William Howard Taft Read online

  On October 26, 1901, after scarcely a month in office, Roosevelt urged his friend to accept a Supreme Court appointment. WOULD APPRECIATE EARLY REPLY, he cabled impatiently to Taft in Manila.35 But as much as he craved the position, Taft felt a duty to the Filipino people at a time of economic crisis, and this compelled him to resist temptation. GREAT HONOR DEEPLY APPRECIATED BUT MUST DECLINE, Taft responded.36 Roosevelt tried to accept Taft’s demurral with grace, replying, “If possible, your refusal on the ground you give makes me admire you and believe in you more than ever.”37 In private, however, Roosevelt bristled at Taft’s inflexible sense of duty: “I have never in my life felt like criticizing anything that Will did, but, upon my word, I do feel like criticizing this mental attitude of his!”38

  At the end of 1901, Taft endured two dangerous operations to remove an abscess on his intestines. While in Washington for a third surgery, he met with Roosevelt, who said he hoped Taft would complete his work in the Philippines before the next Supreme Court vacancy came up. In January 1902, Taft had recovered sufficiently to testify before a Senate committee for two hours, answering hostile questions about alleged cruelty used by American military forces while quelling the rebellion led by the Filipino nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo.39 Taft always became defensive in the face of criticism, but here he was self-aware enough to acknowledge his vulnerability. “It shows my unfitness for public life for me to dislike [the attacks] so and be so sensitive about them,” he observed to Nellie. “I suppose it indicates a thin-skinned vanity.”40

  The following month, President Roosevelt dispatched Taft to Rome, where the civil governor conducted delicate and successful negotiations with Pope Leo XIII over the sale of four hundred thousand acres in the Philippines held by Spanish friars.41 (The vast scope of the land seized by the Church had provoked a Philippine revolt against Spanish rule before the Americans arrived.) Nearly two years later, the United States would agree to pay $7.5 million for most of the lands instead of taking them by force, another diplomatic triumph for Taft.42 During the trip, Taft’s family joined him for an audience at the Vatican. When the pope asked young Robert Taft about his intentions, the boy channeled his father, replying that he meant to become chief justice of the United States.43

  In January 1903, Roosevelt tried once again to appoint Taft to the Supreme Court. And Taft replied once again that he recognized “a soldier’s duty to obey orders,” but pleaded that he be allowed to complete his unfinished business in the Philippines.44 In the meantime, Filipino leaders, and the people themselves, demonstrated outside the Malacañan Palace for Taft to stay. “The whole city of Manila was placarded, in all the necessary languages, with the simple and uniform sentiment: ‘Queremos Taft,’ ‘WE WANT TAFT,’” Nellie recalled, adding that Secretary of War Elihu Root’s “rendering of this in English was ‘I want you, Mah Honey, yes, I do.’”45 In the face of this gratifying demonstration, Taft agreed to stay put; never again would he experience such fervent popular affection. On January 13, Roosevelt conceded petulantly, “All right, you shall stay where you are.”46

  Two months later, Roosevelt asked Taft to replace Root as secretary of war, stressing that he could continue to administer the islands from Washington.47 “If only there were three of you!” Roosevelt added flatteringly. “Then I would have put one of you on the Supreme Court … one of you in Root’s place as secretary of war, when he goes out; and one of you permanently governor of the Philippines.”48 This time, Taft’s family convinced him to accept the post. His generous half brother Charles, who had married the heiress to an iron fortune and supported Taft throughout his political career, even offered to supplement Taft’s cabinet salary to help defray the costs of living and entertaining in Washington. And Nellie, whose eye was always on the White House, was happy to return to Washington as the wife of a cabinet officer.49 And so on December 23, 1903, Taft set off for Washington from Manila on the SS Korea.

