William Howard Taft

by Jeffrey Rosen

  In September 1909, Taft decided to tour the country for a few months, to “get out and see the people and jolly them.”80 Taft’s attempts to jolly the people consisted of delivering nearly forty speeches—all of them read like long, technical judicial opinions—on topics ranging from corporation taxes to the environment. “I do not think his speeches will read as well when put in book form as they will be pleasing to those communities in which they were delivered,” Butt accurately predicted as the tour began, noting that Taft began the trip as a labored and anxious speaker but increasingly gained confidence.81 One of his first stops was in Winona, Minnesota, the home of James A. Tawney, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who wanted the president to offer an unequivocal endorsement of the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill.82 On Constitution Day, September 17, Taft responded like a lawyer arguing a case. He later explained that he had written his speech on the tariff hastily the night before, but his last-minute effort produced the equivalent of a legal brief, with exhaustive charts and numbers comparing the new tariff with the old and establishing that the new bill reduced more tariffs than it raised.

  “I did not promise that everything should go downward,” Taft declared accurately. “What I promised was, that there should be many decreases, and that in some few things increases would be found to be necessary; but that on the whole I conceived that the change of conditions would make the revision necessarily downward—and that, I contend, under the showing which I have made, has been the result of the Payne bill.”83 He acknowledged that the bill was not perfect. But the words that followed would come back to haunt him for the rest of his career.

  On the whole, however, I am bound to say that I think the Payne tariff bill is the best tariff bill that the Republican party ever passed; that in it the party has conceded the necessity for following the changed conditions and reducing tariff rates accordingly. This is a substantial achievement in the direction of lower tariffs and downward revision, and it ought to be accepted as such.84

  These two sentences are a classic Kinsley gaffe. As Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard exclaimed in a hearty chorus on another topic, “Every word of them is true.” Moreover, Taft went on to emphasize that, although he thought the bill was not perfect, he had signed it in the interest of party unity, which he thought was the precondition for “representative government” in America. But given progressive demands for more dramatic tariff reform, even Taft’s tepid defense of the bill struck them as political heresy, for it suggested that no better bill was possible. As usual, however, Taft did not consider the political implications of his candor. “He no longer apologizes. He accepts, he defends, he is enthusiastic,” the New York Times fulminated.85 Wrenched out of context, Taft’s praise of “the best tariff bill that the Republican Party ever passed” went viral on the wires.

  The press accounts failed to note that Taft’s defense of the bill was also based on his commitment to government by party. Taft understood, as the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, that the great movements for social change in America have come from strong political parties that unite groups with different interests.86 Taft insisted that “in a party those who join it, if they would make it effective, must surrender their personal predilections on matters comparatively of less importance.” As a loyal Republican, he said, he could do no less.87

  On the remainder of the tour, Taft defended the rest of his balanced tax policy. In a speech on corporation and income taxes, delivered in Denver on September 21, he said the only way to balance the budget was to cut expenditures or increase revenues, and he pledged his administration would do both, beginning with cutting expenditures by up to $50 million.88 Taft noted, however, that with the tariff reductions in the new law, some tax increases were necessary to make up the deficit. Although Taft believed that “the Constitution does not forbid the levying of an income tax by the Central Government,” he had supported the compromise reached by Senate Republicans, passing the corporation tax and proposing the constitutional amendment authorizing a federal income tax. Because he feared that citizens who disagreed with a federal income tax might refuse to pay and then commit perjury to avoid prosecution, Taft believed that an income tax should be imposed only in times of emergency, as in the Civil War.89 And he disagreed with liberals and populists who wanted to use the income tax “for the purpose of permanently restraining great wealth.”90

  After leaving Colorado (where he declined to wear the specially constructed bathing costume at Glenwood Springs),91 Taft continued to Utah and then to the West Coast, with stops in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. He then set off for Texas and Mexico, where he toasted the capitalist dictator Porfirio Díaz.92 This was the first visit to Mexico by an American president and Taft’s first excursion into “dollar diplomacy,” or a foreign policy designed to advance America’s business interests. “I am glad to aid him,” he wrote to Nellie, “for the reason that we have two billions [of] American capital in Mexico that will be greatly endangered if Díaz were to die and his government go to pieces.”93 As it happened, the government did go to pieces: the idealistic revolutionary Francisco I. Madero would overthrow President Díaz just eighteen months later. Still, Taft’s visit produced at least one decent joke. When his aides expressed relief that Taft had escaped Mexico without an attempted assassination, the president replied with a ready smile, “If anyone wanted to get me, he couldn’t very well have missed such an easy target.”94

  In Taft’s final speeches of his tour, he reflected on the limits of his constitutional powers as president. In an address, “Wisdom and Necessity of Following the Law,” delivered at the state fairgrounds of Macon, Georgia, on November 4, Taft embraced a strikingly restrained conception of the presidency. “The thing which impresses me most is not the power I have to exercise under the Constitution, but the limitations and restrictions to which I am subject under that instrument.”95 He also denounced presidential efforts to circumvent Congress’s will through executive orders: “The best way of getting rid of a legal limitation that interferes with progress … is to change the law, and not rely upon the Executive himself to ignore the statutes and follow a law unto himself.”96

  4

  “Within the Law”: The Environment, Monopolies, and Foreign Affairs

  President Taft was determined to put President Roosevelt’s policies on protecting the environment, prosecuting the trusts, and keeping the peace on firm legal and constitutional grounds. When his efforts ignited a political firestorm, the judicial president was unprepared to extinguish it.

