“We Want Taft”: Civil Governor, Secretary of War, and President-Elect
In January 1900, as Judge Taft was enjoying the comforts of the federal bench, he received an unexpected telegram from President William McKinley summoning him to Washington.1 There was no open seat on the Supreme Court, and so Taft wondered what the president wanted to discuss. At the White House, McKinley greeted Taft warmly. He told the judge that he had created a commission to oversee civil government in the Philippines, which the United States had annexed at the end of the Spanish-American War. He wanted Taft to join the commission and perhaps even to lead it.2
Taft was astounded. Years later, he would say that McKinley might as well have told him “that he wanted me to take a flying machine.”3 (Taft often expressed his surprise at presidential appointments by imagining that he had been ordered to take flight.) Taft protested to McKinley that he spoke no Spanish and had questioned the wisdom of annexing the islands.4
“Why, I am not the man you want,” Taft declared. “To begin with, I have never approved of keeping the Philippines.”
“You don’t want them any less than I do,” McKinley replied, “but we have got them and in dealing with them I think I can trust the man who didn’t want them better than I can the man who did.”5
Taft could never ignore a call to duty. But one question mattered to him above all others: Would this mean the end of his judicial career? On this point, the president was reassuring. “All I can say to you is that if you give up this judicial office at my request you shall not suffer,” McKinley said. “If I last and the opportunity comes, I shall appoint you” to the Supreme Court.6 The judge who revered Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall was especially excited by the prospect of framing and interpreting a new constitution for the Philippines.7
Still, after leaving the meeting, Taft agonized as usual about his preference for the security of the bench over the indignities of political combat. “I confess that I love my present position,” he wrote to his brothers. “Perhaps it is the comfort and dignity and power without worry I like.”8 The question summed up what would become his personal dilemma over the next eight years: he yearned to be chief justice, but his wife and his brothers were determined to make him president. Taft resolved that he could not give up life tenure on the bench without being given authority as well as responsibility, and so he accepted the assignment on the condition that he lead the commission.9 Nellie later acknowledged that her husband’s resignation from the circuit court was “the hardest thing he ever did.”10
On April 17, 1900, the Tafts and their three children set out from San Francisco for the Philippines on the USS Hancock with the four other members of the Philippines commission: a former Confederate general, a New England judge, a University of Michigan zoologist, and a University of California historian.11 This colorful delegation stopped off in Tokyo, where the commissioners were received by the Japanese emperor and empress. On June 3, the American commissioners arrived at Manila Bay to a frosty reception from General Arthur MacArthur. Recently appointed as military governor of the islands, the general insulted the commissioners by refusing to greet them in person.12 MacArthur commanded the sixty-five thousand American troops who were attempting to quell the Philippine guerrilla insurrection that had begun in 1899, and he resented the intrusion on his powers. Taft framed the dispute in constitutional terms, defending the president’s authority to delegate power to civil or military authorities as he saw fit.13 The commission opened for business in September 1900, with Taft as its president. Five months later, Congress declared the insurrection over and transferred power from military to civilian authorities.14 On June 21, 1901, McKinley appointed Taft civil governor of the Philippine Islands. (He was also known as the governor-general.) The Taft family moved into the stately Malacañan Palace, and Nellie was “well pleased with the idea of living in a palace,” as she confessed in her memoir, “however unlike the popular conception of a palace it might be.”15
For Taft, the chance to live in a palace was less enticing than the chance to act as a solon, a constitution maker bringing the blessings of liberty to a grateful people. In the spirit of American federalism, Taft decentralized power and added Filipino representatives to the Philippine Commission. And he scrupulously implemented the Philippine Organic Act of 1902, the law passed by Congress to govern the islands, which extended to the Filipino people a list of the rights guaranteed in Article I of the Constitution, including the right of habeas corpus, which allows prisoners to challenge the legality of their detentions. The act also extended to the Philippines most of the guarantees of the U.S. Bill of Rights, with two significant exceptions: the right to bear arms and the right to trial by jury.16 In testimony to Congress, Taft explained why he agreed that it would be “a great mistake” to extend to the Filipino people these basic means of defending their own liberties. The right to jury trial and the right to bear arms, he declared, “should be withheld from the people until they learn a self-restraint that can only be learned after practice, and the advantage of the example of self-government which, by a gradual course, we hope to give them.”17
Taft’s testimony summed up his fervent if paternalistic view that only those who took the time to acquire self-discipline through education were capable of self-government. He concluded, therefore, that the Constitution did not always follow the flag into conquered territories such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The Supreme Court had recently decided the same question in the Insular Cases (1901), which held that the Dingley Tariff, a landmark American statute imposing tariffs on a series of manufactured goods, did not extend to the Philippines. Taft applauded the decision, both because he felt that the tariff would hurt the island’s economy and because he felt that the Filipino people should be granted the full rights of the Constitution only when they were ready to exercise them responsibly.
