“The Best Tariff Bill”: The President, Tax Reform, and Free Trade
On March 3, 1909, the day before Taft’s inauguration, President Roosevelt invited his successor to spend the evening at the White House. Waiting for Taft’s arrival as the sun set over Lafayette Park, Roosevelt confided his doubts to the journalist Mark Sullivan. “He’s all right,” the president replied when asked how Taft would make out. “He means well and he’ll do his best. But he’s weak.”1 At dinner, Nellie expressed elation and the Roosevelt party gloom. Taft then ducked out to attend a Yale smoker at the Willard Hotel, before returning to the White House after midnight to find Nellie awake with excitement. Preparing for bed in the Blue Room, which had previously served as President Lincoln’s cabinet room, she found a plaque declaring, “In this room Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, whereby four million slaves were given their freedom and slavery forever prohibited in these United States.”2 “It seemed strange,” she recalled, “to spend my first night in the White House surrounded by such ghosts.”3
Early the next morning, Taft and Roosevelt met for breakfast before venturing into icy streets, covered by the heaviest snow in twenty years. “Well, Will, the storm will soon be over,” Roosevelt exclaimed. “As soon as I am out where I can do no further harm to the Constitution it will cease.” “You’re wrong,” Taft replied. “It is my storm. I always said it would be a cold day when I got to be President of the United States.”4 Both predictions—about the constitutional threats that Roosevelt had posed in his effort to impose his program by executive fiat and the personal and political toll of Taft’s efforts to repair them—would prove to be correct.
Because of the blizzard, the ceremony outside the Capitol was canceled for the first time since the inauguration of Andrew Jackson. Taft took the oath in the Senate Chamber instead.5 He made a point of swearing on the same Bible that Supreme Court justices had used for decades.6 (When Taft returned the Bible to the Court, he vowed that he would use it again if he ever took the oath as a justice himself.)7 After repeating the presidential oath along with Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who flubbed the wording, William Howard Taft became what he, like the Framers of the Constitution, called the chief magistrate of the United States.
Taft released his inaugural address to the press but mercifully did not read it in its entirety. (The spoken excerpts were sufficiently brief that his son Charles didn’t feel the need to open the copy of Treasure Island that he had brought for diversion in case his father’s address bored him.)8 In his written draft, Taft made clear that he viewed the promises in what he called his “letter of acceptance” of the Republican nomination, like those in the Republican platform, as enforceable contracts with the public that he meant to perform. “A matter of most pressing importance is the revision of the tariff,” he declared. “In accordance with the promises of the platform upon which I was elected, I shall call Congress into extra session to meet on the 15th day of March, in order that consideration may be at once given to a bill revising the Dingley Act,”9 the last major tariff bill, passed by Congress in 1897, which had raised tariffs by an average of 57 percent. “The Republican party declares unequivocally for a revision of the tariff by a special session of Congress immediately following the inauguration of the next President,”10 the 1908 Republican platform had declared. On the campaign trail, Taft emphasized that he would strictly construe the word “immediately.”11
Taft suggested that Congress focus solely on tariff reform at the extra session, “to secure the needed speed in the passage of the tariff bill.” But believing, as he did, that the president had the constitutional authority to recommend legislation to Congress but no authority to interfere with Congress’s power to legislate, Taft emphasized, “I venture this as a suggestion only, for the course to be taken by Congress, upon the call of the Executive, is wholly within its discretion.”12 The tariff bill, Taft stressed above all, should try to achieve a balanced budget rather than protectionism for its own sake.13 The federal government had an obligation to be “as economical as possible” in its spending, and “to make the burden of taxation as light as possible.”14
Taft, in other words, was more of what would later be called a deficit hawk than Roosevelt, who during his last full year in office had increased government expenditures by $80 million, resulting in a deficit of $57 million.15 In 1909, the deficit had risen above $89 million, and Taft insisted on fiscal discipline. In his first annual message to Congress he would declare, “Perhaps the most important question presented to the Administration is that of economy in expenditures and sufficiency of revenue.”16 As a result of Taft’s directive to cut costs, the various cabinet departments slashed nearly $50 million in spending in 1909.17 The cost cutting, combined with increased revenue from a corporation tax that Congress passed the same year at Taft’s recommendation, had its effect. The federal deficit shrank to $11 million in 1910, and Taft achieved surpluses of $11 million in 1911 and $3 million in 1912.
