Book Review of The Tafts by George W. Liebmann
Arthuriana
5
An American Dynastic History
Review: The Tafts, by George Liebmann
Arthur Bloom
Sep 04, 2024
William Howard Taft | Biography, Accomplishments, Presidency, & Facts | Britannica
There are a few reasons why I need to review this book, the main one is I told the author I would figure something out for it. I tried to find someone to do it, asked Duncan Braid of American Compass because of his facility in labor issues, but he threw me out of the organization instead. I edited George’s columns for a couple of years, and not being a lawyer myself I don’t understand some of his priorities, but I appreciate his writing quite a lot. This is a work of real balance and wisdom, with an impressive amount of research.
A dynastic history is sort of a forgotten form—a forgotten form, about a forgotten family, who in some ways held forgotten views. That’s an exaggeration, of course. Senator Robert Taft has a carillon outside the Capitol dedicated to him, and his father is the only person to have held the offices of both president and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Those are the second and third generations covered here, out of five, which are by far the longest because their careers in public life were extremely significant. One reason for their undeserved obscurity is their public presence was pretty understated, and much of their influence had to do with arranging appointments for various things. There’s a contrast in substance between W.H. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, especially over things like the independence of the judiciary, but there’s also a big difference in personality.
What makes these two interesting is the way they argued the opposite side of what became the New Deal consensus, a perspective lost, it appears, even on some members of the avant-garde right today. It’s also timely given the discussion about pro-worker conservatism. Their perspective is certainly a long way from the totally anti-union radicalism most conservatives have today. What they stood for is economy in government, a limited American role abroad, a strong judiciary, and moderation in most other things—or to one French writer quoted by Liebmann, “the old American liberties against all these dubious novelties.” For many decades this was the family most synonymous with conservatism. The one hint of corruption in the entire five generations involves a numismatist. Another widespread feature is support for antitrust action—President Taft’s brother led the first successful criminal prosecution under the Sherman Act, and in office he continued to pursue it. Liebmann points out that Taft initiated 50 percent more antitrust cases in four years than Theodore Roosevelt did in seven.
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The Taft family name is reviled among unionists because of Robert Taft’s attachment to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act—which even his liberal brother Charles agreed with—passed over Truman’s veto. There is the joke among lefty radicals, about the “AFL-CIA,” which is surely putting it too strongly, but the curtailments included in the law helped decommunize them and tame them into a force that could be used to build the postwar middle class. There don’t seem to be any Tafts who really denied the right of unions to collective bargaining or strikes.
Labor law is really arcane stuff, and a lot of the details of early 20th century judicial decisions covered here are lost on me. But my basic impression is that the Tafts tended to play a trimming role in these debates, with a lot of legal blocking-and-tackling that tends to be lost on both the strictly anti-union conservative side of things, and its radical opposite on the new right, which has started to propose things like French and Scandinavian-style sectoral bargaining in the U.S. It seems like the latter is getting a little ahead of ourselves, because the factories are only now starting to come back—notably in mostly blue-run states.
On the whole the family was very attentive to Jewish issues, President Taft wrote against the situation in Czarist Russia, and Robert Taft spoke to Zionist organizations and was supportive of Israel. It was his chief antagonist, Truman, who had to have his arm twisted to recognize it. This was another thing the Tafts were at odds with the British about—he was willing to pressure the British to admit more Jews to Palestine. What I didn’t know is that Senator Taft’s wife Martha, though a pacifist who supported some initiatives of the isolationists such as the Nye Committee, was also a co-founder of the American-Israel Society.
What distinguishes President Taft from Senator Taft is the former, almost like a well-fed Buddha with a famously genial personality, embodies the comfortable dominance of the Republican Party of his era, whereas his son was in the opposition for most of his career. The later generations were distinguished in their own ways. Liebmann writes they had a rougher go of it because of a less deferential culture, but there are high-level civil servants, businessmen, ambassadors, and a co-founder of the World Council of Churches in the mix. Many continued the family’s noble tradition of doomed rear-guard defenses of decency and moderation.
William H. Taft IV certainly lived up to the family name opposing the Bush administration’s torture memo as a legal advisor to the State Department. His legal memos on behalf of Colin Powell were the main voice of opposition in the Bush White House to the administration’s detainee policy. He also worked with Ralph Nader on the famous FTC report, and in the early Reagan years, was opposite Rudy Giuliani in arguing against military involvement in the drug war.
