taft's relations with Roosevelt are related in detail in William H. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (1961; new rev. ed. 1963), and William Manners, TR and Will: A Friendship That Split the Republican Party (1969). See also Archie Butt, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt (2 vols., 1930). James Penick, Jr., Progressive Politics and Conservation: The Ballinger-Pinchot Affair (1968), sheds new light on that episode. □

TAFT, WILLIAM HOWARD

Despite his imposing stature (six foot tall, three hundred pounds), William Howard Taft (1857–1930) was a reluctant President of the United States (1909–1913). To be leader of the nation was not Taft's first ambition, but his wife, brothers, and close-friend President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) convinced Taft to run for the presidency in 1908. He won the election against Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. Taft's tenure as the twenty-seventh President was undistinguished. He was a man with little taste for politics, and he made many blunders throughout his term in office. Although he was a poor president, he was a fine Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, a position to which he was appointed in 1921, eight years after he left the White House. This appointment fulfilled a life-long ambition, and he performed his job with passion, competence, and enthusiasm.

William Howard Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on September 15, 1857 to a family that lived in comfortable circumstances. They had migrated to Ohio from New England. Since Taft's father and grandfather had both served as judges, he also aspired to a career on the bench. In preparation, he began his studies at Yale University, finishing second in his class, and he received a law degree from the Cincinnati Law School in 1880.

Determined to assist the citizens of his state, Taft held many public offices throughout his early career. In 1887 he served as an Ohio superior court judge. Three years later, Taft was named U.S. solicitor general by President Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893), a position he held successfully until 1892 when he returned to Ohio for a seat on the Circuit Court of Appeals.

Taft distinguished himself as a federal judge and developed an ambition to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. That ambition would have to wait, however, as President William McKinley (1897–1901) requested in 1900 that Taft become president of the Philippine Commission. Working in the unstable and newly independent Philippine Islands, Taft established a civil government designed to serve the needs of its citizens, established an educational system, built roads and harbors, and pushed rapidly for limited self-government for the people whose islands were "possessed legally" by the United States during the Spanish-American War (1898).

Twice, in 1902 and in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt offered Taft a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Taft regretfully turned it down to fulfill his commitment in the Philippines. A year later, however, Taft did accept Roosevelt's offer to become Secretary of War. This position still allowed him to be involved with matters in the Philippines and gave him responsibility for the construction of the Panama Canal. In addition to struggling with the problems and expenses of building the canal, Taft supported missions to Japan, hoping to create alliances for the U.S. in the Far East.

As President Roosevelt's term came to an end, he encouraged Taft to seek the presidency. Roosevelt and Taft had become good friends over the course of their careers and Roosevelt was convinced Taft was the best candidate for the job. With apprehension, Taft agreed to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1908, and in the election he defeated the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. Even in victory, the new president still had misgivings, and said that he felt, "just like a fish out of water."

Taft's timid, conservative style alienated many in Congress. His attempt to reduce tariffs met with strong opposition from Republicans, while supporters of the measure were angered by what they perceived as Taft's lack of forcefulness. It was an inauspicious beginning.

The disagreements over tariff reductions set the tone for Taft's administration. Taft was denounced by many in Congress for what appeared to be weakness towards powerful business interests. His administration also seemed to reverse the strong conservationist policies of his predecessor by opening up much valuable government land for lumber and mining interests. He fired the head of the national Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), who refused to cover up a scandal in the Interior Department.

Working against him in a coalition, Republicans and Democrats in Congress drove through a half dozen reform measures, most of which Taft opposed. The measures included the creation of a graduated income tax, the direct election of senators by the voters, and an increase in the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission to control business. Taft was also faced with the uncertainties of social reform. Working people faced an increasingly volatile and shifting marketplace, and Taft paid little attention to making the necessary changes that would help stabilize the workplace by regulating relations between newly industrialized workers and growing industrial businesses.

Despite his discomfort in office and his difficulties with the legislative branch, Taft's administration was not without accomplishment. He oversaw the creation of the Postal Savings plan, a program to protect citizens' savings, and the admission of Arizona and New Mexico as new U.S. states. In addition, although Taft's predecessor Theodore Roosevelt had the reputation of a "trust buster," Taft's four years of leadership saw twice as many trust prosecutions as occurred throughout the eight years of Roosevelt's administration.

