Everything about Robert A Taft totally explained
Robert Alphonso Taft (
September 8,
1889 -
July 31,
1953), of the
Taft political family of
Ohio, was a
Republican United States Senator and as a prominent
conservative spokesman was the leading opponent of the
New Deal in the Senate from 1939 to 1953. He led the successful effort by the
conservative coalition to curb the legal privileges of
labor unions, and he was a major proponent of the foreign policy of
non-interventionism. However, he failed in his quest to win the presidential nomination of the Republican Party in 1940, 1948 and 1952.
Family
Taft was a product of one of America's most prominent political families. He was the grandson of
Attorney General and
Secretary of War Alphonso Taft, and the son of
President and
Chief Justice William Howard Taft and
Helen Herron Taft. His younger brother,
Charles Taft, served as the
Mayor of
Cincinnati and was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio in 1952. As a boy he spent four years in the
Philippines, where his father was
governor. He was first in his class at
The Taft School (run by his uncle), at
Yale College (1910) and at
Harvard Law School (1913), where he edited the
Harvard Law Review. After finishing first in his class at Yale and Harvard Law School, he practiced for four years with the firm of Maxwell and Ramsey (now
Graydon Head & Ritchey LLP) in
Cincinnati, Ohio, his family's ancestral city. After a two-year stint in Washington working for the
United States Food and Drug Administration, he returned to Cincinnati and opened his own law office. In 1924, he and his brother Charles helped form the law partnership
Taft, Stettinius, and Hollister, with whom he continued to be associated until his death and which continues to carry his name today.
On
October 17,
1914, he married Martha Wheaton Bowers, the heiress daughter of
Lloyd Wheaton Bowers, who had served as the
United States Solicitor General under his father. Taft himself appeared taciturn and coldly intellectual, characteristics that were offset by his gregarious wife, who served the same role his mother had for his father, as a confidante and powerful asset to her husband's political career. In the late 1940s Martha suffered a severe
stroke which left her an
invalid; after her stroke Taft faithfully assisted his wife, even helping to feed and take care of her at public functions, a fact which, his admirers noted, belied his public image as a cold and uncaring person. They had four sons including
Robert Taft Jr. (1917-1993), who was also elected to the U.S. Senate; Horace Dwight Taft, who became a professor of physics and dean at Yale; and
William Howard Taft III (1915-1991), who became ambassador to Ireland. Two of Taft's grandsons are
Robert Alphonso Taft II (1942-),
Governor of Ohio from 1999 to 2007, and
William Howard Taft IV (1945-), a
statesman and
Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1984 to 1989.
Early public career
When the United States entered
World War I in April 1917, Taft attempted to join the US Army, but he was rejected by the army due to his poor eyesight. Instead, he joined the legal staff of the
Food and Drug Administration where he met
Herbert Hoover, who became his idol. In 1918-1919 he was in
Paris as legal adviser for the
American Relief Administration, Hoover's agency which distributed food to war-torn Europe. He learned to distrust governmental bureaucracy as inefficient and detrimental to the rights of the individual principles he promoted throughout his career. He distrusted the
League of Nations, and European politicians generally. He strongly endorsed the idea of a powerful World Court that would enforce international law, but no such idealized court ever existed during his lifetime. He returned to Ohio in late 1919, promoted Hoover for president, and opened a law firm with his brother Charles Taft. In 1920 he was elected to the
Ohio House of Representatives, where he served as Speaker of the House in 1926. In 1930 he was elected to the
state senate, but was defeated for reelection in 1932; it would be the only defeat in a general election he'd suffer in his political career. His period of service in the Ohio state legislature was most notable for his efforts to modernize the state's antiquated tax laws. He was an outspoken opponent of the
Ku Klux Klan; he didn't support
prohibition.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Taft was a powerful figure in local and state political and legal circles, and was known as a loyal Republican who never threatened to bolt the party. He confessed in 1922 that "while I've no difficulty talking, I don't know how to do any of the eloquence business which makes for enthusiasm or applause" [Taft
Papers 1:271].) A lackluster speaker who didn't mix well or glad-hand supporters, nevertheless Taft was a tireless worker with a broad range of policy and political interests. His total grasp of the complex details of every issue impressed reporters and politicians. (Democrats joked that "Taft has the best mind in Washington, until he makes it up.") Taft's loyalty to the conservative politicians who controlled Ohio's Republican Party had a price, as it often caused conflict with his younger brother Charles, who as a local politician in Cincinnati had gained a reputation as a party
maverick and liberal. However, despite their occasional policy disagreements, Charles loyally supported all three of his brother's presidential bids.