Most of them have a Midwest-tempered version of the Yankee skepticism toward religious schools and drinking. Liebmann notes they tend to marry smart women, and both the men and women are very highly educated. There’s a great letter here from William Howard Taft to his daughter, in which he tells her, a dean at Bryn Mawr, “I hope you are not unconsciously stimulated in your enthusiasm for this marriage by the thought that you are approaching 30 and yearn for the happiness of family life. You are a woman of poise and level-headed and I cannot think this.” Liebmann writes, per Bertrand Russell’s standard, that they have most of the virtues of an aristocratic family, but few of the vices. They are strongly associated with the city of Cincinnati, Yale University, and the Taft School, and in religion are generally the loose sort of protestant. Only one flirted with the Yankee preoccupation with eugenics.
Alphonso Taft, who starts the family’s Ohio branch, becoming a judge in Cincinnati, is the first generation covered heavily here, though the Taft family had a big role in the Revolutionary War and his father was a legislator in Vermont. He was a founding member of Skull and Bones, and went on to hold two cabinet positions. He becomes Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War after the bribery scandal of William Belknap, after the president, “like Diogenes, went in search of an honest man.” His work on behalf of the City of Cincinnati was substantial, supporting railroad and factory construction, and Liebmann writes he defended the will that created the city’s eponymous university. He sets the pattern on religious issues that most of his family would follow, being cool toward parochial schools and the reading of the Bible in all the others. Liebmann notes the irony of Cardinal Spellman later saying Catholics ought to be happy with the mere reading of the King James Bible in schools, when that’s the very thing the Tafts had opposed. His ambassadorial appointments were to Vienna and Moscow, the conservative powers of his day, and he seems to have liked Alexander III, who was a man of peace and, after Taft left, began the Franco-Russian rapprochement.
One thing I find interesting about this is that Cincinnati is a very German city, more than half the population would have been at the time Alphonso Taft died—the Miami and Erie canal was jokingly called the Rhine. It’s where the Bavarian branch of my own family first settled. The 19th century is sort of the German century in the same sense that the 18th century was French. German universities and educational models were widely admired, and Helen Taft, President Taft’s wife, praised the influence of the Germans on the local musical culture. Most of these immigrants would have been fairly liberal, especially the ‘48ers, and by and large they were very pro-Union. But Taft’s ambassadorships are to capitals that are beginning to chafe at a resurgent Germany, Alexander III didn’t care for Bismarck, for instance. Alphonso Taft’s eldest son Charles Taft Sr., later the owner of the Chicago Cubs, would have been studying at the University of Heidelberg during the Austro-Prussian War. They also almost all tend to marry fellow Anglos, with a few exceptions in the later generations.
The public career outside the state of Ohio of Alphonso’s most famous son begins just before he dies, in 1891. Liebmann seems to regard William Howard Taft as occupying a favorable Goldilocks point of view, with a vigorous but moderate personality, compared to some of his contemporaries, like the “depressed and indolent” Coolidge. He seems to agree with Taft’s assessment of McKinley as a “timid statesman.” And then on the other hand is the younger Roosevelt, in whom the Tafts picked up the whiff of radicalism. It was Roosevelt’s assaults on the judiciary, which Taft had helped to build up, that had a lot to do with why he became a spoiler against him. He thought Harding unimpressive, below snuff, and “makes a man of intelligent discrimination wince when he reads.” Liebmann credits Taft with heavily influencing the judicial appointments under presidents Harding and Coolidge.
William Howard Taft’s foreign adventures are in Cuba and the Philippines, where he has another testy relationship with Douglass MacArthur’s father. When he reported to Elihu Root that he had arrived at his post for the latter, he received a telegram in reply asking, “how is the horse?” The Philippines assignment transformed Taft into a reluctant if relatively benign imperialist, appointing Filipinos to the commission, buying land from the pope to sell to the natives, and so forth. (The congressman who sponsored the bill to actually end the occupation of the Philippines, William Atkinson Jones, was a Virginian from Warsaw on the Northern Neck.) Some of his letters, which Liebmann quotes, reflect his discomfort with Americans in an occupying role: “they forgot family and home. They betrayed their government and became thieves, removed from the restraints of home life, without their families and with a disposition to amble or drink or lead a lewd life.”
President Taft was a conservationist who withdrew tens of millions of acres from the Homestead Act, skeptical of a federal roads bill, favored sending more troops to confront the bolsheviks after the First World War, and helped set up the Chamber of Commerce. He was also skeptical of debtor relief legislation, like the mortgage relief law passed in Kansas, which caused capital flight. An interesting detail is that he denied a federal charter to the Rockefeller Foundation on the advice of his attorney general, fearing “the dangers of a new mortmain.”