The tension between Taft and Congress eventually affected his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt. During the next presidential campaign in 1912, Taft and Roosevelt vied against each other for the Republican nomination. Taft was re-nominated, but in spite of that Roosevelt formed a new party, the Bull Moose Party. He ran against Taft in the election, and their competing campaigns split the Republican vote, giving the presidency to the Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921).

Taft was relieved to leave White House. Over time, he and Roosevelt reconciled, and their friendship was restored. Taft taught law at Yale University until 1921, when President Warren Harding (1921–1923) named him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Taft's long-time ambition was fulfilled. He accepted the post. As Chief Justice, Taft was well respected and performed the functions of his position confidently and enthusiastically. He made no secret of his happiness to be out of the White House and back in the courthouse. Taft served eight years on the bench until his death in 1930, at age 78.

See also: Interstate Commerce Commission, Spanish-American War, Tobacco Trust, Trust-Busting

FURTHER READING

Anderson, Donald F. William Howard Taft: A Conservative's Conception of the Presidency. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Anderson, Judith I. William Howard Taft: An Intimate History. New York: Norton, 1981.

Burton, David H. The Learned Presidency: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988.

Coletta, Paolo E. The Presidency of William Howard Taft. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973.

Wilensky, Norman M. Conservatism in the Progressive Era: The Taft Republicans of 1912. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1965.

William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft was President Theodore Roosevelt 's (1858–1919; served 1901–09) secretary of war prior to being elected the twenty-seventh president of the United States.

Son of a judge

Taft was born in 1857 to an Ohio judge and his wife. Eager to please his parents, Taft was an anxious child whose weight fluctuated according to the degree of his anxiety. He graduated from Yale University and returned to Cincinnati, Ohio, to open his own law firm. Throughout his law-practicing years, Taft held numerous judiciary appointments.

By the age of thirty-four, Taft was appointed a federal circuit judge, and hoped to one day serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. His wife, Helen, had other plans for his career, however.

To the White House

In 1900, President William McKinley (1843–1901; served 1897–1901) sent Taft to the Philippines as chief civil administrator of America's newly acquired colony in the Pacific Ocean. In that capacity, Taft improved the economy, oversaw the development of both roads and schools, and made sure the people had a voice in government.

President Roosevelt named Taft to be his Secretary of War in 1904, a job he would keep until his election to the presidency. As the Republican candidate, Taft ran against Democratic Party nominee William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) in the 1908 presidential election and won with 51.6 percent of the popular vote. By this time, Taft was 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighed 320 pounds. He had to have a bath tub specially made for him in the White House.

After eight years of Teddy Roosevelt, America had grown accustomed to its president being loud and outspoken. Taft was reserved, uncomfortable with crowds and attention. This was just one difference between the two leaders. Whereas Roosevelt focused on pushing through legislation, Taft concentrated on administration. He saw his job as one that should enforce the laws already in place, regardless of his personal agreement or disagreement with those laws.

Accomplishments and controversy

Taft did not ignore the need for reform, however. One of the first reform acts of his administration was the reduction of tariffs (taxes on products imported from other countries). High taxes brought in extra money but also impeded global commerce because foreign manufacturers did not always want to pay those high tariffs.

Taft also passed the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission the authority to suspend railroad rate hikes and set rates. It also expanded their power beyond railroads to include telephones, telegraphs, and radio.

Taft was the president responsible for getting the Sixteenth Amendment passed into law in 1913; with this, Americans were now required to pay income tax. He was not as enthusiastic in the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment , which allowed senators to be directly elected by citizens of a state. Prior to that, senators were always appointed by the state legislature.

Until Taft's administration, each agency of the federal government submitted its own budget. Taft decided the president should be the one to submit a government budget to Congress for approval. Although the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act was passed too late to affect the authority of Taft (he was out of office eight years by that time), the law gave all future presidents expanded power in the control of the executive branch of government.