  A disagreement about how to protect the environment provoked the first conflagration. Roosevelt had issued executive orders to protect from development millions of acres of national forest. But in 1908, Congress, influenced by corporate interests, tried to thwart Roosevelt’s conservation efforts by passing a law transferring the power to establish national forests from the president to Congress.1 Roosevelt was undaunted by constitutional formalities. In the waning days of his presidency, working with his secretary of the interior, James R. Garfield, and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, he issued a midnight executive order protecting from hydroelectric power development more than a million additional acres of land.2 Roosevelt justified the withdrawal under his “stewardship” theory of executive power, insisting that the president could do anything the Constitution didn’t explicitly forbid.3

  Garfield and Pinchot offered no resistance to the president’s wishes, determined as they were to restrict, by any means necessary, the access of giant corporations to forest lands and water reserves. Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, was a moralistic crusader—initially for the conservation of land and later for the prohibition of alcohol.4 He viewed Roosevelt’s efforts to regulate the water power trust as only one battle in the holy war between the people and the monopolies. A future secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, would dub him “Sir Galahad of the Woodlands.”5 Even after the repeal of Prohibition, as governor of Pennsylvania, Pincho
t ended his career moralistically denouncing the evils of alcohol. In an irony that seemed to escape him, however, he designed a state-run monopoly on the sale of liquor that continues to frustrate lovers of intoxicating spirits in the Keystone State to this day.

  Taft, too, was committed to conservation, but he was also committed to the rule of law. As he wrote to Pinchot, “I am thoroughly in sympathy with these policies and propose to do everything that I can to maintain them, insisting only that the action for which I become responsible … shall be within the law.”6 Taft promptly asked Congress for federal legislation codifying Roosevelt’s executive orders.7 Congress responded enthusiastically to Taft’s expression of respect for its constitutional prerogatives and restored executive power over land conservation. In the end, Taft would withdraw more land for federal protection in his single term in office than Roosevelt did in two terms, protecting 8.5 million acres and creating ten national parks.8 As the historian Jonathan Lurie notes, Taft called himself a “progressive conservative”9 and meant to preserve rather than threaten Roosevelt’s legacy. But Taft’s achievements would be overshadowed by a dramatic clash between Pinchot and Taft’s new secretary of the interior, Richard Ballinger. And Taft exacerbated the conflict through his legalistic insistence on viewing it in constitutional rather than political terms.

  Taft’s appointment of Ballinger, a former state judge and mayor of Seattle, was part of his judicial approach to conservation policy. Ballinger believed that Roosevelt’s executive orders withdrawing land without congressional approval were illegal, and he began to restore some of the lands for private development.10 Taft agreed with Ballinger’s more legalistic approach to conservation, believing, as he did, that the president could exercise only those powers that the Constitution or the law explicitly authorized.11 Pinchot suspected Ballinger, with some cause, as being overly sympathetic to the corporate classes, and the conflict between the men exploded in August 1909 over the disposition of federal coal lands in Alaska. Pinchot insisted that the lands should be leased from the U.S. government; Ballinger maintained that they should be sold outright.

  At this point, the tale becomes intricate. A corporate syndicate known as the Clarence Cunningham group (which may have been a front for mining companies owned by the monopolists Morgan and Guggenheim) had submitted claims on the land. The General Land Office at first rejected these claims but then accepted them.12 With Pinchot’s encouragement, Louis R. Glavis, the young chief of the Portland, Oregon, division of the General Land Office, accused Ballinger of laboring under a conflict of interest when he decided to sell off the lands to the Cunningham syndicate. In 1907, when he was head of the General Land Office, Ballinger had shut down Glavis’s investigation into the partnership between Cunningham and the Morgan-Guggenheim Alaska syndicate, which was seeking to develop Alaskan coal. Ballinger then went into private law practice in Seattle, where he earned a modest fee of $250 for providing legal advice to the Cunningham syndicate for an unrelated land office dispute.13 In Glavis’s view, Ballinger, who had been on the Cunningham group’s payroll, had shut down his investigation to favor the financial interests of his former patrons, who had also been contributors to Taft’s presidential campaign.

  Pinchot arranged for Glavis to lay his charges directly before the president. On August 18, Glavis arrived at the summer White House in Beverly bearing a letter from Pinchot supporting his account. Taft reviewed the charges like a judge rather than a politician, reading Glavis’s fifty-page report and consulting the attorney general.14 He also asked Ballinger for a formal response. Ballinger set out for Beverly with Oscar Lawler, a young assistant, and on September 6 they consulted with Taft.15 Taft was already disposed against Pinchot—he had angrily declared the day before, so loudly that everyone in the house could hear him, that “Pinchot is a fanatic and has no knowledge of discipline or interdepartmental etiquette,” adding that he would “not stand for such insubordination.”16 As Taft was conducting his meeting with Ballinger and Lawler, Archie Butt predicted that the president, who “is not-overindulgent toward reformers,” would uphold Ballinger and fire Pinchot, which would in turn alienate Roosevelt and array against Taft “all that set of men who look upon themselves as purists in politics.”17 That is precisely what happened.