Broadly, the debate in the United States over whether the Constitution followed the flag reflected a larger moral debate. Jeffersonian anti-imperialists, such as the Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and the Republican senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, insisted that imperialism abroad, like slavery at home, denied the conquered people the natural, God-given rights of equality and liberty promised by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.18 Hamiltonian imperialists, such as the progressive Republican senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, insisted that Americans were divinely entitled to govern the Philippines without the people’s consent.19
Taft, as usual, stood between the two constitutional extremes. He told Theodore Roosevelt, “I did not agree with Senator Hoar and his followers, that the Philippines were capable of self-government or that we were violating any principles of our government or the Declaration of Independence so far as they were concerned, that I thought we were doing them great good.”20 At the same time, he disagreed with Beveridge that America had a duty to civilize what the senator considered an inferior race without their consent. Instead, Taft maintained that the Filipinos should be granted as much involvement in all three branches of government as their level of education allowed. As he declared in his inaugural address as civil governor, delivered on July 4, 1901, his ultimate goal was to make the “islands ripe for permanent civil government on a more or less popular basis.”21
Taft patronizingly referred to Filipino people as “our little brown brothers” and believed that the majority of them were “utterly incapable of self-government and should the guiding hand of the United States be withdrawn, chaos, conscription and corruption would follow inevitably,” a view he attributed to the chief justice of the Philippine Supreme Court.22 But he was less condescending than the imperialists and the U.S. military, which marched defiantly to the words: “He may be a brother of William H. Taft but he ain’t no friend of mine!”23 Recognizing that the Filipinos were sensitive to slights, or any implication of inferiority,24 Taft insisted on treating them as social equals. The Tafts hosted a public “at home” reception every Wednesday in the governor’s palace and advertised it in the leading newspapers. By asking the Filipinos “personally and persistently to ‘be sure and come Wednesday,’” Nellie recalled, “we prevailed on a good number to believe they were really wanted; and after a little while there began to be as many brown faces as white among our guests.”25
Taft’s democratic initiative was so successful that he became surprisingly popular among the Filipino people. In fact, on many levels, Taft was a striking success as civil governor. He thrived in an atmosphere where he could serve as both chief executive and chief judge, enforcing congressional statutes like a benign magistrate. He encouraged the commission to hold open hearings on new legislation, which he helped to draft.26 Without a legislature to check him, or political rivals to criticize him, Taft could have taken liberties in shaping the Philippines as he saw fit.27 But Taft applied his old habits of judicial deference in fulfilling his executive duties, and he worked to implement the goals of Congress and the president, rather than imposing his own.28
Under Taft’s leadership, the commission revised the old Spanish tax code, built new roads and harbors, established a health department, police force, and independent judicial system—the judges were divided between Americans and Filipinos, as Taft put it, to “enable the Filipinos to learn and administer justice.”29 Most significantly, reflecting his views about the importance of education in making self-government possible, Taft built a series of public schools that, within years, taught more native Filipinos to speak English than Spanish. Nellie wrote that Taft’s establishment of first-rate public schools received more “enthusiastic support and co-operation” from the Filipino people than any other of her husband’s projects.30 “Whatever may be said about the American Constitution,” she declared happily, “there can be no dispute about the fact that education follows the flag.”31
Back in the United States, Theodore Roosevelt was feeling emasculated as William McKinley’s vice president. “I had a great deal rather be your assistant in the Philippines … than be vice-president,” he wrote to Taft in August 1900.32 After hearing of Taft’s promotion to civil governor, he wrote a prophetic profile of Taft in Outlook magazine, noting that “the first Governor of the Philippines ought to combine the qualities which would make a first-class President of the United States with the qualities which would make a first-class Chief Justice of the United States.” Roosevelt concluded, “The only man … who possessed all these qualities was Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio.”33 Taft reciprocated Roosevelt’s praise, writing to the vice president, “I have no doubt that you will be the [presidential] nominee in 1904.”34 Roosevelt did not wait long. On September 14, 1901, William McKinley died eight days after he had been shot by an assassin at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Roosevelt learned at dawn that he was now president of the United States.
