William Howard Taft Read online

  At the end of his exhaustive acceptance speech, Taft apologized for its length with endearing modesty.81 Nellie, who often upbraided him for writing speeches that read like judicial opinions,82 was excited afterward. “Hasn’t it been glorious! I love public life,” she exclaimed. “To me this is better than when Mr. Taft was at the bar and at the bench, for the things before him now and in which he takes part are live subjects.”83 Still, Nellie was correct that Taft’s 1908 campaign speeches read like judicial opinions.84 How was it possible, with such dry and legalistic speeches, that Taft could win a comfortable popular victory—51 percent to Bryan’s 43 percent—over the most celebrated orator of his day?

  One clue comes from the excerpts of his acceptance speech that Taft recorded for the Edison Record Company on August 3, 1908, just a few days after his notification ceremony. The election of 1908 was the first time that sound recordings played a central role in a presidential campaign, and they were distributed in an unusual way. Taft and Bryan supporters often held “record duels,” inviting other supporters to listen to the recordings of both candidates in a church hall or public meeting place. A newspaper in Spokane, Washington, described one of these battles of the phonograph: a Bryan supporter played Bryan’s recording on the need to reduce the tariff, only to be interrupted by a Taft supporter playing the song “Merry Ha Ha.” The Taft man would then play Taft’s warning that “taking the tariff off on all articles coming into competition with the so-called trusts would not only destroy the trusts, but all of their small competitors,” and the Bryan man responded with a recording of the comic song “Oh Glory,” in which the Bryan supporters lustily joined.85

  The new technology was undeniably exciting, converting even the most tiresome speech into an exhilarating novelty. But in addition to their unexpected entertainment value, the Bryan and Taft records make clear that Taft’s legalistic delivery was well matched to Bryan’s more orotund style, and uniquely well suited to the acoustical recording methods of his day. Bryan’s delivery has a grandiloquent and stentorian quality—he trills his r’s on words like “Orient” and “experiment”—but the Great Commoner’s recordings sound more natural than his flamboyant rerecordings of his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech.86

  In his final speech, titled “Mr. Taft’s Borrowed Plumes,” Bryan accused the accommodating Taft of adopting some of his best ideas from the Democratic platform.

  He favors an income tax when we need it, but thinks we do not need it now.… Mr. Taft favors railroad regulation.… Mr. Taft is personally inclined towards the election of senators by the people.… Mr. Taft advocates a certain kind of publicity, of campaign contributions.… Mr. Taft is advocating tariff revision.… Mr. Taft even recognizes that the Filipinos must ultimately have independence.

  Bryan’s conclusion: “Mr. Taft has [even] imitated the Democrats in using the talking machine as a means of reaching the public.”

  Bryan was correct: Taft’s speeches for Edison, recorded three months later, stole some of Bryan’s dramatic and substantive thunder. In the twelve recordings, Taft’s baritone is calm, unaffected, and entirely American—he has no regional inflection, except for his pronunciation of the word “man-a-facture.” His diction, like his prose, is modest and judicious, and always respects the intelligence of the listener. And in his speeches responding to Bryan, Taft did indeed embrace some aspects of the Democratic platform, including one that Roosevelt had ignored: a call to preserve the Constitution. In the election of 1904, Taft noted, the Democrats had focused on “the usurpation of the powers of the Executive Office for President Roosevelt including his settlement of the anthracite coal strike and the violation of the federal constitutional limitations by the Republican Party.” The people, however, rejected the Democratic “party which had temporarily assumed its ancient character as a preserver of the Constitution.”87 Quoting from his acceptance speech, Taft promised again to put Roosevelt’s executive orders on firm legislative and constitutional grounds. Taft also promised to reorganize the Department of Justice and the Department of Commerce and Labor, noting that “the moral standards set by President Roosevelt will not continue to be observed by those whom cupidity and the desire for financial power may tempt, unless the requisite machinery is introduced into the law.”88

  In the rest of his recorded speeches, Taft’s focus was more legal than political. Unlike the openly segregationist Democrats, he unequivocally endorsed the Republican platform’s “demands [for] justice for all men without regard to race or color” and “for the enforcement and without reservation in letter and spirit of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.” He called for the restraint (but not the destruction) of unlawful trusts. Invoking the reasoning of his own lower court opinions, he endorsed the right of unions to strike but denounced the secondary boycott.