Liebmann credits President Taft with the actual beginnings of the Republican Party’s postwar inroads in the South, long before Nixon’s famous Southern Strategy. While he notes that Taft gave more speeches to black audiences than any president up until Lyndon Johnson, he viewed the South as an instrumental bulwark against socialism, and wrote that Southerners are America’s most conservative people. He was on the board of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, which at the time favored the Booker T. Washington approach to black education. While there are frustrations with that among a lot of black intellectuals, it might be noted that today the trades are a major source of remunerative employment for Americans black or white.
As he was a reluctant imperialist who once expressed his doubts about the Monroe Doctrine, William Howard Taft also had positive things to say about the delay in America’s entry into the First World War, arguing it tended to solidify American opinion. Liebmann notes a similarity between Taft’s thoughts here and Churchill’s obituary for Neville Chamberlain.
The major figure of the third generation is Senator Robert Taft, known as “Mr. Republican,” who added a major point of agreement with organized labor in the form of immigration restrictionism. It’s Robert Taft that fights the doomed effort to maintain Congress’s war powers after the Second World War. He and Herbert Hoover were close, and the latter called him “more nearly the irreplaceable man in American public life than any we have had in three generations.”
You see in Robert Taft a real reticence about the Anglo-American world order Churchill envisioned. One imagines these Yankees on the Ohio River looking with disdain on all the New England families marrying into the British aristocracy. He advised lawyers not to move to New York. Liebmann writes that Robert Taft and Churchill were two of the only statesmen of the time who didn’t use ghostwriters for their speeches, which is fascinating. Senator Taft’s views on the Second World War were more moderate than many of the America First types, he favored tweaking the Neutrality Act to allow cash-and-carry weapons sales, but opposed Lend-Lease on the grounds that the British would never pay the loans back, which they didn’t. Like most Republicans, he viewed communism as a greater danger than fascism.
Taft refrained from criticizing Joe McCarthy’s excesses, but did take issue with FDR’s Great Sedition Trial, which collapsed, as Liebmann notes, and viewed the Nuremberg Trials as victor’s justice. Like his father he viewed direct primaries with great skepticism, thinking they tended to produce the worst candidates, which is certainly borne out in the present.
Liebmann points out that Taft suggested in the Spring of 1945 that the Japanese might be offered to keep Formosa, modifying the unconditional surrender policy, which would have had major implications for foreign policy today had it been followed. His final speech argued for negotiating with the Chinese for a united Korea, warning that if the truce were to be made the country would never be united. At the end of his career, when he called on Truman to send the Navy to protect Taiwan, he began to break with his longstanding impulses in a more stridently anti-communist direction that would begin to characterize Republican foreign policy.
Liebmann suggests Taft would have agreed with Herbert Hoover’s suggestion, the day after Pearl Harbor, that “this constant sticking of pins into rattlesnakes would produce just such a result,” noting George Kennan and John Lukacs both viewed war with Japan as unnecessary. My favorite arch observation about intellectual history by Liebmann is that James Burnham’s thoughts that the natural state of society is in perpetual preparation for war, haven’t aged well. They are certainly foreign to what the Tafts represented, and perhaps constitute his Trotskyism carrying over into his anti-communist phase.
In A Foreign Policy for Americans, written in 1952, Senator Taft wrote that the president might try to “establish a vast Garden of Eden in the Kingdom of Iraq” if we came to think the United Nations authorized him to make war. It turns out an American president tried to do that even without them. He had an abiding fear that war led to the destruction of liberty, on which grounds he criticized Eisenhower as well, and was the only prominent member of Congress to object to FDR’s policy of Japanese internment. Many commentators in 1944 and 1952 viewed Taft as more or less the rightful, and far more capable, Republican nominee to oppose FDR or Truman, but he didn’t get the chance.
Though Robert Taft was a moderate in labor relations, he considered himself a liberal, and Liebmann astutely notes that he has none of the self-consciousness about the social costs of the free market that you find in later economists. There is a great deal of moderation on other subjects, however—for instance, Taft supported federal home loans and even a modest amount of public housing, much of which wasn’t fully built.
Even in the early Cold War and despite his distaste for communism, Taft maintained a restrained view on foreign policy, and his suggestion that the Soviets were not contemplating aggression outside their sphere of influence, Liebmann notes, turned out to be true when the Soviet archives were opened.
This is a very dense book, but a very good one that tells you what this family, one of the most important in American political history, actually stood for. It’s far from a cartoon. And if you are able to distinguish what’s true from what’s fashionable, there’s a lot to recommend them.
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