On October 26, 1901, after scarcely a month in office, Roosevelt urged his friend to accept a Supreme Court appointment. WOULD APPRECIATE EARLY REPLY, he cabled impatiently to Taft in Manila.35 But as much as he craved the position, Taft felt a duty to the Filipino people at a time of economic crisis, and this compelled him to resist temptation. GREAT HONOR DEEPLY APPRECIATED BUT MUST DECLINE, Taft responded.36 Roosevelt tried to accept Taft’s demurral with grace, replying, “If possible, your refusal on the ground you give makes me admire you and believe in you more than ever.”37 In private, however, Roosevelt bristled at Taft’s inflexible sense of duty: “I have never in my life felt like criticizing anything that Will did, but, upon my word, I do feel like criticizing this mental attitude of his!”38
At the end of 1901, Taft endured two dangerous operations to remove an abscess on his intestines. While in Washington for a third surgery, he met with Roosevelt, who said he hoped Taft would complete his work in the Philippines before the next Supreme Court vacancy came up. In January 1902, Taft had recovered sufficiently to testify before a Senate committee for two hours, answering hostile questions about alleged cruelty used by American military forces while quelling the rebellion led by the Filipino nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo.39 Taft always became defensive in the face of criticism, but here he was self-aware enough to acknowledge his vulnerability. “It shows my unfitness for public life for me to dislike [the attacks] so and be so sensitive about them,” he observed to Nellie. “I suppose it indicates a thin-skinned vanity.”40
The following month, President Roosevelt dispatched Taft to Rome, where the civil governor conducted delicate and successful negotiations with Pope Leo XIII over the sale of four hundred thousand acres in the Philippines held by Spanish friars.41 (The vast scope of the land seized by the Church had provoked a Philippine revolt against Spanish rule before the Americans arrived.) Nearly two years later, the United States would agree to pay $7.5 million for most of the lands instead of taking them by force, another diplomatic triumph for Taft.42 During the trip, Taft’s family joined him for an audience at the Vatican. When the pope asked young Robert Taft about his intentions, the boy channeled his father, replying that he meant to become chief justice of the United States.43
In January 1903, Roosevelt tried once again to appoint Taft to the Supreme Court. And Taft replied once again that he recognized “a soldier’s duty to obey orders,” but pleaded that he be allowed to complete his unfinished business in the Philippines.44 In the meantime, Filipino leaders, and the people themselves, demonstrated outside the Malacañan Palace for Taft to stay. “The whole city of Manila was placarded, in all the necessary languages, with the simple and uniform sentiment: ‘Queremos Taft,’ ‘WE WANT TAFT,’” Nellie recalled, adding that Secretary of War Elihu Root’s “rendering of this in English was ‘I want you, Mah Honey, yes, I do.’”45 In the face of this gratifying demonstration, Taft agreed to stay put; never again would he experience such fervent popular affection. On January 13, Roosevelt conceded petulantly, “All right, you shall stay where you are.”46
Two months later, Roosevelt asked Taft to replace Root as secretary of war, stressing that he could continue to administer the islands from Washington.47 “If only there were three of you!” Roosevelt added flatteringly. “Then I would have put one of you on the Supreme Court … one of you in Root’s place as secretary of war, when he goes out; and one of you permanently governor of the Philippines.”48 This time, Taft’s family convinced him to accept the post. His generous half brother Charles, who had married the heiress to an iron fortune and supported Taft throughout his political career, even offered to supplement Taft’s cabinet salary to help defray the costs of living and entertaining in Washington. And Nellie, whose eye was always on the White House, was happy to return to Washington as the wife of a cabinet officer.49 And so on December 23, 1903, Taft set off for Washington from Manila on the SS Korea.