  Roosevelt still wanted to put Taft on the Court, now viewing the appointment as part of his effort to ramp up federal antitrust enforcement. His most dramatic crusade was against the Northern Securities holding company, a giant conglomerate merging the shipping and rail lines of Morgan and Vanderbilt with those of Rockefeller, Harriman, and Gould. After the merger, Northern Securities became the world’s second-largest corporation, surpassed only by U.S. Steel, which J. P. Morgan also controlled.50 “If we have done anything wrong,” Morgan protested to the president, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”51 Roosevelt retorted that he wanted to stop the Northern Securities merger, not fix it, prompting Morgan to ask whether U.S. Steel was vulnerable to a lawsuit as well. Roosevelt replied that the Steel Trust was safe “unless we find out that in any case they have done something that we regard as wrong.”52 And the president kept his word. During the Panic of 1907, a leading brokerage house that owned a large stake in the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company threatened to go bankrupt. In exchange for Roosevelt’s assurances that the government would not file an antitrust suit against U.S. Steel, Morgan offered to restore financial stability by buying the Tennessee combination, in what turned out to be a sweetheart deal.

  Taft enthusiastically supported Roosevelt’s decision to prosecute the shipping and railway trust in the Northern Securities case, and he sat in the Supreme Court with Attorney General Philander Knox on March 14, 1904, as Justice Harlan announced the Court’s 5–4 decision holding that the trust had illegally restrained commerce in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.53 Taft must have been proud as Harlan cited the Supreme Court decision upholding his own reasoning in the Addyston case. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whom Roosevelt had appointed in 1902 when Taft turned down the seat, voted against the administration in the Northern Securities case, prompting the president to exclaim, “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that.”54

  As head of the War Department, Taft was now in charge of overseeing the Philippines, pacifying Cuba, and supervising the construction of the Panama Canal. Roosevelt declared himself happy to leave Washington for a hunting trip in the Rockies because he had “left Taft sitting on the lid.”55 In 1904, Taft set off for Panama to oversee progress on the canal and impressed all with his vitality, attention to detail, and keen administrative ability.56 He also stumped for Roosevelt in the 1904 presidential campaign and was relieved when Roosevelt won—although he confessed prophetically that “a national campaign for the presidency is to me a nightmare.”57

  During Roosevelt’s second term, Taft traveled to Havana to quell an insurgency, briefly becoming provisional governor in 1906.58 A magazine profile called him “the proconsul of American good faith to fractious islands; an ambassador to stubborn tasks at far corners of the earth.”59 In addition to proving his gifts as an able administrator and chief operating officer, Taft was also a natural consensus seeker.60

  When he wasn’t traveling, Taft brightened the offices of the War Department in Washington with his laughter and good humor.61 The work must have been more congenial than his executive duties in the Philippines; starting in October 1905, Taft found the iron self-discipline to lose seventy-six pounds.62 Here is a typical day on the Taft diet, in the words of his diet guru, Dr. Yorke-Davies. At 8 a.m., “you may sip a tumbler of hot water,” adding “a squeeze of lemon if liked.” At 9 a.m., Taft breakfasted on “two or three of gluten biscuits”—in other words, gluten-free biscuits—and six ounces of “lean grilled steak or chop, or of chicken, or of grilled kidney, or of grilled or broiled white fish.” Lunch at 1:30 allowed “4 or 5 ozs of lean meat,” such as beef, mutton, lamb, “or of chicken or game in season, or of rabbit or turkey”; and “4 or 5 ozs of carefully cooked green vegetable, without butter”; and “3 or 4 ozs of baked apple or stewed apple or other fresh fruits.” Salad could be “taken freely, but no oil is allowed,” along with one of the gluten-free biscuits. In the afternoon, a cup or two of coffee or tea could be taken, “if liked,” but without milk or sugar, “or a cup of beef tea.” Finally, f
or dinner at 7, Taft could enjoy “clear soup when desired,” meat, fish, and vegetables, and stewed fruit in the same quantities as at lunch and “salads as in the list if liked (no oil) and two of the biscuits.”63 The low-carb diet hit its mark, and within seven months Taft had returned to his college weight. “A reduction of seventy pounds is not an inexpensive luxury,”64 Taft wrote to Nellie, lamenting the $400 he owed his tailor.

