Robert A. Taft

American senator (1939-1953)

• Born: September 8, 1889
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: July 31, 1953
• Place of death: New York, New York

A third-generation member of one of America’s most enduring political dynasties, Taft entered the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1939 and there achieved a position of leadership as a spokesperson for conservative Republicanism.

Early Life

Robert A. Taft was the first of three children born to William Howard and Helen Herron Taft. Robert’s father, then a superior court judge in Ohio, became president of the United States in 1909; his paternal grandfather, Alphonso Taft, a successful lawyer, had served the Ulysses S. Grant administration as both secretary of war and attorney general before ending his years of public service with ministerial appointments to Austria-Hungary and Russia during the 1880’s.

Robert Taft’s youth was one of privilege; his first ten years were spent mainly in fashionable neighborhoods in Cincinnati or in Washington, D.C., where his father served as United States solicitor general from 1890 to 1892. In 1900, William Taft accepted an assignment in Manila as a commissioner and in 1901 became the first civilian governor of the recently acquired Territory of the Philippines. His family accompanied him.

From 1903 to 1906, Robert attended the Taft School, founded and run by his uncle Horace, in Watertown, Connecticut. The curriculum stressed academic rigor in the traditional subjects and the duty of young men of good family to take part in public service. At school, Taft excelled in academics. Nearly six feet in height and 170 pounds by the time he was graduated, he tried several sports with his customary earnestness but performed only passably.

In 1906, Taft entered Yale, as family tradition dictated. In his junior year, his father became president of the United States, but by then, Robert, reserved and dignified, was immersed in his habits of diligent study and seemed little affected by his father’s eminence. He had been first in his class at Taft, attained the same position at Yale, and finished first at Harvard Law School, still another step in the career progression that was expected of him and that he followed without question.

Life’s Work

In 1913, on completion of his studies at Harvard, Taft was offered a clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He declined it to join a prestigious Cincinnati law firm. Taft’s workload allowed him ample time to take part in civic life: legal-aid work, charitable fund-raising, and support for a home-rule charter for Cincinnati. In October, 1914, he married Martha Bowers, sister of a Yale classmate. The Tafts had four sons.

Taft reluctantly came to favor American entry into World War I. He volunteered for military service only to be rejected because of poor eyesight. In July, 1917, he joined the Food Administration as one of the wartime agency’s four assistant counsels. The work was tedious but satisfying compared with what he had been doing in Cincinnati, and for Taft personally, these years of public service seem to have brought about a new independence from his father’s guidance of his career. Loyal to Herbert Hoover, the head of the Food Administration, Taft went with him to administer the Paris office of the American Relief Administration organized at the end of the war. While he was proud of his role in helping to bring relief to some 200 million people in war-ravaged Europe, Taft, like Hoover himself, soured on the diplomatic intrigues that were still part of the European scene. Taft did give his support to the League of Nations, albeit coolly, and he was not then or in the future the single-minded isolationist critics would later label him. Still, he came to regard European leaders as selfish and would always be wary when issues concerning American involvement in world affairs arose. He believed that international law rather than collective security could best be used to preserve peace.

In 1919, Taft returned home to establish a law practice, which his younger brother Charles soon joined. Their specialty was corporate law, much of the firm’s business coming from their uncle Charles Taft, long a man of affairs in Cincinnati. In 1920, Robert Taft was elected to the Ohio assembly. He soon gained the respect of his peers for his expertise in tax problems and compiled a good record on civil liberties, supporting them even when it meant opposing the interests of the Ku Klux Klan , then a force in Ohio politics. In his participation in municipal reform in Cincinnati and in his service in the state assembly, Taft demonstrated his belief in party loyalty. Perhaps recalling how Republican factionalism had marred his father’s administration, he remained a steadfast Republican even when various issues in Ohio, especially those concerning reform in Cincinnati, caused some to bolt the party.

Although his father, now chief justice of the United States, tried to interest him in running for the governorship of Ohio in 1926, Robert Taft showed no inclination to do so. In his six years in Columbus, he had come to enjoy legislative work but preferred to return home to Cincinnati and his law firm, known since 1924 as Taft, Stettinius, and Hollister. His practice boomed, and Taft represented many of Cincinnati’s leading corporations, became a director of several, and took part in various protracted negotiations that involved streetcar service and Cincinnati’s crying need for a central terminal to accommodate its large rail traffic. Taft handled these cases with a deftness that won praise from all sides. Other than his law practice, his chief interests were in raising money for the Taft School and for the arts in Cincinnati. His principal recreations were golf, fishing, and taking care of the affairs of the farm on which he and his family resided.