  In one recording, Taft’s personality unexpectedly shines through. The topic, of all things, was Irish humor. After quoting Kipling about how, in Ireland and America, “smiles and tears chase each other fast,” Taft offered a surprisingly personal recollection of a trip to County Cork twenty-five years earlier. “We landed at Queen Sound very early in the morning of a July day and it seemed to me that nothing was ever greener, nothing was ever sweeter, nothing was ever more attractive than the surroundings of Queen Sound harbor at that hour.” Taft then recited “the musical verse The Shandon Bells,” which crowded his memories at the time:

  With deep affection and recollection

  I oft times think of those Shandon Bells

  Whose sounds so wild would, in days of childhood

  Fling round my cradle their magic spells.

  In reciting these verses, Taft’s voice is somber yet rhapsodic. He recites beautifully and deliberately, in tones he must have used when reading aloud to Nellie during their courtship. The spirit revealed by this intimate act of personal revelation is vulnerable and sentimental, earnest and full of soul.

  On November 3, 1908, Taft was elected the twenty-seventh president of the United States. He carried twenty-nine of the forty-six states, won 321 electoral votes to Bryan’s 162, and outpolled Bryan by more than a million popular votes.89 On the night of his victory, Taft gave a short speech. “I pledge myself to use all the energy and ability in me to make the next Administration a worthy successor to that of Theodore Roosevelt. I could have no higher aim than that,” he said.90 In fact, he did have a higher aim—to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

  3

  “The Best Tariff Bill”: The President, Tax Reform, and Free Trade

  On March 3, 1909, the day before Taft’s inauguration, President Roosevelt invited his successor to spend the evening at the White House. Waiting for Taft’s arrival as the sun set over Lafayette Park, Roosevelt confided his doubts to the journalist Mark Sullivan. “He’s all right,” the president replied when asked how Taft would make out. “He means well and he’ll do his best. But he’s weak.”1 At dinner, Nellie expressed elation and the Roosevelt party gloom. Taft then ducked out to attend a Yale smoker at the Willard Hotel, before returning to the White House after midnight to find Nellie awake with excitement. Preparing for bed in the Blue Room, which had previously served as President Lincoln’s cabinet room, she found a plaque declaring, “In this room Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, whereby four million slaves were given their freedom and slavery forever prohibited in these United States.”2 “It seemed strange,” she recalled, “to spend my first night in the White House surrounded by such ghosts.”3

  Early the next morning, Taft and Roosevelt met for breakfast before venturing into icy streets, covered by the heaviest snow in twenty years. “Well, Will, the storm will soon be over,” Roosevelt exclaimed. “As soon as I am out where I can do no further harm to the Constitution it will cease.” “You’re wrong,” Taft replied. “It is my storm. I always said it would be a cold day when I got to be President of the United States.”4 Both predictions�
�about the constitutional threats that Roosevelt had posed in his effort to impose his program by executive fiat and the personal and political toll of Taft’s efforts to repair them—would prove to be correct.

  Because of the blizzard, the ceremony outside the Capitol was canceled for the first time since the inauguration of Andrew Jackson. Taft took the oath in the Senate Chamber instead.5 He made a point of swearing on the same Bible that Supreme Court justices had used for decades.6 (When Taft returned the Bible to the Court, he vowed that he would use it again if he ever took the oath as a justice himself.)7 After repeating the presidential oath along with Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who flubbed the wording, William Howard Taft became what he, like the Framers of the Constitution, called the chief magistrate of the United States.