  Still, even during his happy tenure at the War Department, Taft pined to be chief justice. In 1906, when the retirement of Justice Henry Billings Brown opened yet another Supreme Court vacancy, Taft wrote in his diary, “I am very anxious to go on the Supreme bench. The President has promised me a number of times that he would appoint me Chief Justice if a vacancy occurred in that position and he knows that I much prefer a judicial future to a political future.”65 Nellie, however, viewed Roosevelt’s 1906 offer of an associate justiceship as an attempt to take Taft out of the running for president, and she insisted that he reject it. A friend of the family asked Taft’s son Charlie whether his father would accept the Supreme Court seat. “Nope,” he replied, because “Ma wants him to be president.”66

  Later that year, Taft and Nellie joined the Roosevelts for an intimate dinner at the White House, after which Roosevelt threw himself into a chair in the library and closed his eyes.

  “I am the seventh son of a seventh daughter and I have clairvoyant powers,” he intoned melodramatically. “There is something hanging over his head. I cannot make out what it is.… At one time it looks like the Presidency, then again it looks like the chief justiceship.”

  “Make it the presidency,” said Mrs. Taft.

  “Make it the chief justiceship,” said Mr. Taft.67

  In December 1907, Roosevelt issued a statement reaffirming his promise not to seek a second full term, a pledge he had rashly made on the night of his election in 1904 and soon came to regret. Taft quietly stumped for the Republican nomination by courting the state delegations, and in time he bested his main rival, Governor Charles Evans Hughes of New York. Taft’s only misstep during the quiet campaign was his impulsively candid response in January to a reporter’s question about what he would do for those unemployed in the wake of the Panic of 1907. “God knows,” Taft replied. “They have my deepest sympathy. It is an awful case when a man is willing to work and is put in this position.”68 (The phrase “God knows” was quoted out of context, provoking public outrage.) Thanks to Roosevelt’s steadfast support, in June 1908 the Republican Convention in Chicago nominated William Howard Taft to be its candidate for president of the United States. The Texas delegation brandished a flagpole with a pair of plus-sized trousers, accompanied by the slogan “As pants the hart for cooling streams, so Texas pants for Taft!”69 A series of five photographs taken of Taft on the telephone at the moment he received word of his nomination from President Roosevelt shows his face, serious at first, crinkling into a contented grin.

  Roosevelt, who had learned of Taft’s nomination during a tennis game, quickly issued an enthusiastic endorsement: “I do not believe there can be found in the whole country a man so well fitted to be president.”70 Months later, in an interview with Success Magazine entitled “Why the President Is for Taft,” Roosevelt was even more effusive. “The bigness of the job demands a man of Taft’s type,” he explained. “Never has there been a candidate for president so admirably trained in varied administrative service.” All this was entirely accurate. But Roosevelt added two predictions that proved to be overly optimistic. “I think Taft will succeed better with Congress than I have done,” and “I sincerely believe that Taft will make our greatest president, excepting, of course, our two greatest, Washington and Lincoln.”71

  In 1908, Roosevelt and Taft were the closest of allies, and Taft promised to put Roosevelt’s sweeping executive actions on firmer legal footing. Far from viewing himself as Roosevelt’s clone, Taft said that his constitutional vision would make his agenda “distinct from, and a progressive development of,” his predecessor’s agenda. “The chief function of the next Administration,” he declared, in his speech accepting the Republican nomination on July 28, “is to complete and perfect the machinery by which these standards may be maintained, by which the lawbreakers may be promptly restrained and punished, but which shall operate with sufficient accuracy and dispatch to interfere with legitimate business as little as possible.”72

  After a two-hour parade in his honor, Taft addressed the enthusiastic crowd from a special reviewing stand constructed in front of his brother Charles’s grand colonial home in Cincinnati. Taft’s acceptance speech lasted an hour but hit its mark. (The Wall Street Journal praised it as “an exceedingly able and shrewd political document” that positioned Taft “in the middle of the road, avoiding alike the extreme of eastern conservatism and the extreme of western radicalism.”)73 Verbose and legalistic, like all of his prose, his acceptance speech is not light reading—Taft wrote as he thought—but he was remarkably transparent as he judiciously weighed all sides of each argument and candidly shared the strengths and weaknesses of his conclusions. In the end, Taft’s speeches, like judicial opinions, reward the patient reader. They amount to detailed constitutional contracts with America about the legal reforms Taft intended to bring about.