Taft ended his inaugural address on a characteristically judicial note, pledging to uphold “the power of the federal courts to issue injunctions in industrial disputes.” Here, Taft was implicitly rebuking his predecessor on a topic that foreshadowed their coming breach. In his final message to Congress, Roosevelt had criticized judges who “often fail to understand and apply the needed remedies for the new wrongs produced by the new and highly complex social and industrial civilization which has grown up in the last half-century.”18 This assault on the courts struck at the heart of Taft’s most fervent beliefs.
As soon as Taft finished speaking, Roosevelt rushed up to shake his hand, exclaiming something that sounded to Mrs. Taft like “Bully speech, old man!”19 The former president then hurried out of the room. Soon after the inauguration, as Roosevelt set off for an African safari, Taft wrote him a thoughtful note accompanied by an inscribed golden ruler. “I want you to know that I would do nothing in the Executive Office without considering what you would do under the same circumstances and without having in a sense a mental talk with you over the pros and cons of the situation,” he wrote to “My dear Theodore,” whom he was still inclined to call “My dear Mr. President.”20 With keen self-awareness, Taft acknowledged that he was not as adept as Roosevelt in working with journalists to explain his policies and educate the public. “I fear that a large part of the public will feel as if I had fallen away from your ideals; but you know me better and will understand that I am still working away on the same old plan.”21 Roosevelt jotted off a quick reply as the SS Hamburg left New York: “Am deeply touched by your gift and even more by your letter. Greatly appreciate it. Everything will turn out all right, old man. Give my love to Mrs. Taft.”22
When she walked into the White House for the first time as first lady, Nellie felt “as Cinderella must have felt when her mice footmen bowed her into her coach and four and behaved just as if they had conducted her to a Court Ball every night of her life.” She experienced “a little secret elation,” which quickened as she stood over the brass seal with the national coat of arms sunk into the floor of the entrance hall: “‘The Seal of the President of the United States,’ I read around the border, and now—that meant my husband!”23
The Tafts enjoyed an inaugural lunch, followed by a tea for the president’s Yale classmates, the inaugural parade, and a ball at the Pension Building. They returned to the White House at one o’clock in the morning, and Nellie’s last memory before she fell asleep was a hearty laugh from her husband as she asked drowsily, “I wonder where we had all better have breakfast in the morning!”24 Reviews of Taft’s inaugural address were positive. The New York Times, which had pledged to support the Union, the Constitution, and Reconstruction after the Civil War but had moved away from the Republican Party during the scandals of the Grant administration, accurately predicted, “We are to have, it seems, during the next four years, a government of laws, of laws enforced by an Executive of a just and deliberating mind.”25
Taft initially felt like something of an imposter in the White House. “When I hear someone say Mr. President,” he declared on March 11, “I look around expecting to see Roosevelt.”26 And yet Taft wasted no time doing precisely what he had promised during his campaign: he set out to put Roosevelt’s policies on sound legal ground that respected the constitutional boundaries established by the Framers. As he had explained in January, “We do not wish to destroy that government or so change it as to make it different from that which our fathers and forefathers contemplated in the formation and maintenance of the Constitution, entered upon in 1789.”27 But because he approached many decisions as a principled judge rather than a calculating politician, he immediately stepped into political minefields. The trouble began with the selection of his cabinet. As Taft recalled, “One day, just after I was nominated, I told Roosevelt, that should I be elected, I did not see how I could do anything else but retain all the old members of the Cabinet.”28 But, a few months later, Taft changed his mind and decided to replace the old Roosevelt loyalists with a cabinet of what he called “corporation lawyers” who could help him in his constitutional tasks.
As Taft told his new secretary of state, Philander Knox, who was one of the corporation lawyers, “I am trying … to act as judicially as possible, and to free myself from considerations of friendly association as far as I can and remain a decent man with red blood in me.”29 Rather bloodlessly, however, Taft sacked Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, James R. Garfield, son of the late president and one of Roosevelt’s staunchest supporters, because he questioned the legality of some of Garfield’s decisions—made in concert with Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service—to withdraw land for federal conservation.30 Taft’s decision to replace Garfield with Richard Ballinger, the Seattle reform mayor turned corporate lawyer, would lead Pinchot to retaliate, precipitating the biggest scandal of his presidency.