  Taft released his inaugural address to the press but mercifully did not read it in its entirety. (The spoken excerpts were sufficiently brief that his son Charles didn’t feel the need to open the copy of Treasure Island that he had brought for diversion in case his father’s address bored him.)8 In his written draft, Taft made clear that he viewed the promises in what he called his “letter of acceptance” of the Republican nomination, like those in the Republican platform, as enforceable contracts with the public that he meant to perform. “A matter of most pressing importance is the revision of the tariff,” he declared. “In accordance with the promises of the platform upon which I was elected, I shall call Congress into extra session to meet on the 15th day of March, in order that consideration may be at once given to a bill revising the Dingley Act,”9 the last major tariff bill, passed by Congress in 1897, which had raised tariffs by an average of 57 percent. “The Republican party declares unequivocally for a revision of the tariff by a special session of Congress immediately following the inauguration of the next President,”10 the 1908 Republican platform had declared. On the campaign trail, Taft emphasized that he would strictly construe the word “immediately.”11

  Taft suggested that Congress focus solely on tariff reform at the extra session, “to secure the needed speed in the passage of the tariff bill.” But believing, as he did, that the president had the constitutional authority to recommend legislation to Congress but no authority to interfere with Congress’s power to legislate, Taft emphasized, “I venture this as a suggestion only, for the course to be taken by Congress, upon the call of the Executive, is wholly within its discretion.”12 The tariff bill, Taft stressed above all, should try to achieve a balanced budget rather than protectionism for its own sake.13 The federal government had an obligation to be “as economical as possible” in its spending, and “to make the burden of taxation as light as possible.”14

  Taft, in other words, was more of what would later be called a deficit hawk than Roosevelt, who during his last full year in office had increased government expenditures by $80 million, resulting in a deficit of $57 million.15 In 1909, the deficit had risen above $89 million, and Taft insisted on fiscal discipline. In his first annual message to Congress he would declare, “Perhaps the most important question presented to the Administration is that of economy in expenditures and sufficiency of revenue.”16 As a result of Taft’s directive to cut costs, the various cabinet departments slashed nearly $50 million in spending in 1909.17 The cost cutting, combined with increased revenue from a corporation tax that Congress passed the same year at Taft’s recommendation, had its effect. The federal deficit shrank to $11 million in 1910, and Taft achieved surpluses of $11 million in 1911 and $3 million in 1912.

  Taft ended his inaugural address on a characteristically judicial note, pledging to uphold “the power of the federal courts to issue injunctions in industrial disputes.” Here, Taft was implicitly rebuking his predecessor on a topic that foreshadowed their coming breach. In his final message to Congress, Roosevelt had criticized judges who “often fail to understand and apply the needed remedies for the new wrongs produced by the new and highly complex social and industrial civilization which has grown up in the last half-century.”18 This assault on the courts struck at the heart of Taft’s most fervent beliefs.

  As soon as Taft finished speaking, Roosevelt rushed up to shake his hand, exclaiming something that sounded to Mrs. Taft like “Bully speech, old man!”19 The former president then hurried out of the room. Soon after the inauguration, as Roosevelt set off for an African safari, Taft wrote him a thoughtful note accompanied by an inscribed golden ruler. “I want you to know that I would do nothing in the Executive Office without considering what you would do under the same circumstances and without having in a sense a mental talk with you over the pros and cons of the situation,” he wrote to “My dear Theodore,” whom he was still inclined to call “My dear Mr. President.”20 With keen self-awareness, Taft acknowledged that he was not as adept as Roosevelt in working with journalists to explain his policies and educate the public. “I fear that a large part of the public will feel as if I had fallen away from your ideals; but you know me better and will understand that I am still working away on the same old plan.”21 Roosevelt jotted off a quick reply as the SS Hamburg left New York: “Am deeply touched by your gift and even more by your letter. Greatly appreciate it. Everything will turn out all right, old man. Give my love to Mrs. Taft.”22

  When she walked into the White House for the first time as first lady, Nellie felt “as Cinderella must have felt when her mice footmen bowed her into her coach and four and behaved just as if they had conducted her to a Court Ball every night of her life.” She experienced “a little secret elation,” which quickened as she stood over the brass seal with the national coat of arms sunk into the floor of the entrance hall: “‘The Seal of the President of the United States,’ I read around the border, and now—that meant my husband!”23

  The Tafts enjoyed an inaugural lunch, followed by a tea for the president’s Yale classmates, the inaugural parade, and a ball at the Pension Building. They returned to the White House at one o’clock in the morning, and Nellie’s last memory before she fell asleep was a hearty laugh from her husband as she asked drowsily, “I wonder where we had all better have breakfast in the morning!”24 Reviews of Taft’s inaugural address were positive. The New York Times, which had pledged to support the Union, the Constitution, and Reconstruction after the Civil War but had moved away from the Republican Party during the scandals of the Grant administration, accurately predicted, “We are to have, it seems, during the next four years, a government of laws, of laws enforced by an Executive of a just and deliberating mind.”25