Roosevelt still wanted to put Taft on the Court, now viewing the appointment as part of his effort to ramp up federal antitrust enforcement. His most dramatic crusade was against the Northern Securities holding company, a giant conglomerate merging the shipping and rail lines of Morgan and Vanderbilt with those of Rockefeller, Harriman, and Gould. After the merger, Northern Securities became the world’s second-largest corporation, surpassed only by U.S. Steel, which J. P. Morgan also controlled.50 “If we have done anything wrong,” Morgan protested to the president, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”51 Roosevelt retorted that he wanted to stop the Northern Securities merger, not fix it, prompting Morgan to ask whether U.S. Steel was vulnerable to a lawsuit as well. Roosevelt replied that the Steel Trust was safe “unless we find out that in any case they have done something that we regard as wrong.”52 And the president kept his word. During the Panic of 1907, a leading brokerage house that owned a large stake in the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company threatened to go bankrupt. In exchange for Roosevelt’s assurances that the government would not file an antitrust suit against U.S. Steel, Morgan offered to restore financial stability by buying the Tennessee combination, in what turned out to be a sweetheart deal.
Taft enthusiastically supported Roosevelt’s decision to prosecute the shipping and railway trust in the Northern Securities case, and he sat in the Supreme Court with Attorney General Philander Knox on March 14, 1904, as Justice Harlan announced the Court’s 5–4 decision holding that the trust had illegally restrained commerce in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.53 Taft must have been proud as Harlan cited the Supreme Court decision upholding his own reasoning in the Addyston case. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whom Roosevelt had appointed in 1902 when Taft turned down the seat, voted against the administration in the Northern Securities case, prompting the president to exclaim, “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that.”54
As head of the War Department, Taft was now in charge of overseeing the Philippines, pacifying Cuba, and supervising the construction of the Panama Canal. Roosevelt declared himself happy to leave Washington for a hunting trip in the Rockies because he had “left Taft sitting on the lid.”55 In 1904, Taft set off for Panama to oversee progress on the canal and impressed all with his vitality, attention to detail, and keen administrative ability.56 He also stumped for Roosevelt in the 1904 presidential campaign and was relieved when Roosevelt won—although he confessed prophetically that “a national campaign for the presidency is to me a nightmare.”57
During Roosevelt’s second term, Taft traveled to Havana to quell an insurgency, briefly becoming provisional governor in 1906.58 A magazine profile called him “the proconsul of American good faith to fractious islands; an ambassador to stubborn tasks at far corners of the earth.”59 In addition to proving his gifts as an able administrator and chief operating officer, Taft was also a natural consensus seeker.60
When he wasn’t traveling, Taft brightened the offices of the War Department in Washington with his laughter and good humor.61 The work must have been more congenial than his executive duties in the Philippines; starting in October 1905, Taft found the iron self-discipline to lose seventy-six pounds.62 Here is a typical day on the Taft diet, in the words of his diet guru, Dr. Yorke-Davies. At 8 a.m., “you may sip a tumbler of hot water,” adding “a squeeze of lemon if liked.” At 9 a.m., Taft breakfasted on “two or three of gluten biscuits”—in other words, gluten-free biscuits—and six ounces of “lean grilled steak or chop, or of chicken, or of grilled kidney, or of grilled or broiled white fish.” Lunch at 1:30 allowed “4 or 5 ozs of lean meat,” such as beef, mutton, lamb, “or of chicken or game in season, or of rabbit or turkey”; and “4 or 5 ozs of carefully cooked green vegetable, without butter”; and “3 or 4 ozs of baked apple or stewed apple or other fresh fruits.” Salad could be “taken freely, but no oil is allowed,” along with one of the gluten-free biscuits. In the afternoon, a cup or two of coffee or tea could be taken, “if liked,” but without milk or sugar, “or a cup of beef tea.” Finally, for dinner at 7, Taft could enjoy “clear soup when desired,” meat, fish, and vegetables, and stewed fruit in the same quantities as at lunch and “salads as in the list if liked (no oil) and two of the biscuits.”63 The low-carb diet hit its mark, and within seven months Taft had returned to his college weight. “A reduction of seventy pounds is not an inexpensive luxury,”64 Taft wrote to Nellie, lamenting the $400 he owed his tailor.
Still, even during his happy tenure at the War Department, Taft pined to be chief justice. In 1906, when the retirement of Justice Henry Billings Brown opened yet another Supreme Court vacancy, Taft wrote in his diary, “I am very anxious to go on the Supreme bench. The President has promised me a number of times that he would appoint me Chief Justice if a vacancy occurred in that position and he knows that I much prefer a judicial future to a political future.”65 Nellie, however, viewed Roosevelt’s 1906 offer of an associate justiceship as an attempt to take Taft out of the running for president, and she insisted that he reject it. A friend of the family asked Taft’s son Charlie whether his father would accept the Supreme Court seat. “Nope,” he replied, because “Ma wants him to be president.”66
Later that year, Taft and Nellie joined the Roosevelts for an intimate dinner at the White House, after which Roosevelt threw himself into a chair in the library and closed his eyes.