Breaks ties with Roosevelt

In those early days of big business, corporations sometimes formed trusts (the name given to the practice when dominant companies from the same industry banded together to reduce competition and set prices). Trusts were eventually outlawed because they were unfair to the smaller businesses. Theodore Roosevelt had been known as the trust-busting president, but more antitrust lawsuits (nearly one hundred) were pursued during Taft's presidency.

Two of the more famous cases were begun under Roosevelt: Standard Oil Company and American Tobacco Company. Both ended in victory under Taft. He was less successful in his efforts against U.S. Steel. The suit found Taft pitted against Roosevelt, who had approved of the company's formation in 1901. Roosevelt accused Taft of not being able to distinguish between “good” and “bad” trusts, and the friendship fell apart. In 1920, the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. Steel was not in violation of antitrust laws. The verdict came seven years after Taft left office.

More mistakes

Many Republicans felt betrayed by Taft when he signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act in 1909. Republicans as a group were in favor of more severe reductions than the Act allowed. Taft, however, felt the reform was the best tariff bill ever passed by Congress. Those Republicans he angered later formed a political party called the Progressives; they would be joined by Theodore Roosevelt.

Taft fired Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), leader of the National Forest Service and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, in 1910. The firing was a direct result of a public controversy between Pinchot and one of Taft's appointees. The majority of America sympathized with Pinchot.

International relations

Foreign relations deteriorated under Taft. Trade with China decreased, and Central America resented the president's efforts to “rescue” them by encouraging American investors to pour money into their economy. This program was known as “dollar diplomacy.”

The failure to maintain foreign relations prompted a Pan-American (relating to North, South, and Central America) Conference in 1910. The purpose of the conference was to find a way to keep the United States from intervening in the affairs of South and Central America. Not long after the conference, Taft ordered two thousand troops to the border of Mexico. Their mission was to intervene in a revolution taking place there so that U.S. investments would be protected. Congress refused to approve this move and Taft backed down.

Loses the 1912 election

America had mixed feelings about Taft. His size affected his image and offended some. Those who were not offended were amused; he was hard to take seriously. What started off as light teasing in the early years of his administration became hostile comments as his administration faltered. Furthermore, the president often fell asleep at public functions and embarrassed his family and friends. Modern doctors believe he probably suffered from a sleep disorder, made worse by his obesity.

Taft lacked the leadership skills necessary to run the country. He was incapable of making sound decisions on the spot, but considered every issue from all sides, a habit that led to indecisiveness. He also tended to let others influence his leadership. A good example of this is his initial tariff reform package: Congress made 847 amendments to it, and he approved them. As a result, the reform meant almost nothing.

Taft ran for reelection in 1912 only because he felt the need to defend himself against Theodore Roosevelt's many public attacks on his character and judgment. This caused Roosevelt to leave the Republican Party and join the Progressives, a move that guaranteed Taft would not win. He lost the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924; served 1913–21), New Jersey's governor.

Taft was relieved to leave the White House and took a job teaching law at Yale. He then accepted an appointment as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, a position he kept until his death in 1930. It was the job William Taft was most honored to have in his lifetime.

TAFT, WILLIAM HOWARD

William Howard Taft is the only person to serve as both president and Supreme Court chief justice of the United States. A gifted judge and administrator, Taft helped modernize the way the U.S. Supreme Court conducted its business and was the driving force behind the construction of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

Taft was born on September 15, 1857, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, alphonso taft, served as secretary of war and attorney general in President Ulysses S. Grant's administration. Taft graduated from Yale University in 1878 and earned a law degree from Cincinnati Law College (now University of Cincinnati College of Law) in 1880. He established a law practice in Cincinnati and served as assistant prosecuting attorney for Hamilton County, Ohio, from 1881 to 1883. Taft was assistant county solicitor from 1885 to 1887 and a superior court judge from 1887 to 1890.