  Taft initially felt like something of an imposter in the White House. “When I hear someone say Mr. President,” he declared on March 11, “I look around expecting to see Roosevelt.”26 And yet Taft wasted no time doing precisely what he had promised during his campaign: he set out to put Roosevelt’s policies on sound legal ground that respected the constitutional boundaries established by the Framers. As he had explained in January, “We do not wish to destroy that government or so change it as to make it different from that which our fathers and forefathers contemplated in the formation and maintenance of the Constitution, entered upon in 1789.”27 But because he approached many decisions as a principled judge rather than a calculating politician, he immediately stepped into political minefields. The trouble began with the selection of his cabinet. As Taft recalled, “One day, just after I was nominated, I told Roosevelt, that should I be elected, I did not see how I could do anything else but retain all the old members of the Cabinet.”28 But, a few months later, Taft changed his mind and decided to replace the old Roosevelt loyalists with a cabinet of what he called “corporation lawyers” who could help him in his constitutional tasks.

  As Taft told his new secretary of state, Philander Knox, who was one of the corporation lawyers, “I am trying … to act as judicially as possible, and to free myself from considerations of friendly association as far as I can and remain a decent man with red blood in me.”29 Rather bloodlessly, however, Taft sacked Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, James R. Garfiel
d, son of the late president and one of Roosevelt’s staunchest supporters, because he questioned the legality of some of Garfield’s decisions—made in concert with Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service—to withdraw land for federal conservation.30 Taft’s decision to replace Garfield with Richard Ballinger, the Seattle reform mayor turned corporate lawyer, would lead Pinchot to retaliate, precipitating the biggest scandal of his presidency.

  All told, Taft nominated six corporate lawyers to his cabinet: Knox as secretary of state, Ballinger as secretary of the interior, George Wickersham as attorney general, Jacob Dickinson as secretary of war, Frank Harris Hitchcock as postmaster general, and Charles Nagel as secretary of commerce and labor.31 Only the two holdovers from Roosevelt’s cabinet—Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson and Secretary of the Navy George von Lengerke Meyer—along with Taft’s new secretary of the treasury, Franklin MacVeagh, had escaped legal training.32 “I am going to be criticized for putting corporation lawyers into my Cabinet,” Taft accurately predicted, as critics such as Henry Adams wondered why a president elected to carry out Roosevelt’s policies had fired most of Roosevelt’s men.33

  Taft soon settled into a calmer, more judicious work schedule than his frenetic predecessor, whom Adams had described as “pure act.” The president’s days started at 7:00 a.m., when he ate what his aide Archie Butt recalled as “a hearty breakfast” that often included a twelve-ounce steak.34 (The gluten-free biscuits had disappeared.) By 9:30, he left for the new White House Oval Office, which Taft himself had designed and installed in the West Wing in October 1909 to replace the temporary executive office that Roosevelt had constructed. A rudimentary air-conditioning system, using three thousand pounds of ice a day to pipe cold air into the Oval Office, ensured the smiling president’s comfort, even on the warmest summer days.35 He often skipped lunch, except for an occasional apple, Butt recalled, but “I don’t think this fast does him any good, for he eats a correspondingly larger dinner. He has a tremendous appetite and does not control it as did his predecessor.”36 Exhausted by sleep apnea and fleeing the pressures of office, he liked to escape in the afternoon for golfing, horseback riding, or, with increasing pleasure, motoring. Continuing his schoolboy habits of procrastination, Taft worked in concentrated bursts, waiting until the last minute and then producing a prodigious volume of speeches and reports. But Taft’s work habits as president were also shaped by his work habits as a federal judge. He presided over cabinet meetings as if they were judicial conferences. He weighed all sides of an issue before reaching his verdict without consulting others. He based his decisions on legal rather than political considerations. And he handed down his decisions in speeches and messages to Congress that read like judicial opinions, without considering their political effect.37