All told, Taft nominated six corporate lawyers to his cabinet: Knox as secretary of state, Ballinger as secretary of the interior, George Wickersham as attorney general, Jacob Dickinson as secretary of war, Frank Harris Hitchcock as postmaster general, and Charles Nagel as secretary of commerce and labor.31 Only the two holdovers from Roosevelt’s cabinet—Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson and Secretary of the Navy George von Lengerke Meyer—along with Taft’s new secretary of the treasury, Franklin MacVeagh, had escaped legal training.32 “I am going to be criticized for putting corporation lawyers into my Cabinet,” Taft accurately predicted, as critics such as Henry Adams wondered why a president elected to carry out Roosevelt’s policies had fired most of Roosevelt’s men.33
Taft soon settled into a calmer, more judicious work schedule than his frenetic predecessor, whom Adams had described as “pure act.” The president’s days started at 7:00 a.m., when he ate what his aide Archie Butt recalled as “a hearty breakfast” that often included a twelve-ounce steak.34 (The gluten-free biscuits had disappeared.) By 9:30, he left for the new White House Oval Office, which Taft himself had designed and installed in the West Wing in October 1909 to replace the temporary executive office that Roosevelt had constructed. A rudimentary air-conditioning system, using three thousand pounds of ice a day to pipe cold air into the Oval Office, ensured the smiling president’s comfort, even on the warmest summer days.35 He often skipped lunch, except for an occasional apple, Butt recalled, but “I don’t think this fast does him any good, for he eats a correspondingly larger dinner. He has a tremendous appetite and does not control it as did his predecessor.”36 Exhausted by sleep apnea and fleeing the pressures of office, he liked to escape in the afternoon for golfing, horseback riding, or, with increasing pleasure, motoring. Continuing his schoolboy habits of procrastination, Taft worked in concentrated bursts, waiting until the last minute and then producing a prodigious volume of speeches and reports. But Taft’s work habits as president were also shaped by his work habits as a federal judge. He presided over cabinet meetings as if they were judicial conferences. He weighed all sides of an issue before reaching his verdict without consulting others. He based his decisions on legal rather than political considerations. And he handed down his decisions in speeches and messages to Congress that read like judicial opinions, without considering their political effect.37
True to his promise to Roosevelt and the American people, Taft set out immediately to revise the tariff. On March 16, 1909, as he had pledged in his inaugural address, Taft invoked his constitutional authority to summon both Houses “on extraordinary Occasions” and convened a special session of Congress. The Senate and House waited expectantly as the clerk began to read Taft’s presidential message. But when the clerk finished reading after two minutes, the assembled members of Congress were astounded. They had anticipated a state paper of historic importance and presidential leadership, but Taft had sent them a 340-word message that he had composed in fifteen minutes that morning.38
The message urged Congress “to give immediate consideration to the revision of the Dingley Tariff Act.” Taft explained that the current tariff was insufficient to raise enough revenue to pay government expenditures; without adjustment, there would be a deficit of $100 million by the next July. Moreover, because the Republican Party had pledged to revise the tariff, and the business community and the country expected the pledge to be fulfilled, those expectations had created “an extraordinary occasion, within the meaning of the Constitution, justifying and requiring the calling of an extra session.”39 Taft reminded Congress that his inaugural address had outlined the principles of tariff revision and new taxation to avoid future deficits. “It is not necessary for me to repeat what I then said,” he concluded. “The less time given to other subjects of legislation in this session, the better for the country.”40
Read in light of Taft’s constitutional understanding of the limits of his own powers, his brief message is a masterpiece of concision. Taft believed that the Constitution gave him the power to recommend to Congress “consideration of … such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”41 And that is precisely what he had done in his inaugural address, which many of the statesmen had heard and all could read. He believed that Congress alone could decide whether to accept or reject his suggestions. What more needed to be said?
