William Howard Taft

by Jeffrey Rosen

  One who so lightly regards constitutional principles, and especially, the independence of the judiciary, one who is so naturally impatient of legal restraints, and of due legal procedure, and who has so misunderstood what liberty regulated by law is, could not be safely intrusted with successive presidential terms. I say this sorrowfully, but I say it with the full conviction of truth.7

  After unburdening himself of this fervent address, Taft retired to the presidential railroad car, where a journalist found him with his head in his hands. “Roosevelt was my closest friend,” he exclaimed, looking up with anguish. And then he began to weep.8

  Behind the scenes, though, Taft was undaunted. He worked with Republican political bosses to secure his renomination through the various state conventions rather than relying on the handful of direct primaries. Six states in the North and West held primaries at the beginning of the election year; six more states would join them before the Republican Convention in June. Forced to submit himself to the direct consideration of the people, Taft campaigned vigorously: after winning the Massachusetts primary, he told a crowd in Maryland, “I am a man of peace and don’t want to fight. But when I do fight I want to hit hard. Even a rat in a corner will fight.”9 After alarming the public with this unfortunate image, he lamented the “hypocrisy, the insincerity, the selfishness, the monumental egotism, and almost the insanity of the megalomania that possess Theodore Roosevelt.” Roosevelt reciprocated by calling Taft a “puzzlewit” and a “fathead”10 as well as “a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and the common in him.”11

  In the end, Taft won the New York and Massachusetts primaries, but lost to Roosevelt in California, Minnesota, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. (Both men failed to carry their home states.) Senator Robert La Follette took North Dakota and his home state of Wisconsin. All told, in the states that held direct primaries, Roosevelt won 1,157,397 votes and 278 delegates; Taft, 761,716 votes and 48 delegates; and La Follette 351,043 and 36 delegates.12 But 254 delegates were still contested, and the rest of the delegates would be allocated at the Republican Convention in Chicago in June. A candidate needed the votes of 504 delegates to win the nomination.

  At the beginning of that month, the Republican National Committee awarded 235 of the contested seats to Taft and only 19 to Roosevelt, depriving the former president of dozens of delegates (the precise number remains disputed) to which he plausibly claimed he was entitled.13 Days before the convention opened on June 18, Roosevelt declared, “I’m feeling like a bull moose!” and called on the credentials committee to allocate more than 70 of the additional contested seats to him rather than Taft.14 In the Chicago Coliseum, Roosevelt gave the most melodramatic speech of his career, culminating with the messianic battle cry, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”15 In response, twenty thousand of his supporters sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Taft had the wit to appoint as chairman of the convention the conservative New York attorney Elihu Root, who was close to both Taft and Roosevelt. Root delivered a keynote address promising that the Republican Party would uphold the integrity of the courts and the Constitution.16 Root then settled the matter by awarding 71 contested delegates to Taft rather than Roosevelt. This prompted Roosevelt supporters to express their conviction that their champion had been steamrolled by repeatedly exclaiming “toot toot” and “choo choo.”17 Taft was promptly nominated on the first ballot, with 561 votes to Roosevelt’s 107 and La Follette’s 41. Protesting the lack of progressive representation on what was now branded as a conservative ticket, 344 delegates refused to vote.18 Roosevelt and his delegates walked out and held a rump convention of their own, where the former president exhorted his supporters to remember the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”19 The new party would soon be called the Progressive Party and was popularly known as the Bull Moose Party, after one of Roosevelt’s favorite expressions.

  Did party bosses loyal to Taft steal the Republican nomination from Roosevelt? Taft’s biographer Henry Pringle concludes that the answer hardly matters, given the party rules in place at the time. “Whether thirty votes were stolen or seventy-two or none has no real bearing on the outcome in Chicago during those humid days of June, 1912,” Pringle concludes. “The Republican party was in the hands of the forces which favored Taft’s renomination.”20 Taft, for his part, criticized the direct primary, as opposed to the convention system, as encouraging the election of demagogues rather than moderates.

  In July, Taft lamented to Nellie that Roosevelt “is utterly unscrupulous in his method of stating things, and his power of attracting public attention is marvelous. I think he has really convinced a great number of people of the United States that we committed gross frauds, that I am the receiver of stolen goods in taking the nomination.”21 A month later, Taft complained to his wife again, calling Roosevelt “the fakir, the juggler, the green goods man, the gold brick man that he has come to be.” The president accused his predecessor of “seeking to make his followers ‘Holy Rollers,’ and I hope that the country is beginning to see this.… So far as personal relations with him are concerned, they don’t exist.”22 During the campaign that followed, Taft would maintain, remarkably, that he preferred the election of Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic nominee, to the election of Roosevelt, even though he recoiled from Wilson’s “general radicalism” and criticisms of the Constitution and found his acceptance speech “purring and ladylike.”23