“I am the seventh son of a seventh daughter and I have clairvoyant powers,” he intoned melodramatically. “There is something hanging over his head. I cannot make out what it is.… At one time it looks like the Presidency, then again it looks like the chief justiceship.”
“Make it the presidency,” said Mrs. Taft.
“Make it the chief justiceship,” said Mr. Taft.67
In December 1907, Roosevelt issued a statement reaffirming his promise not to seek a second full term, a pledge he had rashly made on the night of his election in 1904 and soon came to regret. Taft quietly stumped for the Republican nomination by courting the state delegations, and in time he bested his main rival, Governor Charles Evans Hughes of New York. Taft’s only misstep during the quiet campaign was his impulsively candid response in January to a reporter’s question about what he would do for those unemployed in the wake of the Panic of 1907. “God knows,” Taft replied. “They have my deepest sympathy. It is an awful case when a man is willing to work and is put in this position.”68 (The phrase “God knows” was quoted out of context, provoking public outrage.) Thanks to Roosevelt’s steadfast support, in June 1908 the Republican Convention in Chicago nominated William Howard Taft to be its candidate for president of the United States. The Texas delegation brandished a flagpole with a pair of plus-sized trousers, accompanied by the slogan “As pants the hart for cooling streams, so Texas pants for Taft!”69 A series of five photographs taken of Taft on the telephone at the moment he received word of his nomination from President Roosevelt shows his face, serious at first, crinkling into a contented grin.
Roosevelt, who had learned of Taft’s nomination during a tennis game, quickly issued an enthusiastic endorsement: “I do not believe there can be found in the whole country a man so well fitted to be president.”70 Months later, in an interview with Success Magazine entitled “Why the President Is for Taft,” Roosevelt was even more effusive. “The bigness of the job demands a man of Taft’s type,” he explained. “Never has there been a candidate for president so admirably trained in varied administrative service.” All this was entirely accurate. But Roosevelt added two predictions that proved to be overly optimistic. “I think Taft will succeed better with Congress than I have done,” and “I sincerely believe that Taft will make our greatest president, excepting, of course, our two greatest, Washington and Lincoln.”71
In 1908, Roosevelt and Taft were the closest of allies, and Taft promised to put Roosevelt’s sweeping executive actions on firmer legal footing. Far from viewing himself as Roosevelt’s clone, Taft said that his constitutional vision would make his agenda “distinct from, and a progressive development of,” his predecessor’s agenda. “The chief function of the next Administration,” he declared, in his speech accepting the Republican nomination on July 28, “is to complete and perfect the machinery by which these standards may be maintained, by which the lawbreakers may be promptly restrained and punished, but which shall operate with sufficient accuracy and dispatch to interfere with legitimate business as little as possible.”72
After a two-hour parade in his honor, Taft addressed the enthusiastic crowd from a special reviewing stand constructed in front of his brother Charles’s grand colonial home in Cincinnati. Taft’s acceptance speech lasted an hour but hit its mark. (The Wall Street Journal praised it as “an exceedingly able and shrewd political document” that positioned Taft “in the middle of the road, avoiding alike the extreme of eastern conservatism and the extreme of western radicalism.”)73 Verbose and legalistic, like all of his prose, his acceptance speech is not light reading—Taft wrote as he thought—but he was remarkably transparent as he judiciously weighed all sides of each argument and candidly shared the strengths and weaknesses of his conclusions. In the end, Taft’s speeches, like judicial opinions, reward the patient reader. They amount to detailed constitutional contracts with America about the legal reforms Taft intended to bring about.