In fact, Taft had stepped into a political minefield so explosive that even the ordinarily bellicose Roosevelt had been too fainthearted to approach it. Roosevelt believed, with the progressives, that high tariffs led to higher prices and more entrenched monopolies, but he feared igniting a tariff battle that would divide eastern manufacturers in protected industries, who favored the tariff, from western farmers, who paid higher prices for raw materials, such as oil and steel, and therefore opposed it.42
Moreover, the question of what kind of taxes should fund the national debt was one of the central constitutional debates of the American republic. Since the Founding era, most federal revenue had come from import taxes raised by the tariff and excise taxes on staples such as sugar and salt; by 1910, these taxes funded 90 percent of the federal budget. That’s because the Constitution required that all “direct taxes” be apportioned according to population rather than according to personal wealth or property. When the tariff failed to raise enough revenue, excise taxes on goods such as whiskey and carriages filled the gap. Although they were often unpopular with the consumers (and had provoked the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion), the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of excise taxes in the 1796 Hylton decision, argued by Alexander Hamilton.43
One way to avoid contentious debates over tariffs, which had divided the North and South in the years leading up to the Civil War, was to adopt a temporary income tax. In 1861, after the South seceded from the Union, the Lincoln administration imposed the first federal income tax, a flat tax of 3 percent on all incomes over $300 a year, to fund the Civil War.44 Neither Abraham Lincoln nor his secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase, whom Lincoln would later appoint chief justice, believed that an income tax was a “direct tax” that had to be apportioned among the states according to population.45 And after the war the unpopular income tax expired.
The idea of an income tax had support, however, among Democrats as well as Republicans. After the Panic of 1893, populist Democrats argued that tariffs and excise taxes were regressive instruments of economic tyranny that discriminated against farmers and the producing classes. The Democratic Congress, supported by a Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, passed a federal income tax bill in 1894 that included a 2 percent tax on incomes over $4,000, as well as tariff reductions. But the Supreme Court wasted no time in striking down the law by a 5–4 vote in the Pollock case (1895),46 on the ground that taxes on income were direct taxes that had to be apportioned among the states. In doing so, the Court disregarded the reasoning of the 1796 Hylton decision, which held that only taxes that could plausibly be apportioned according to population—such as taxes on land or head taxes—qualified as direct taxes. Taft, then a federal circuit court judge, agreed with Justice Harlan’s dissent in Pollock, which exhaustively reviewed the records of the Constitutional Convention to argue convincingly that the Framers intended direct taxes to encompass only taxes on land and slaves.
The Pollock case was the most controversial of its day. It made the federal income tax impossible to administer, since the people of Delaware, if they represented 4 percent of the U.S. population, would have had to pay 4 percent of the income tax.47 It also cleared the way for Congress to raise the tariff to fund the national debt. Goaded by the popularity of President William McKinley’s protectionist policies, Congress passed the Dingley Tariff of 1897, setting rates as high as 50 percent. (European rates were closer to 10 percent.) During the 1908 presidential campaign, Taft acknowledged, “One of the great policies to which the Republican Party has been pledged from the beginning has been the protective system.”48
Nevertheless, at the beginning of Taft’s presidency, this consensus among Republicans had begun to splinter. Recent articles by the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell helped to galvanize a bipartisan political revolt against protectionism, as consumers came to recognize that they were paying higher prices for domestic as well as imported goods, because domestic manufacturers could jack up prices without fear of foreign competition. By March 1909, when Taft sent his terse message to Congress, he faced a three-way struggle among competing camps of tariff reformers within the Republican Party. Moderate Revisionists, like Taft himself, wanted to reduce but not eliminate tariffs, returning to the original Hamiltonian vision of modest import duties as sources of revenue.49 Insurgent Republicans, led by progressives such as Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, wanted to reduce tariffs even further, to increase competition and lower consumer prices, although they did not go so far as free trade Democrats to argue that the tariff should be eliminated entirely. And standpat Republican protectionists, led by Speaker Joe Cannon, who controlled the majority of Republican votes in the House, and the powerful senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, wanted to maintain or even increase the rates of the Dingley Tariff. “Where did we ever make the statement that we would revise the tariff downward?” Aldrich asked Taft disingenuously, ignoring the fact that everyone understood the promise of tariff revision in the Republican platform as a pledge to reduce the rates, not simply to change them in one direction or the other.50
These warring Republican factions might have defeated even the shrewdest and most determined politician. But Taft in this case was no politician at all, insisting that the Constitution prohibited him from interfering with Congress’s deliberations. “I have no disposition to exert any other influence than that which it is my function under the Constitution to exercise,” he told Aldrich, unwittingly tipping his hand.51 He could have supported the effort by the insurgent Republicans to unseat Speaker Cannon, but he viewed the encouragement of an intraparty coup as beyond his constitutional authority as well. “I would be very severely criticized,” he protested, “if I should attempt to use executive power to control the election in the House.”52 In this way, Taft used his devotion to the Constitution, and to party unity above all, to justify his temperamental aversion to building congressional support for his legislative agenda. After submitting his brief to Congress, he was content to wait for Congress’s verdict.