  In his heart, Taft viewed both Roosevelt and Wilson as threats to the Constitution. Unfortunately for Taft, his attempts to defend the Constitution against assaults from both sides were drowned out by a debate that proved more galvanizing to voters: the debate between Wilson’s New Freedom and Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. That debate asked whether centralizing or decentralizing corporate and government power was the best way to tame the trusts and protect the economic interests of the middle classes. The Jeffersonian Wilson, guided by his economic advisor Louis Brandeis, who had denounced “the curse of bigness” in business and government, insisted on regulating competition by breaking up the banks or preventing them from consolidating in the first place. The Hamiltonian Roosevelt, influenced by Herbert Croly, the editor of the New Republic, called for big regulatory bodies to oversee the big corporations.24 And the constitutionalist Taft called for vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws to break up the most egregious trusts; he also defended the importance of independent courts to keep big government as well as big business within legal and constitutional bounds. In the battle between the competing visions of Roosevelt and Wilson,25 Taft’s constitutionalism struggled for attention as a countertheme to the major fugue.

  All three platforms framed their programs in constitutional terms. Roosevelt’s Progressive Party advocated publicity of campaign donations, minimum wage and maximum hour laws, and other reforms. “We hold with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln that the people are the masters of their Constitution, to fulfill its purposes and to safeguard it from those who, by perversion of its intent, would convert it into an instrument of injustice,” the Progressive platform declared.26 Taft’s Republican platform, by contrast, unequivocally emphasized judicial independence, declaring: “The Republican Party reaffirms its intention to uphold at all times the authority and integrity of the Courts, both State and Federal, and it will ever insist that their powers to enforce their process and to protect life, liberty and property shall be preserved inviolate.”27 As for Wilson’s Democratic platform, it connected constitutional principles to economic reform. “We declare it to be a fundamental principle of the Democratic Party that the Federal government, under the Constitution, has no right or power to impose or collect tariff duties, except for the purpose of revenue.”28

  As the Democratic platform suggested, the election was also a battle over the tariff. “We favor the immediate downward revision” of “the high republican tariff,” the Democrats declared, and “we denounce the action of President Taft in vetoing the bills to reduce
the tariff in the cotton, woolen, metals, and chemical schedules, and the farmers’ free-list bill, all of which were designed to give immediate relief to the masses from the exactions of the trusts.”29 The Republican platform countered, “We reaffirm our belief in a protective tariff,” although “some of the existing import duties are too high, and should be reduced.”30 And the Progressive Party essentially split the difference, endorsing “a protective tariff which shall equalize conditions of competition between the United States and foreign countries, both for the farmer and the manufacturer, and which shall maintain for labor an adequate standard of living.” It also condemned “the Payne-Aldrich bill as unjust to the people” and the Democratic platform for being “committed to the destruction of the protective system through a tariff for revenue only, a policy which would inevitably produce widespread industrial and commercial disaster.” With a faith in experts shared by all three candidates, the Progressives, like the Republicans, called for “a non-partisan scientific tariff commission, reporting both to the President and to either branch of Congress.”31

  After winning the Republican nomination from a rival he considered an illiberal demagogue, Taft initially seemed indifferent to winning the general election.32 By July 22, he took on a self-pitying tone: “The Bull Moose continues to roar as much as ever, but I don’t think he frightens as many people. Sometimes I think I might as well give up so far as being a candidate is concerned. There are so many people in the country who don’t like me. Without knowing much about me, they don’t like me—apparently on the Dr. Fell principle.”33 (“I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,” went the old nursery rhyme, “The reason why—I cannot tell.”) Taft insisted defensively that he was indifferent to popular disdain: “The truth is that it is not the height of my ambition to be popular, and I have become quite philosophical with respect to the dislike the people may feel for me, because generally I can attribute it to some misrepresentation.”34 On July 24, he wrote to Nellie about a trip that his son Bob and daughter Helen were taking to Glacier National Park, and joked that they should “enjoy all the privileges they can on this trip because they may not continue to be the son and daughter of a President for very long.”35

  Whatever his ambivalence about the campaign of 1912, Taft’s constitutional passions and competitive spirit were roused in his speech on August 1 accepting the Republican nomination. His address focused on the Republican Party’s commitment to defending the Founders’ Constitution and on the injustices he had suffered from “a reign of sensational journalism and unjust and unprincipled muckraking.”36

  Taft then gave a comprehensive accounting of his own accomplishments. He had kept the promise of his 1908 acceptance speech, he stressed, to give “special attention to the machinery of government with a view to increasing its efficiency and decreasing its cost.”37 Citing budget figures to make the point that he had moved the government from deficit to surplus by cutting $50 million in expenses and increasing revenues with the Payne tariff and corporation tax,38 Taft went on to say that he had reorganized government with the help of “an Economy and Efficiency Commission, consisting of the ablest experts in the country.”39 In foreign relations, “we have maintained peace everywhere and sought to promote its continuance and permanence,” although he complained that the Senate had amended beyond repair his proposed “broad treaties for the promotion of universal arbitration.” In Mexico, Taft said, his self-restraint in refusing to provoke war by sending troops over the border, despite populist calls for an invasion, had saved hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of lives.