U.S. Senator
Taft was elected to the first of his three terms as U.S. Senator in
1938. Cooperating with conservative southern Democrats, he led the
Conservative Coalition that opposed the "
New Deal." The Republican gains in the 1938 congressional elections, combined with the creation of the Conservative Coalition, had stopped the expansion of the New Deal. However, Taft saw his mission as not only stopping the growth of the New Deal, but also as eliminating many of the government programs that had already come from it. During his first term in the Senate, Taft criticized what he believed was the inefficiency and waste of many New Deal programs, and of the need to let private enterprise and businesses restore the nation's economy instead of relying upon government programs to end the
Great Depression. He condemned the New Deal as socialistic and attacked deficit spending, high farm subsidies, governmental bureaucracy, the National Labor Relations Board, and nationalized health insurance. However, he didn't always follow conservative ideology; for instance, after investigating the lack of adequate housing in the nation he supported
public housing programs. He also supported the
Social Security program. Taft set forward a conservative program that promoted economic growth, individual economic opportunity, adequate social welfare, strong national defense [Navyand Air Force], and non-involvement in European wars. He also strongly opposed the military
draft on the principle that it limited a young man's freedom of choice. Broadly speaking, in terms of political philosophy Taft was a
libertarian; he opposed nearly all forms of governmental interference in both the national economy and in the private lives of citizens. (Patterson, pgs. 332-333)
Taft's greatest prominence during his first term came not from his fight against the New Deal and President
Franklin Roosevelt, but rather from his vigorous and outspoken opposition to U.S. involvement in the
Second World War. A staunch
non-interventionist, Taft believed that America should avoid any involvement in European or Asian wars and concentrate instead on solving its domestic problems. He believed that a strong U.S. military, combined with the natural geographic protection of the broad
Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans, would be adequate to protect America even if the
Nazis overran all of Europe. Between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in December 1941 Taft opposed nearly all attempts to aid Allied forces fighting the Nazis in Europe. His outspoken opposition to aiding the Allied forces earned him strong criticism from many Republican liberals, such as
Wendell Willkie and
Thomas E. Dewey, who felt that America could best protect itself by fully supporting the British and other anti-Nazi forces. Although Taft fully supported the American war effort after Pearl Harbor, he continued to harbor a deep suspicion of American involvement in postwar military alliances with other nations, including
NATO.
In
1944 Taft was nearly defeated in his bid for a second term in the Senate; his Democratic opponent received major support from Ohio's
labor unions and
internationalists and nearly won the upset victory. However, in
1950 Taft ran a more effective campaign in which he wooed factory workers; he won a third term by a wide margin. He became chairman of the
Senate Republican Conference in 1944.
By the start of his third term in the Senate, Taft had been given the nickname "Mr. Republican"; he was the chief ideologue and spokesperson for the
paleoconservatism of the Republican Party of that era, and he was the acknowledged national leader of the GOP's conservative faction. (Patterson, p. 335)
Condemnation of the Nuremberg Trials
Taft condemned the postwar
Nuremberg Trials as victor's justice in which the people who won the war were the prosecutors, the judges and the alleged victims, all at the same time. Taft condemned the trials as a violation of the most basic principles of American justice and internationally accepted standards of justice. Although his opposition to the trials was strongly condemned by many, other observers, such as Senator
John F. Kennedy in his bestselling
Profiles In Courage, applauded Taft's principled stand even in the face of great criticism.
1947 Taft-Hartley Labor Act
When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1947, Taft focused on labor-management relations as Chair of the Senate Labor Committee. Decrying the effect of the
Wagner Act in tilting the balance toward labor unions, he wrote the 1947
Taft-Hartley Act, which remains the basic labor law. It bans "unfair" union practices, outlaws
closed shops, and authorizes the President to seek federal court injunctions to impose an eighty-day cooling-off period if a strike threatened the national interest. Taft displayed all of his parliamentary skills in getting the bill through Congress; when President
Harry Truman vetoed it, Taft then convinced both houses of Congress to overturn the veto.
From 1947 to 1949, when the Republicans controlled the Senate, Taft was his party's leading voice in
domestic policy. He was reluctant to support farm subsidies, a position that hurt the GOP in the farm belt in the 1948 elections. Moving a bit to the left, he supported federal aid to education (which didn't pass) and cosponsored the Taft-Wagner-Ellender Housing Act to subsidize public housing in inner cities. In terms of foreign policy he was non-interventionist and didn't see Stalin's
Soviet Union as a major threat. Nor did he pay much attention to internal Communism. The true danger, he believed, was big government and runaway spending. He supported the
Truman Doctrine, reluctantly approved the
Marshall Plan, and opposed
NATO as unnecessary and provocative to the Soviets. He took the lead among Republicans in condemning President
Harry S. Truman's handling of the
Korean War.
Presidential ambitions
Taft first sought the Republican (GOP) presidential nomination in
1940, but lost to
Wendell Willkie. Taft was regarded as a strong contender, but his support of
non-interventionist foreign policies and his opposition to the
New Deal in domestic policy led many liberal Republicans to reject his candidacy. At the 1940 GOP Convention Willkie - a onetime Democrat and corporate executive who had never run for political office - came from behind to beat Taft and several other candidates for the nomination. In the 1944 presidential campaign Taft wasn't a candidate, instead he supported Governor
John Bricker of Ohio, a fellow conservative, for the GOP nomination. However, Bricker was defeated by New York Governor
Thomas E. Dewey; Bricker then became Dewey's running mate. In
1948 Taft made a second try for the GOP nomination, but was defeated by his arch-rival, Governor Dewey, who led the GOP's moderate/liberal wing.