He did not wait long. Sereno E. Payne, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was, like Taft, a Republican moderate who supported downward revision based on the difference between the costs of production at home and abroad.53 On the day Taft sent his brief message to Congress, Payne introduced a tariff revision bill, reflecting more than a year of hearings. In a nod to Taft, he proposed to eliminate duties on coal, hide, and iron ore, while more than doubling duties on gloves—an industry of Payne’s home state of New York.54 Taft praised the Payne bill, calling it “as near [to] complying with our promises as we can hope,” and the bill passed the House on April 9.55 In the Senate, however, the bill was eviscerated by nearly eight hundred amendments sponsored by Senator Aldrich, more than half of which restored rates to the levels of the Dingley law.56
Even if Taft had been inclined to intervene in this battle, which he was not, he was soon distracted at home. Nellie Taft had settled into her role as first lady with enthusiasm and style. She replaced the white ushers in frock coats at the front door of the White House with African American ushers in blue livery. She installed oriental furnishings (including the constitutionally controversial tapestry from Japan) and tropical plants throughout the executive mansion, prompting servants to refer to it as the Malacañan Palace.57 And she left a permanent and welcome mark on Washington, D.C., by accepting the gift of three thousand Japanese cherry trees from the mayor of Tokyo and planting them around the Tidal Basin in 1910. When the trees bloomed the following year, and she saw the cherry blossoms, Archie Butt reported, “Mrs. Taft actually clapped her hands in delight.”58
Soon after moving into the White House and achieving her most ardent dream, however, Nellie Taft collapsed during an outing on the presidential yacht.59 “I was permitted fully to enjoy only about the first two and a half months of my sojourn in the White House,” she wrote decorously in her memoir. “In May I suffered a serious attack of illness and was practically out of society through an entire season.”60 In fact, Nellie had suffered a terrible stroke, which deprived her of control of her right arm and leg, and her power of speech. Seeing his paralyzed wife carried into the salon, Taft “went deathly pale,” as Archie Butt recalled, adding that “the President looked like a great stricken animal. I have never seen greater suffering or pain shown on a man’s face.”61 During the year that it took Nellie to recover her ability to speak, Taft nursed her with patience and loving attention, working with her gently for hours a day. A housekeeper recalled that he was always full of laughter in an effort to ease her strain. “Now please, darling, try and say ‘the’—that’s it, ‘the,’” he would say. “That’s pretty good, but now try it again.”62 Nellie thrived under Taft’s tender ministrations, and after a substantial recuperation, she looked “lovely and happy,” as Archie Butt observed her during one of Taft’s speeches. “She always looks happy when listening to the President.”63
The Tafts had a summer home in Beverly, Massachusetts, which was known during Taft’s presidency as the “Summer Capital of the U.S.” As Nellie recuperated there, the president was left alone in the White House to observe the fight over the tariff bill from a distance. He drew one line in the sand: unless Congress revised the tariff downward, he would veto the bill.64 Always most comfortable as a conciliator presiding over a judicial conference, he then invited the House and Senate conference committees to the White House for dinner on the veranda—the press called it the “White House lovefeast”—where he scrupulously avoided discussing substantive issues, which he considered Congress’s prerogative.65
In the end, the wily Aldrich assured Taft that his views would be duly considered, and although Taft confessed he could not predict the outcome—“I am trusting a great many of them,” he told Nellie, “and I may be deceived”—he decided his duty to the Constitution and to the unity of the Republican Party required him to defer to Aldrich, who did indeed deceive him. When the conservative protectionists finally passed a bill that increased hundreds of duties while decreasing others, La Follette, the leader of the insurgents, rushed to the White House and urged the president to assert himself. “Well, I don’t much believe in a president’s interfering with the legislative department while doing its work,” Taft replied with judicial blandness. “They have their responsibility and I have mine.”66 On July 15, he rejected demands that he throw down the gauntlet and threaten a veto, declaring, “I could make a lot of cheap capital by adopting just such a course, but what I am anxious to do is to get the best bill possible with the least amount of friction. I owe something to the party, and while I would popularize myself with the masses with a declaration of hostilities toward Congress, I would greatly injure the party and possibly divide it.”67