In 1930, Taft won election to the state senate, hoping to achieve tax reform in Ohio. An intangible property tax was enacted, but other measures he wanted, such as county zoning and planning commissions, gained insufficient support. Taft, at heart an efficiency-minded Progressive, found his political goals unappealing to others during a time when nationwide depression brought new demands for welfare and slum-clearance programs. Taft was by no means against all legislative action in these areas, and during his earlier stay in Columbus had shown moderation on several questions involving labor, but the priority he normally placed on a balanced budget and efficiency in government made him seem callously insensitive to human needs. A strong supporter of Hoover in 1932, he lost his own bid for reelection in that year of Democratic triumph. It was the only election he ever lost.

By the middle of the 1930’s, Taft was ready to take an increased role in national Republican politics. He championed Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon in 1936 and was rumored to be a possible running mate for Landon. Two years later, Taft was elected to the United States Senate.

Taft quickly earned the respect of Senate colleagues for the care with which he studied legislative issues and, from the start of his tenure in Washington, served on such important committees as Education and Labor, Appropriations, and Banking and Currency. During his first campaign for the Senate, he accepted important New Deal programs dealing with unemployment insurance and old-age pensions, but he never was comfortable with the New Deal’s approach to government. From both philosophy and his own experience, especially with the Food Administration, which had been involved in a host of complex and often disliked regulatory decisions, he opposed big government. He regarded the New Deal as seriously flawed in its careless administration, wasteful spending, and excessive interference with private enterprise. The forcefulness and intelligence with which he expressed his opinions quickly made him a prominent figure in the Republican Party.

As early as 1940, Taft was considered a possible presidential candidate. He was eager to enter the race and had assets as a campaigner: energy, ability to organize, and thorough knowledge of the issues. His chances were diminished, however, with the German conquest in the spring of 1940 of France and the Low Countries, for his previous insistence that Germany posed no threat to the United States now seemed shortsighted to many. He had other liabilities. Not only did he dislike mingling with a crowd, but also he was an uninspiring speaker. His talks were heavy with facts and often boring. Fortunately, his wife enjoyed campaigning on his behalf and brought to his campaigns an affability with the public that he lacked. She was, as Taft’s most informed biographer states, the most helpful political wife since Jessie Benton Frémont nearly a century before. Republican Party leaders and the press, however, had already stereotyped Taft as a boring personality in an era increasingly dominated by charismatic politicians. Wendell Willkie, an internationalist and a more appealing candidate, gained the Republican nomination.

In the Senate, however, Taft became increasingly successful. He was reelected by a narrow margin in 1944 and, as a leader of a bipartisan conservative bloc in Congress, became one of the most powerful senators in modern American history. He was anathema to liberal Democrats because of his status among conservatives of both major parties. Because he spoke about public issues in forthright, often abrasive terms, he was easy to deride as an isolationist and a reactionary. In practice, his thought was more complex. He is perhaps best remembered for cosponsoring the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which to liberals and union spokespersons seemed a retrograde step in labor law. It did not, however, stifle unionism, as was feared by its opponents at the time; on many occasions since, Taft-Hartley’s “cooling-off period” has been invoked when major strikes have been threatened. As he had in Ohio, Taft did work for some reformist measures modest federal aid to education and public housing and federal grants to the states for improved health care. Fellow conservatives and liberals alike seemed puzzled by his support of such proposals, but in Taft’s thinking the bills were consistent with his own conservative philosophy that all Americans deserved a fair start and that opportunity must be open to all.

In foreign affairs Taft also showed flexibility. Prior to Pearl Harbor, he had opposed Lend-Lease and other measures designed to aid Great Britain, but subsequently he supported American entry into the United Nations. With the emergence of the Cold War, he voted against American entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but once the United States had joined, he believed that American commitments to the alliance should be upheld. Like numerous other conservatives, he displayed more enthusiasm for American involvement in Asia; he derided the Truman administration for “losing” China to Communism and called for a stronger American effort during the Korean conflict. To an extent his views had changed since his pre-World War II advocacy of noninvolvement, but basically he held that while the United States should oppose the expansion of communism, American power had its limits and the United States should be wary of excessive commitments in distant areas of the world. Such views made him seem conservative in the early years of the Cold War. Ironically, they would make him a hero to some members of the succeeding generation’s New Left, soured on America’s interventionism in Vietnam and other developing-world locations.