  On free trade, he said, the Payne-Aldrich bill “furnished the opportunity for insisting on the removal by foreign countries of discriminations in that trade,” raising America’s exports and imports to “a higher figure than ever before in the history of the country.” Taft said that he had kept the promises of the Republican platform of 1908 by calling a special session of Congress to reduce the tariff, and as a result “prosperity has been gradually restored since the panic of 1907.” Finally, Taft said that the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Standard Oil and American Tobacco cases had for the first time given the antitrust law “an authoritative construction which is workable and intelligible.” Taft concluded his address by expressing confidence that the people would ultimately vote for the preservation of the Constitution rather than its destruction.40

  “I shall not go out to make speeches,”41 Taft wrote to Nellie in July, attempting to maintain the tradition that overt campaigning was beneath the dignity of a sitting president. But he made an exception for the gramophone, which once again allowed him to speak to voters from the comfort of his summer home in Beverly. On October 1, 1912, Taft recorded excerpts from his acceptance speech called “Popular Unrest,” along with six other discs, for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Here is the relevant passage on the Constitution:

  After we have changed all the governmental machinery so as to permit instantaneous expression of the people in constitutional amendment, in statute, and in recall of public agent, what then? Votes are not bread, constitutional amendments are not work, referendums do not pay rent or furnish houses, recalls do not furnish clothing, initiatives do not supply employment or relieve inequalities of condition or of opportunity. We still ought to have set before us the definite plans to bring on complete equality of opportunity and to abolish hardship and evil for humanity. We listen for them in vain.42

  In Taft’s other records, he defended his economic achievements and the Constitution. In “On Prosperity,” he said that the tariff policy of the Democratic Party would “halt and paralyze business.” In a speech on peace, he repeated his call for a world court. In “President Taft on a Protective Tariff,” he legalistically insisted that he had fulfilled the promise of the platform of 1908 to revise the tariff at an extra session of Congress. “An extra session was called and the tariff was revised,” Taft said defensively. “The platform did not say in specific words that the revision would be generally downward, but I construed it to mean that.” He responded to criticism that his vigorous antitrust prosecutions had been bad for business. “The answer to the charge is first, that as long as the statute is upon the statute book, it’s the sworn duty of the President and his assistant to see that the law is executed.” And in a fervent address called “Who Are the People?” Taft expressed the wan hope that the people would resist Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s populist siren calls and vote to defend “our popular constitutional representative form of government with the independence of the judiciary as necessary to the preservation of those liberties that are the inheritance of centuries.”

  On October 14, an assassination attempt against Roosevelt only increased the former president’s popular appeal; he bravely declared, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose” and then finished delivering his ninety-minute speech. Two weeks later, on October 30, Vice President Sherman died of kidney disease; when Taft chose Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler to replace him on the ticket, the public reacted with indifference, since everyone anticipated Taft’s defeat. “I do not know,” Henry Adams exclaimed waspishly, “whether Taft or the Titanic is likely to be the furthest reaching disaster.”43 But until the end, Taft vainly hoped for victory and a reconciliation with Roosevelt.44

  On Election Day, Taft won the fewest electoral votes ever received by an incumbent president, and Roosevelt won the most electoral votes ever received by a third-party candidate.45 Taft carried only two states—Utah and Vermont—receiving 8 electoral votes, while Roosevelt carried six states, with 88 electoral votes. But in the three-way race, Wilson won an Electoral College landslide, with forty states and 435 electoral votes. In the end, Wilson won 42 percent of the popular vote; Roosevelt, 27 percent; and Taft, 23 percent, with 6 percent going to the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs. The Democrats increased their majority in the House and took the Senate from the Republicans.

  In the wake of his decisive defeat, Taft was gracious and relieved.
After wiring his congratulations to Wilson, he wrote to a friend, “The vote in favor of Mr. Roosevelt was greater than I expected, and to that extent the result was a disappointment.”46 But Taft was hardly surprised. “In my heart,” he wrote, he was “making preparations for the future to be lived outside the White House.”47 He told a reporter from the New York World of his gratitude for the presidency and his still lively judicial ambitions. “I am very glad to have had the opportunity to be President,” he confessed. “My tastes had been and still are judicial, but there is a very wide field of usefulness for a President.”48

  Days after the election, Taft set off for a meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, where the president of Yale University offered him the Kent professorship of law on the spot. (As a Yale official later recalled, Taft joked “that he was afraid that a Chair would not be adequate, but that if we would provide a Sofa of Law, it might be all right.”)49 In December, he sent his last written address to the opening of Congress. In a striking expression of constitutional frustration, he recommended that Congress require the members of the president’s cabinet to attend sessions of the House and Senate and answer questions about legislation, as they had done in the early days of the Republic. “This rigid holding apart of the executive and the legislative branches of this Government has not worked for the great advantage of either,”50 he confessed. After the new year, Taft sent two final special messages to Congress—the subjects were fur seals, on January 8, and transportation in Alaska, on February 6. In these final weeks of his presidency, Taft’s mood began to lighten. “The nearer I get to the inauguration of my successor,” he wrote to a friend, “the greater relief I feel.”