The Democrats were led for the third time by the populist barnstormer William Jennings Bryan. The “Great Commoner” had championed free silver in 1896 and anti-imperialism in 1900 and was determined to make the 1908 campaign a referendum on Republican domestic financial reforms.74 America had just recovered from the Panic of 1907, when the stock market dropped by more than 50 percent, only to be rescued by J. P. Morgan, who pledged his own capital to shore up confidence. The Democratic platform of 1908 declared that the panic showed that the Republicans were “either unwilling or incompetent to protect the interests of the general public.”75
Taft promised to continue Roosevelt’s reform policies, and he and Bryan agreed on the need to curb the power of the trusts. But they disagreed about how to go about curbing that power. In his acceptance speech, Taft rejected the Democrats’ efforts to prevent monopolies from forming in the first place by imposing caps on size, banning trusts that controlled more than 50 percent of a product’s market, and requiring national licensing for trusts that controlled more than 25 percent. Instead, Taft returned to the definition of illegal trusts he had championed as a judge: to be unlawful, he said, a trust has to display “an element of duress in the conduct of its business,” based on the illegitimate “purpose of controlling the market, to maintain or raise prices, restrict output and drive out competitors.”76 Taft proposed vigorous antitrust prosecutions, including injunctions against illegal trusts and criminal prosecutions against the corporate officers, to bring the trusts “within the law.”
On the central economic issue in the campaign, the Democrats supported tariffs only for the purpose of raising revenue, not for the protection of American industries. Taft embraced the promise in the Republican Party platform to preserve the protective tariff but also to reduce it. He pledged to call a special session of Congress immediately after the inauguration to revise the tariff in accordance with “the true principle of protection”—namely, “the imposition of such duties as will equal the difference between the cost of production at home and abroad, together with a reasonable profit to American industries.”77
On the rights of labor, the Democratic platform vigorously opposed judicial injunctions against striking unions, and Bryan campaigned as the champion of labor.78 Taft, on the other hand, had been denounced as the “Father of Injunctions,” and he maintained his support for property rights throughout the campaign. Taft adhered to the position he had taken as a judge: that “workmen have a right to strike” and to persuade their co-workers to join them, “provided it does not reach the point of duress.” But they may not “injure their employer’s business by use of threats or methods of physical duress” or by “a secondary boycott against his customers or those with whom he deals in business.”79
On the need to publicize corporate campaign contributions, Taft largely agreed with the Democrats, noting that the Republican Congress in 1907 had banned “contributions from corporations to influence or pay the expenses connected with the election of presidential electors or of members of Congress.” He personally refused to accept questionable campaign contributions from large corporations, prompting Roosevelt, who had been less fastidious, to write, “My affection and respect for you are increased by your attitude about contributions. But really I think you are oversensitive.” Taft also pledged to support a federal law requiring the disclosure of “contributions received by committees and candidates in elections for members of Congress, and in such other elections as are constitutionally within the control of Congress.” But he did not endorse the Democratic call for “the enactment of a law prohibiting any corporation from contributing to a campaign fund and any individual from contributing an amount above a reasonable maximum.”80
Finally, Taft tepidly endorsed the proposal in the Democratic platform for a constitutional amendment that would authorize the direct election of senators; although he said a federal income tax amendment was not strictly necessary, he would later endorse it as well. (Congress would propose both amendments during his presidential term.)
At the end of his exhaustive acceptance speech, Taft apologized for its length with endearing modesty.81 Nellie, who often upbraided him for writing speeches that read like judicial opinions,82 was excited afterward. “Hasn’t it been glorious! I love public life,” she exclaimed. “To me this is better than when Mr. Taft was at the bar and at the bench, for the things before him now and in which he takes part are live subjects.”83 Still, Nellie was correct that Taft’s 1908 campaign speeches read like judicial opinions.84 How was it possible, with such dry and legalistic speeches, that Taft could win a comfortable popular victory—51 percent to Bryan’s 43 percent—over the most celebrated orator of his day?
