August 2003 Newsletter

William Howard Taft: A Quick Account of a Durable Deception

James Vivian

Ex-President William Howard Taft died in 1930. Obituaries and eulogies were suitably retrospective, informed, and respectful. Most, if not all, remembered the active and influential interval between his presidency and his chief justiceship on the Supreme Court. Many of them regarded these seven years, 1913-1921, as a graceful and productive transition to private prominence. This included Taft's contractual obligations to the Philadelphia Public Ledger, which yielded one or more newspaper columns per week from late 1917 through June 1921, and found nationwide syndication in at least 13 metropolitan dailies.

Not ten years later, Henry F. Pringle's two-volume biography––the principle reference for the past 64 years––ensconced Taft securely in his Yale University professorship. Pringle artfully skirted Taft's editorial series and lightly scanned his leadership in the League to Enforce Peace during World War I and the Versailles peace settlement. Pringle's casual treatment and conscious omission seem forever destined to disparage Taft's public career.
Ruhl Bartlett, in catching the wave of interest in 1944 leading toward the creation of the United Nations after World War II, recovered Taft's major presence in the League of Nation's debate, but chose, without explanation, to compound Pringle's error and to ignore the editorial contribution and involvement. Frederick Hicks then dealt with Taft's Yale law school professorship from the perspective of the Alumni Office and its extensive network. Since Taft's journalism and numerous speaking tours were not central to the subject, Hicks too bypassed them as wholly separate pursuits if no real relevance. With the publication of Professor Paolo Coletta's comprehensive bibliography, for the Merker-Greenwood series in 1989, one could not be sure if Taft had developed any serious off-campus commitments during the war. That Taft's editorials ran parallel to, and eventually exceeded, President Theodore Roosevelt's colorful, often pungent pieces in the Kansas City Star, had become a very obscure item, indeed.

I attempted to provide an overdue corrective in the course of collecting and annotating Taft's editorialized views for publication in 1990. I failed. Although the hefty volume was duly noted in the usual bulletins, including SHAFR's own newsletter, and elsewhere reviewed, it continues quite unknown to scholars and specialists identified with the period. The volume, containing some 60 topical entries on the League issue, has been accessioned in the nation's research libraries, professional technicians reliably assure me. It is, therefore, "only a click away," in the idiom of the day.

Yet, Professor John Milton Cooper is not aware of it, as evidenced by his Breaking the Heart of the World. Now comes Professor David H. Burton with another of several titles in the field, even as he has won the Taft family's endorsement for an eight-volume edition of the president's lifetimes writings. Burton's slim monograph calmly mentions the Public Ledger as though to suggest they number fewer than a handful of columns. Does Burton not yet know of Taft's leading role in the League debate and its outcome? Does he not surmise that Taft made himself a vocal force in the 1920 general elections? Does he not wonder where the selection of abridged Taft Papers on the League of Nations emanated and to what purpose? Clearly, the tenets of bibliographic control stand considerably relaxed.

Senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona, a contemporary of sorts, thought the Taft administration "prosaic," a victim of the "most deadly" of the "political defects that can hamper a president." Possibly so. It is difficult to say, however, considering the low level of interest in Taft compared to the attention given his protagonists, Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. What are the limits of Taft's prosaic ways? Who knows?