On August 5, 1909, convinced that the Payne-Aldrich bill was consistent with the promise in the Republican platform to revise the tariff, Taft signed it into law. Although disappointed that the bill didn’t go further, Taft viewed it with equanimity. “I hope that my attitude will have so reconciled the people of this country as to make them believe, what is a fact, that the bill really is a good bill,” Taft wrote to Nellie. “It does not go far enough in certain respects, but it goes far in others; and a tariff bill no one can be entirely satisfied with.”68 With judicial precision, he gave several speeches emphasizing that, all things considered, the bill represented a downward revision: there were 654 decreases, 220 increases, and 1,150 unchanged items, and the average duty on imports was 21.09 percent, whereas under the Dingley law it had been 24.03 percent.69
Taft argued plausibly that the bill—the first downward revision of the tariff since the Cleveland administration—was the best he could have achieved, given the explosiveness of the politics.70 The Washington Post agreed. “It is easy to pick flaws in the bill, but it cannot be denied that, as a whole, it is as good as any tariff legislation that has preceded it,” the editors declared.71 But the progressive press attacked the bill as a capitulation to big business, reinforcing the public perception that Taft had sided with the conservatives over the insurgents.72 And it’s true that Taft was sometimes willing to veto bills that offended that Republican orthodoxy—such as the populist Democratic free trade bill—but he refused to veto the Payne bill after it was diluted by Aldrich’s amendments. In the end, Taft was more devoted to preserving the unity of the Republican Party than to offering presidential leadership. But instead of uniting the party, his insistence that the Constitution precluded him from interfering with the details of legislation ultimately divided it.
Nevertheless, Taft achieved the tariff revision that eluded Roosevelt, and he shaped the tax reforms of the Payne-Aldrich bill as well. In a fiscally responsible search for additional federal revenue to balance the loss of funding from the tariff, the House proposed a graduated federal inheritance tax, which Taft had endorsed in his inaugural address. The Senate objected on the ground that some states viewed a federal inheritance tax as a form of double taxation, since they already imposed state inheritance taxes of their own.73 Taft then called on Congress to adopt an ingenious compromise: a 2 percent tax on corporate net profits and the constitutional amendment authorizing an individual income tax that would not require apportionment. He had criticized the Supreme Court’s Pollock decision in 1895 as depriving the federal government “of a power which, by reason of previous decisions of the court, it was generally supposed that Government had.”74 But he also believed that passing another income tax statute would embarrass the Court, since the justices were unlikely to reverse themselves, and his devotion to the Court’s legitimacy trumped his own constitutional views. In the meantime, Taft viewed the 2 percent excise tax on corporate income as a temporary solution that would allow Congress to raise revenue and regulate corporations at the same time.75
As Taft told Congress, “It is the constitutional duty of the President from time to time to recommend to the consideration of Congress such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”76 And on this front, Taft’s recommendations were largely successful. In July 1909, Congress passed a resolution calling for an amendment to the Constitution authorizing Congress to collect income taxes. And in 1911 the Supreme Court would unanimously uphold the corporate tax as an indirect tax on the privilege of doing business as a corporation, rather than a direct tax on income.77 All in all, despite criticism from extreme reformers, Taft had cause for wan satisfaction with the Payne-Aldrich bill. He had set the United States down a path of tax reform that, in time, would lead to a bipartisan consensus favoring relatively free trade and a federal government funded by an income tax rather than by protective tariffs.
