In The Tafts, veteran Baltimore lawyer George W. Liebmann offers an account of 5 generations of the Ohio-based dynasty of Republicans, extremely achieved however much less susceptible to self-advertisement than among the United States’ better-known political households. Louise Taft Semple, President Taft’s niece, bequeathed her fortune for the promotion of classical research on the College of Cincinnati, which consequently boasts one among America’s most prestigious Classics departments and one of many world’s greatest Classics libraries. The college itself was rescued by the primary of Liebmann’s topics, lawyer and decide Alphonso Taft (1810-91), who efficiently defended the need of the founder, Charles McMicken, which financed its institution. McMicken was a slave-owner. In 2022 the college eliminated his identify from all its buildings and areas named after its benefactor as a result of, it argued, not to take action ‘betrays tutorial values’. What about historic reality?
As a decide of the Ohio Supreme Courtroom, Alphonso Taft dissented in a ruling that allowed the King James Bible to be learn in public colleges. Alphonso’s insistence on an obligation ‘to maintain non secular partisanship out of the general public colleges’ was cited in 1963 by the US Supreme Courtroom, which held Bible studying and the recital of the Lord’s Prayer in public colleges to be unconstitutional. His principled dissent is alleged to have value him three governorships. One in all Alphonso’s lawyer sons, Henry Waters Taft, opposed actions for alienation of affections, ‘legal dialog’ (i.e. adultery) and breach of promise of marriage – as did his British modern, Mr Justice McCardie – as degrading and devices of blackmail. The extremely cultivated Taft’s Opinions, Literary or In any other case (1934) repays studying.
Liebmann devotes most consideration to the perfect recognized of Alphonso’s sons, William Howard Taft (1857-1930) and his eldest son Robert A. Taft (1889-1953). By all accounts probably the most genial incumbent of the White Home, with a benevolence matching his legendary girth (at its widest over 28 stone), W.H. Taft was president from 1909 to 1913 and (after six years as a professor of constitutional legislation at Yale) chief justice of the Supreme Courtroom from 1921 till his demise in 1930. The one president to occupy each workplaces, he thought of the second by far the extra enviable. Liebmann approves his rulings, particularly his contribution to labour and anti-trust legislation. He was a deft supervisor of his typically troublesome colleagues and lobbied for the commissioning of the stately Supreme Courtroom constructing subsequently erected on Capitol Hill.
William Howard’s son, Senator Robert A. Taft, is greatest recognized for the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, enacted after a dangerous wave of strikes to restrain unionised exercise, banning the closed store, secondary picketing and the political levy. Congress handed the Act regardless of the veto of President Harry S. Truman, who condemned it as an ‘intrusion on free speech’. Taft’s spouse, Martha Wheaton Bowers, punned that ‘to err is Truman’.
Each William and Robert had qualms about US international coverage. William disbelieved in abroad enlargement, although he proved a comparatively enlightened governor of the newly annexed Philippines when President William McKinley appointed him to that submit in 1901. He most popular ‘greenback diplomacy’ to the gunboat selection and deplored Woodrow Wilson’s botched interventions in Mexico. Like many different Republicans, Taft favoured a march to Berlin in 1918 to place an finish to German militarism, and to Moscow to extirpate Bolshevism. He deplored the Republican partisanship that scuttled American help for the League of Nations.
Robert was foremost in repealing the isolationist embargo laws, thus allowing Britain at battle to buy arms from the US. He was the one notable public determine to oppose the internment of Japanese Individuals after the assault on Pearl Harbor in 1941. A supporter of the Balfour Declaration, he favoured the partition of Palestine and a small Jewish state and held that no peaceable answer within the Center East was doable ‘till this [Arab] refugee downside is settled’.
Liebmann’s remedy of a dense and miscellaneous array of case-law assumes a data of American jurisprudence outdoors the vary of non-specialists, together with your reviewer. The guide is attractively introduced, with good pictures of its topics. This isn’t a group of Plutarchian ‘lives’, however a piece, Liebmann tells us, of mental, not political historical past. This appears barely odd given his give attention to how successive Tafts reacted to political developments. Of the 36 lives recounted, among the shorter entries go earlier than the reader like Banquo’s ghost.
The golden thread working by means of the Taft heritage was tutorial excellence, onerous work, philanthropy and an ethic of public service moderately than self-promotion. A lot of this was acquired throughout a liberal (and classical) schooling, usually on the prestigious Connecticut personal college, the Taft Faculty, based in 1893 by W.H. Taft’s brother, Horace, who was additionally its first headmaster, adopted by Yale and legislation college. The motto of the Taft Faculty is ‘Non ut sibi ministretur, sed ut ministret’ (‘to not be served however to serve’).
In 1920 H.L. Mencken wrote of George Washington that he was ‘the primary and maybe the final American gentleman’. That is to neglect the Tafts. Above all, the Tafts had integrity. Liebmann quotes a remark by the liberal journalist Richard Rovere on Robert Taft: ‘Alongside the papier mâché statesmen of the interval, virtually a determine of granite.’ Their integrity mirrored the Jeffersonian view of schooling: ‘to render residents immune from the blandishments of demagogues’. Liebmann implicitly and explicitly factors the ethical and mental distinction with at the moment’s lightweights.
Antony Lentin is a Senior Member of Wolfson Faculty, Cambridge.