In
1952 Taft made his third and final try for the GOP nomination; it also proved to be his strongest effort. He had the solid backing of the party's conservative wing, and with Dewey no longer an active candidate many political
pundits regarded him as the frontrunner. However, the race changed when Dewey and other GOP moderates were able to convince
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most popular general of
World War Two, to run for the nomination. According to biographer
Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower agreed to run in part because of his fear that Taft's isolationist views in foreign policy might unintentionally benefit the
Soviet Union in the
Cold War. The fight between Taft and Eisenhower for the GOP nomination was one of the closest and most bitter in American political history. When the Republican Convention opened in July 1952, Taft and Eisenhower were neck-and-neck in delegate votes, and the nomination was still up for grabs. On the convention's first day Eisenhower's managers complained that Taft's forces had unfairly denied Eisenhower supporters delegate slots in several Southern states, including Texas. They proposed to remove pro-Taft delegates in these states and replace them with pro-Eisenhower delegates; they called their proposal "Fair Play". Although Taft angrily denied having stolen any delegate votes, the convention voted to support Fair Play 658 to 548; this decided the nomination in Eisenhower's favor. Despite his bitterness at his narrow defeat and his belief that he'd been unfairly ambushed by the Eisenhower forces (including Governor Dewey), after the convention Taft issued a brief statement conveying his congratulations and support to Eisenhower. Thereafter, however, he brooded in silence at his summer home in
Quebec. As the weeks passed, Eisenhower's aides worried that Taft and his supporters would sit on their hands during the campaign, and that as a result Eisenhower might lose the election. In September 1952 Taft finally agreed to meet with Eisenhower, at
Morningside Heights in New York City. There, in order to gain Taft's support in the campaign, Eisenhower promised he'd take no reprisals against Taft partisans, would cut federal spending, and would fight "creeping socialism in every domestic field." In fact, Eisenhower and Taft agreed on most domestic issues, their disagreements were primarily in foreign policy. Eisenhower firmly believed in
NATO and was committed to the U.S. supporting anti-Communism in the
Cold War.
Following Eisenhower's election and the GOP takeover of Congress, Taft served as
Senate Majority Leader in 1953, and he strongly supported Eisenhower's domestic proposals. He worked hard to assist the inexperienced new officials of the administration. He even tried–with little success–to curb the excesses of
red-baiting U.S. Senator
Joseph McCarthy. By April the President and Taft were friends and golfing companions, and Taft was praising his former adversary. Defeat in 1952, it seemed, had softened Taft. No longer burdened by presidential ambitions, he'd become less partisan, less abrasive, and more conciliatory; during this time he was widely regarded as the most powerful man in Congress.
Death and legacy
In early 1953 Taft began to feel pain in his hips, and after a painful golf outing with President Eisenhower in April 1953 he entered a New York hospital for tests. The tests revealed that he'd cancer, and his doctors recommended exploratory surgery to see the extent of the cancer. Taft continued to work hard in the Senate, but the exploratory operation revealed that the cancer was widespread and
terminal. In late May 1953, Taft transferred his duties as Senate Majority Leader to Senator
William Knowland of California, but he didn't resign his Senate seat and told reporters that he expected to recover and return to work. However, his condition rapidly worsened, and after suffering a brain hemorrhage Taft died in a New York hospital on July 31, depriving the new administration of its ablest supporter on Capitol Hill. President Eisenhower and many prominent politicians from both parties attended his funeral. He is buried at
Indian Hill Episcopal Church Cemetery in
Cincinnati.
In 1957, a committee led by Senator
John F. Kennedy selected Taft as one of five of their greatest Senate predecessors whose oval portraits would adorn the President's Room off the Senate floor. Kennedy would profile him in his book
Profiles in Courage, and Taft continues to be regarded by historians as one of the most powerful U.S. Senators of the twentieth century. (Patterson, p. 617)
Memorial
The
Robert A. Taft Memorial, featuring a 10-foot statue by the sculptor
Wheeler Williams and a bell tower, is located north of the Capitol on Constitution Avenue. The inscription on the tower reads:
"This Memorial to Robert A. Taft, presented by the people to the Congress of the United States, stands as a tribute to the honesty, indomitable courage, and high principles of free government symbolized by his life."
Robert A. Taft Club
Founded in 2006, the
Robert A. Taft Club describes itself as offering "lively debate on issues that the typical beltway conservative movement ... often avoids." At a 2007 club meeting,
U.S. Congressman
Ron Paul (who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2008) described why Taft is a personal hero of his.
Further Information
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