Though only thirty-three years old, Taft lobbied President benjamin harrison for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890. Although Harrison demurred, he did make Taft U.S. solicitor general, the person who argues on behalf of the federal government before the Supreme Court. Taft won sixteen of the eighteen cases he argued before 1892, when Harrison appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

"The ordinary result of human punishment is that those near to the criminal, or dependent upon him, suffer in many cases more than he does."
—William Howard Taft

The jurisdiction of the Sixth Circuit included Chicago and other industrialized cities of the Midwest, which were the scenes of conflict between labor unions and large manufacturing

companies. Taft, like most conservative judges of his time, upheld the use of the labor injunction to prevent labor strikes and violence. The use of the injunction removed an important bargaining tool and seriously weakened labor unions. Taft, however, did believe workers had a right to organize and could legally strike, if the strike was peaceful.

Taft left the court in 1900 at the request of President william mckinley. In the aftermath of the spanish-american war (1898), the United States had taken possession of the Philippine Islands. Taft was chosen to lead a commission that would help establish a civil government in the islands and end military rule. In 1901 he became the first civilian governor of the Philippines and drew praise from the Philippine people for his administration. Taft reluctantly returned to Washington in 1904 at the request of President theodore roosevelt to become secretary of war. As secretary, Taft supervised the construction of the Panama Canal, established the U.S. Canal Zone, and helped negotiate a treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

When Roosevelt declined to run for another term in 1908, Taft was nominated as the Republican candidate. He easily defeated the Democratic candidate, william jennings bryan, in the general election and assumed office in 1909 as Roosevelt's political heir. Taft's administration proved to be lackluster at best, however. Though he was an able administrator, he lacked the political skills necessary to succeed in Washington. He alienated Roosevelt and other liberal Republicans by appeasing conservative Republicans, splitting the party in the process.

Taft did carry on Roosevelt's "trust-busting" initiatives, attacking business trusts under the sherman anti-trust act (15 U.S.C.A. § 1 et seq.) and supporting the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910 (49 U.S.C.A. § 1 et seq.), which gave more power to the interstate commerce commission. He also established the labor department. In foreign affairs Taft adopted a policy of "dollar diplomacy" as an economic substitute for military aid to underdeveloped countries.

Taft's political downfall began in 1910 with his support of Speaker of the House of Representatives Joseph Cannon, a conservative Republican who ran the House with an iron fist. Liberals had counted on Taft to help them break Cannon's power, but he refused. When Taft

approved the development of Alaskan coal resources, he drew public criticism from Gifford A. Pinchot of the Forestry Service, a promoter of conservation and Roosevelt's close ally.

In 1912 Roosevelt ran against Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. When Taft won the endorsement, Roosevelt formed the progressive party, effectively guaranteeing that Democrat woodrow wilson would be elected president. Taft carried only Utah and Vermont and split the Republican vote with Roosevelt, allowing Wilson to win handily.

After leaving the presidency, Taft became a law professor at Yale University. During world war i he served on the National War Labor Board and advocated the establishment of the league of nations and U.S. participation in that world organization.

In 1921 President warren g. harding appointed Taft chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. On a Court dominated by conservatives, Taft usually went along with his brethren in striking down laws that sought to regulate business and labor practices.

Taft distinguished himself more as an administrator than as a judge. He developed and lobbied for the judiciary act of 1925, 43 Stat. 936, which gave the Court almost complete discretion over its docket. Under Taft the Court developed the writ of certiorari process, whereby a party files a petition seeking review by the Court. Because only a small fraction of these petitions are granted, the process has dramatically reduced the work of the Court. Taft also lobbied Congress for funds to construct a separate building for the Court. Although he did not live to see its completion, the Supreme Court Building, which was designed by cass gilbert, proved to be a lasting monument to Taft's administrative talents.

Taft's health began to fail in 1928, and he was forced to resign from the Court in February 1930. He died on March 8, 1930, in Washington, D.C.

further readings

Anderson, Donald F. 2000. "Building National Consensus: The Career of William Howard Taft. University of Cincinnati Law Review 68 (winter).

Burton, David H. 1998. Taft, Holmes, and the 1920s Court: An Appraisal. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press.

Taft, William H. 2001. The Collected Works of William Howard Taft. Ed. by David H. Burton. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press.