  Treating Lawler as the equivalent of his own law clerk, Taft asked him to write a memorandum “as if he were President.”18 After reviewing Lawler’s memo, Taft concluded that Ballinger was innocent of fraud or any other wrongdoing. Displaying the Manichean demand for loyalty that sometimes clouded his otherwise judicial perspective, he released a letter on September 13 exonerating Ballinger of all charges. An editorial commented that Taft’s letter characteristically “exhibits … the judicial tone and temper of a magistrate disposing of a case.”19 In a fit of anger that would prove politically unfortunate, however, Taft also fired Glavis for insubordination.20 This was the Taft who had once assaulted a man for insulting his father—a great “hater,” as Theodore Roosevelt once called him—whose obsession with personal loyalty could sometimes overcome his otherwise keen devotion to the rule of law.

  Taft insisted that the firing of Glavis was necessary to maintain the administrative discipline that he considered indispensable to an efficient executive branch. “The heads of the Departments are the persons through whom I must act, and unless the bureau chiefs are subordinate to the heads it makes government of an efficient character impossible,”21 he wrote to Nellie during his speaking tour in Oregon in early October. He predicted to Nellie that Pinchot, with his “fanaticism,” was behind the controversy and was perhaps planning a “coup,” and that Taft would one day have to fire him, too.22 Meanwhile, in public speeches, Taft insisted that conservation efforts could be put on solid constitutional footing.23 Taft wrote to Pinchot asking him to remain in government,24 but in a separate letter to Representative William Kent, a progressive Republican, Taft insisted, “We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law. Now, if that is reactionary, then I am a reactionary.”25 At the same time, the thin-skinned president refused to take responsibility for the political firestorm he had created by firing Glavis. In November he told Archie Butt on the golf course, “I have done nothing that I would not do over again, and therefore I must feel that [the] troubles are either imaginary or else someone else is to blame.”26

  The president then asked Attorney General Wickersham to prepare a memo explaining why Taft had exonerated Ballinger. In what would prove to be the most scandalous decision of his presidency, Taft asked Wickersham to backdate the memo to September 11—the date of the attorney general’s initial meeting with the president, to make it appear as though Taft had relied on the full written memo, rather than Wickersham’s more cursory notes on the evidence, before making his decision.27 But Glavis, convinced of his virtue, would not be silenced. In November he published an explosive article in Collier’s Weekly entitled “The Whitewashing of Ballinger.” “Are the Guggenheims in charge of the Department of the Interior?”28 he asked in the article, alleging corruption without providing evidence.29 Finally, at Ballinger’s request, Taft agreed to a congressional investigation, in the vain hope of preserving the unity of the Republican Party.30

  Because the self-regarding Pinchot was determined to turn himself into a martyr, the investigation into the Pinchot-Ballinger affair, which riveted Washington from January through May 1910,31 had the opposite effect. As Archie Butt reported the previous November, “I know the President does not want to force Pinchot to resign, yet he will not tolerate insubordination, much less criticism of himself.”32 As late as December 31, when Taft’s brother Charlie urged him at a family wedding to fire Pinchot, Taft responded, “I am beginning to think that is just what he wants to force me to do, and I will not do it,” because he was determined to avoid the “open rupture” with Roosevelt that the firing would ensure.33

  On January 6, however, Pinchot forced Taft’s hand. In anticipation o
f the hearings, the moralistic gadfly wrote to Senator Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa, a leader of the progressive insurgent Republicans, alleging that Taft had fired Glavis without understanding the facts.34 The letter was read into the Congressional Record; the next day, Taft, always prickly on questions of honor and administrative discipline, fired Pinchot for insubordination.35 He reached the decision after agonizing about its political consequences—“he looked like a man almost ill,” Butt wrote on January 7, as Taft was making his decision. “He is weighing Pinchot in the balance but is weighing also the consequences of his own act with Roosevelt.”36

  Taft objected to Pinchot’s personal disloyalty and lack of constitutional scruples, not to his conservationist zeal; to prove the point, he replaced Pinchot with another nationally acclaimed conservationist, Henry S. Graves, the head of the Yale School of Forestry, which Pinchot himself had founded. And on January 14, he issued a special message urging Congress to pass laws “to validate the withdrawals which have been made by the Secretary of the Interior and the President.”37 But the political firestorm continued: Collier’s published a sensational follow-up attack on Ballinger, accusing him of shutting down Glavis’s investigation to help Taft’s election at the behest of big donors and excoriating the secretary of the interior for issuing an executive order to prevent leaks by forbidding Interior Department staffers from testifying before Congress without his approval. “Can This Be Whitewashed Also?” asked the San Francisco Call. “How Campaign Funds Figured—Administration Badly Tied Up.”38