Disappointed by his failure to win the GOP presidential nomination in both 1940 and 1948, Taft was determined to make a strong effort in 1952. Taft and his supporters lashed out not only at the Truman administration but also at his Republican rivals. Ordinarily a staunch supporter of civil liberties, he did not seek to curb the smear tactics of fellow Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who attributed setbacks in foreign affairs to communist infiltration of the U.S. government. Without regard for due process, McCarthy, and others who followed his lead, accused and brought ruin to many innocent people in government, the media, and education. Taft seems to have hoped for the then-influential McCarthy’s endorsement in 1952 and on several occasions seconded McCarthy’s sweeping accusations. He did not, however, get McCarthy’s backing. Neither did political newcomer Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had emerged as the chief obstacle to Taft’s hopes. Prominent Republicans from the delegate-rich states of the East regarded the colorless Taft as a loser and backed the popular Eisenhower, who won the nomination on the first ballot.

The recriminations of the preconvention period had left Taft and Eisenhower at odds, but party figures attempted to reconcile the two. The effort worked, in part because Taft and Eisenhower were not that distant on domestic issues. Taft campaigned energetically for Eisenhower, and the two became friends and occasional golfing companions. Although Taft believed that he too could have won the election, he accepted Ike’s triumph and became a strong backer of the new administration. Realizing that he would be too old to run again for president in 1960, Taft mellowed in his public appearances and praised Eisenhower, providing advice and able support in the Senate, where he secured the post of majority leader. He was determined to help make the first Republican administration in twenty years a success. Early in 1953, however, he was found to be suffering from a severe form of cancer. It spread rapidly, and he died in a were chosen hospital.

Significance

Taft spent more than three decades in public life. He achieved leadership positions in his party in Cincinnati, in the Ohio assembly, and in the United States Senate. He was recognized as “Mr. Republican,” widely quoted on both domestic and international issues. He was never as extreme as his rhetoric or that of his more vocal disciples made him appear. However, the perception of him as a reactionary on domestic issues and as an isolationist made him unappealing as a presidential candidate to influential Republicans who wanted to back a winner. Inevitably measured against his political contemporaries such as Eisenhower and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was found wanting in the personal flair that helped give them their widespread national following. He never received the nomination he sought so avidly. Taft’s greatest distinction was therefore won in the legislative branch, where his diligent work habits and informed opinions won respect. He was one of the twentieth century’s genuine masters of the legislative process.

Bibliography

Ambrose, Stephen E. Eisenhower. 2 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983-1984. Valuable for its portrayal of the man whose candidacy kept Taft from getting the 1952 presidential nomination he coveted. Eisenhower was the only Republican to hold the presidency while Taft was in the Senate.

Harnsberger, Caroline Thomas. A Man of Courage: Robert A. Taft. New York: Wilcox and Follett, 1952. A laudatory popular biography of Taft. The author asks if Taft is qualified for the presidency and repeatedly answers yes. What he lacks in charisma, she argues, he more than makes up for in “integrity and courage.”

Hayes, Michael T. “The Republican Road Not Taken.” Independent Review 8, no. 4 (Spring, 2004): 509-525. A detailed examination of Taft’s vision of U.S. foreign policy.

Kirk, Russell, and James McClellan. The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft. New York: Fleet Press Corporation, 1967. Provides a brief and convenient guide to Taft’s public career and a more extended discussion of his political principles.

Merry, Robert W. “The Last Stand of Senator Robert Taft, Republicans’ Guiding Voice.” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 53 (March 18, 1995): 791-794. A brief look at Taft’s significant influence on the Republican Party.

Patterson, James T. Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Authorized by the Taft family but written by an outstanding academic historian. Detailed and judicious, it is a model of political biography and shows no effort by the late senator’s family to censor the author’s judgments. Provides an extensive bibliography.

Taft, Robert A. A Foreign Policy for Americans. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951. One of two books that contain Taft’s own writings, it provides a guide to the senator’s outlook on international affairs.

Taft, Robert A., and T. V. Smith. Foundations of Democracy: A Series of Debates. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939. This helpful volume makes available the series of radio debates Taft conducted with T. V. Smith, a Democratic congressman from Illinois.

White, William S. The Taft Story. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954. Written by a reporter for The New York Times who knew Taft, this book deals primarily with Taft’s career in the Senate.

Wunderlin, Clarence E. Robert A. Taft: Ideas, Tradition, and Party in U.S. Foreign Policy. Lanham, Md.: SR Books, 2005. Wunderlin examines Taft’s life, focusing on his and other conservatives’ opposition to liberal internationalism in the 1940’s.