  The Democrats were led for the third time by the populist barnstormer William Jennings Bryan. The “Great Commoner” had championed free silver in 1896 and anti-imperialism in 1900 and was determined to make the 1908 campaign a referendum on Republican domestic financial reforms.74 America had just recovered from the Panic of 1907, when the stock market dropped by more than 50 percent, only to be rescued by J. P. Morgan, who pledged his own capital to shore up confidence. The Democratic platform of 1908 declared that the panic showed that the Republicans were “either unwilling or incompetent to protect the interests of the general public.”75

  Taft promised to continue Roosevelt’s reform policies, and he and Bryan agreed on the need to curb the power of the trusts. But they disagreed about how to go about curbing that power. In his acceptance speech, Taft rejected the Democrats’ efforts to prevent monopolies from forming in the first place by imposing caps on size, banning trusts that controlled more than 50 percent of a product’s market, and requiring national licensing for trusts that controlled more than 25 percent. Instead, Taft returned to the definition of illegal trusts he had championed as a judge: to be unlawful, he said, a trust has to display “an element of duress in the conduct of its business,” based on the illegitimate “purpose of controlling the market, to maintain or raise prices, restrict output and drive out competitors.”76 Taft proposed vigorous antitrust prosecutions, including injunctions against illegal trusts and criminal prosecutions against the corporate officers, to bring the trusts “within the law.”

  On the central economic issue in the campaign, the Democrats supported tariffs only for the purpose of raising revenue, not for the protection of American industries. Taft embraced the promise in the Republican Party platform to preserve the protective tariff but also to reduce it. He pledged to call a special session of Congress immediately after the inauguration to revise the tariff in accordance with “the true principle of protection”—namely, “the imposition of such duties as will equal the difference between the cost of production at home and abroad, together with a reasonable profit to American industries.”77

  On the rights of labor, the Democratic platform vigorously opposed judicial injunctions against striking unions, and Bryan campaigned as the champion of labor.78 Taft, on the other hand, had been denounced as the “Father of Injunctions,” and he maintained his support for property rights throughout the campaign. Taft adhered to the position he had taken as a judge: that “workmen have a right to strike” and to persuade their co-workers to join them, “provided it does not reach the point of duress.” But they may not “injure their employer’s business by use of threats or methods of physical duress” or by “a secondary boycott against his customers or those with whom he deals
in business.”79

  On the need to publicize corporate campaign contributions, Taft largely agreed with the Democrats, noting that the Republican Congress in 1907 had banned “contributions from corporations to influence or pay the expenses connected with the election of presidential electors or of members of Congress.” He personally refused to accept questionable campaign contributions from large corporations, prompting Roosevelt, who had been less fastidious, to write, “My affection and respect for you are increased by your attitude about contributions. But really I think you are oversensitive.” Taft also pledged to support a federal law requiring the disclosure of “contributions received by committees and candidates in elections for members of Congress, and in such other elections as are constitutionally within the control of Congress.” But he did not endorse the Democratic call for “the enactment of a law prohibiting any corporation from contributing to a campaign fund and any individual from contributing an amount above a reasonable maximum.”80

  Finally, Taft tepidly endorsed the proposal in the Democratic platform for a constitutional amendment that would authorize the direct election of senators; although he said a federal income tax amendment was not strictly necessary, he would later endorse it as well. (Congress would propose both amendments during his presidential term.)