One clue comes from the excerpts of his acceptance speech that Taft recorded for the Edison Record Company on August 3, 1908, just a few days after his notification ceremony. The election of 1908 was the first time that sound recordings played a central role in a presidential campaign, and they were distributed in an unusual way. Taft and Bryan supporters often held “record duels,” inviting other supporters to listen to the recordings of both candidates in a church hall or public meeting place. A newspaper in Spokane, Washington, described one of these battles of the phonograph: a Bryan supporter played Bryan’s recording on the need to reduce the tariff, only to be interrupted by a Taft supporter playing the song “Merry Ha Ha.” The Taft man would then play Taft’s warning that “taking the tariff off on all articles coming into competition with the so-called trusts would not only destroy the trusts, but all of their small competitors,” and the Bryan man responded with a recording of the comic song “Oh Glory,” in which the Bryan supporters lustily joined.85
The new technology was undeniably exciting, converting even the most tiresome speech into an exhilarating novelty. But in addition to their unexpected entertainment value, the Bryan and Taft records make clear that Taft’s legalistic delivery was well matched to Bryan’s more orotund style, and uniquely well suited to the acoustical recording methods of his day. Bryan’s delivery has a grandiloquent and stentorian quality—he trills his r’s on words like “Orient” and “experiment”—but the Great Commoner’s recordings sound more natural than his flamboyant rerecordings of his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech.86
In his final speech, titled “Mr. Taft’s Borrowed Plumes,” Bryan accused the accommodating Taft of adopting some of his best ideas from the Democratic platform.
He favors an income tax when we need it, but thinks we do not need it now.… Mr. Taft favors railroad regulation.… Mr. Taft is personally inclined towards the election of senators by the people.… Mr. Taft advocates a certain kind of publicity, of campaign contributions.… Mr. Taft is advocating tariff revision.… Mr. Taft even recognizes that the Filipinos must ultimately have independence.
Bryan’s conclusion: “Mr. Taft has [even] imitated the Democrats in using the talking machine as a means of reaching the public.”
Bryan was correct: Taft’s speeches for Edison, recorded three months later, stole some of Bryan’s dramatic and substantive thunder. In the twelve recordings, Taft’s baritone is calm, unaffected, and entirely American—he has no regional inflection, except for his pronunciation of the word “man-a-facture.” His diction, like his prose, is modest and judicious, and always respects the intelligence of the listener. And in his speeches responding to Bryan, Taft did indeed embrace some aspects of the Democratic platform, including one that Roosevelt had ignored: a call to preserve the Constitution. In the election of 1904, Taft noted, the Democrats had focused on “the usurpation of the powers of the Executive Office for President Roosevelt including his settlement of the anthracite coal strike and the violation of the federal constitutional limitations by the Republican Party.” The people, however, rejected the Democratic “party which had temporarily assumed its ancient character as a preserver of the Constitution.”87 Quoting from his acceptance speech, Taft promised again to put Roosevelt’s executive orders on firm legislative and constitutional grounds. Taft also promised to reorganize the Department of Justice and the Department of Commerce and Labor, noting that “the moral standards set by President Roosevelt will not continue to be observed by those whom cupidity and the desire for financial power may tempt, unless the requisite machinery is introduced into the law.”88
In the rest of his recorded speeches, Taft’s focus was more legal than political. Unlike the openly segregationist Democrats, he unequivocally endorsed the Republican platform’s “demands [for] justice for all men without regard to race or color” and “for the enforcement and without reservation in letter and spirit of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.” He called for the restraint (but not the destruction) of unlawful trusts. Invoking the reasoning of his own lower court opinions, he endorsed the right of unions to strike but denounced the secondary boycott.
In one recording, Taft’s personality unexpectedly shines through. The topic, of all things, was Irish humor. After quoting Kipling about how, in Ireland and America, “smiles and tears chase each other fast,” Taft offered a surprisingly personal recollection of a trip to County Cork twenty-five years earlier. “We landed at Queen Sound very early in the morning of a July day and it seemed to me that nothing was ever greener, nothing was ever sweeter, nothing was ever more attractive than the surroundings of Queen Sound harbor at that hour.” Taft then recited “the musical verse The Shandon Bells,” which crowded his memories at the time:
With deep affection and recollection
I oft times think of those Shandon Bells
Whose sounds so wild would, in days of childhood
Fling round my cradle their magic spells.
In reciting these verses, Taft’s voice is somber yet rhapsodic. He recites beautifully and deliberately, in tones he must have used when reading aloud to Nellie during their courtship. The spirit revealed by this intimate act of personal revelation is vulnerable and sentimental, earnest and full of soul.
On November 3, 1908, Taft was elected the twenty-seventh president of the United States. He carried twenty-nine of the forty-six states, won 321 electoral votes to Bryan’s 162, and outpolled Bryan by more than a million popular votes.89 On the night of his victory, Taft gave a short speech. “I pledge myself to use all the energy and ability in me to make the next Administration a worthy successor to that of Theodore Roosevelt. I could have no higher aim than that,” he said.90 In fact, he did have a higher aim—to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.