REVIEW POTPOURRI: William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft

by Peter Cates

William Howard Taft

The 27th former President William Howard Taft (1857-1930) had what might be considered the closest friendship possible with his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt. They more than frequently visited with each other, advised each other, encouraged each other, even rebuked each other.

Under Roosevelt, Taft served as Governor/General of the newly-annexed Philippines and, in a strange twist of fate, as Secretary of War at the same time; TR had so much faith in Taft that he used him as his personal roving ambassador at large (no pun intended with Taft’s well known obesity of over 300 pounds) and as a diplomatic mediator in setting up peace talks between the Russians and Japanese during their 1905 War.

When the 1908 Republican Convention occurred, Roosevelt, due to his own popularity with the voters, pretty much had control of its delegates, got his friend easily nominated as the front runner and a Republican president another four years in the White House, an achievement not to be achieved again until the Reagan/Bush years of 1980-1992.

An interesting anecdote in Christine Sadler’s 1963 book America’s First Ladies tells of a vicious blizzard of an ice storm that “tied up transportation all along the Atlantic coast, left thousands of inaugural visitors stranded on trains and roads leading into Washington, and temporarily halted the sending of telegrams. President Roosevelt said the storm was aimed at him and would abate when he got out of town, but Taft replied, ‘You’re wrong; it’s my storm. I always said it would be a cold day when I got to be president of the United States. ‘ ”

At the actual inauguration ceremony, Taft’s youngest son Charles brought along a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in case he was bored by his father’s speech; it proved to be a very interesting speech which 11-year-old Charles enjoyed immensely. The boy never even cracked his book and his father considered the boy’s attention a personal compliment.

Taft himself had always set his ambition on being Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court but his wife Helen (1861-1943) pushed him into politics and he lacked the will to resist her.

However, once in the White House, Taft, while still believing in Roosevelt’s policies, steered a more cautious middle ground between the traditional Republicans who detested Roosevelt’s aggressive “bull in a china shop” progressivism and the progressive Republicans who wished to continue where Roosevelt left off.

He also basically disliked the job, didn’t try very hard to achieve much and had an ultra-cautious Vice-President James Sherman (1855-1912) who made Taft seem like a radical progressive.

Meanwhile, the First Lady suffered a physical collapse and some paralysis of her facial muscles which left her an invalid most of the first year (She did eventually recover much of her health and lived to see oldest son Robert elected to the U.S. Senate in 1939.).

As mentioned in an earlier column, Taft lost in the three-way race of 1912 in which Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican vote and was quite happy to turn the White House over to Woodrow Wilson.

Finally in 1921, President Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) appointed Taft to his dream job as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court where he would do fine work, would swear in both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover as president in 1925 and 1929, respectively, and would retire in February 1930, one month before his death from a heart ailment at the age of 72.