In the late twentieth century, the journalist Michael Kinsley observed that a gaffe in Washington involves a politician inadvertently telling the truth. The compulsively honest Taft wrote many of his own speeches without editing, and he often embarrassed himself when his truth-telling gaffes were taken out of context. In a Memorial Day appreciation of Ulysses S. Grant delivered during the 1908 campaign, Taft scandalized an audience of veterans by declaring that, before the Civil War, Grant had “resigned from the Army because he had … yielded to the weakness of a taste for strong drink.”78 (A few sentences later, Taft added that Grant eventually had “overcome in a great measure his weakness for strong drink,”79 but the qualification was lost in the uproar.) And shortly after he signed the tariff bill, Taft committed what proved to be the most politically damaging gaffe of his career.
In September 1909, Taft decided to tour the country for a few months, to “get out and see the people and jolly them.”80 Taft’s attempts to jolly the people consisted of delivering nearly forty speeches—all of them read like long, technical judicial opinions—on topics ranging from corporation taxes to the environment. “I do not think his speeches will read as well when put in book form as they will be pleasing to those communities in which they were delivered,” Butt accurately predicted as the tour began, noting that Taft began the trip as a labored and anxious speaker but increasingly gained confidence.81 One of his first stops was in Winona, Minnesota, the home of James A. Tawney, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who wanted the president to offer an unequivocal endorsement of the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill.82 On Constitution Day, September 17, Taft responded like a lawyer arguing a case. He later explained that he had written his speech on the tariff hastily the night before, but his last-minute effort produced the equivalent of a legal brief, with exhaustive charts and numbers comparing the new tariff with the old and establishing that the new bill reduced more tariffs than it raised.
“I did not promise that everything should go downward,” Taft declared accurately. “What I promised was, that there should be many decreases, and that in some few things increases would be found to be necessary; but that on the whole I conceived that the change of conditions would make the revision necessarily downward—and that, I contend, under the showing which I have made, has been the result of the Payne bill.”83 He acknowledged that the bill was not perfect. But the words that followed would come back to haunt him for the rest of his career.
On the whole, however, I am bound to say that I think the Payne tariff bill is the best tariff bill that the Republican party ever passed; that in it the party has conceded the necessity for following the changed conditions and reducing tariff rates accordingly. This is a substantial achievement in the direction of lower tariffs and downward revision, and it ought to be accepted as such.84
These two sentences are a classic Kinsley gaffe. As Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard exclaimed in a hearty chorus on another topic, “Every word of them is true.” Moreover, Taft went on to emphasize that, although he thought the bill was not perfect, he had signed it in the interest of party unity, which he thought was the precondition for “representative government” in America. But given progressive demands for more dramatic tariff reform, even Taft’s tepid defense of the bill struck them as political heresy, for it suggested that no better bill was possible. As usual, however, Taft did not consider the political implications of his candor. “He no longer apologizes. He accepts, he defends, he is enthusiastic,” the New York Times fulminated.85 Wrenched out of context, Taft’s praise of “the best tariff bill that the Republican Party ever passed” went viral on the wires.
The press accounts failed to note that Taft’s defense of the bill was also based on his commitment to government by party. Taft understood, as the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, that the great movements for social change in America have come from strong political parties that unite groups with different interests.86 Taft insisted that “in a party those who join it, if they would make it effective, must surrender their personal predilections on matters comparatively of less importance.” As a loyal Republican, he said, he could do no less.87
On the remainder of the tour, Taft defended the rest of his balanced tax policy. In a speech on corporation and income taxes, delivered in Denver on September 21, he said the only way to balance the budget was to cut expenditures or increase revenues, and he pledged his administration would do both, beginning with cutting expenditures by up to $50 million.88 Taft noted, however, that with the tariff reductions in the new law, some tax increases were necessary to make up the deficit. Although Taft believed that “the Constitution does not forbid the levying of an income tax by the Central Government,” he had supported the compromise reached by Senate Republicans, passing the corporation tax and proposing the constitutional amendment authorizing a federal income tax. Because he feared that citizens who disagreed with a federal income tax might refuse to pay and then commit perjury to avoid prosecution, Taft believed that an income tax should be imposed only in times of emergency, as in the Civil War.89 And he disagreed with liberals and populists who wanted to use the income tax “for the purpose of permanently restraining great wealth.”90
After leaving Colorado (where he declined to wear the specially constructed bathing costume at Glenwood Springs),91 Taft continued to Utah and then to the West Coast, with stops in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. He then set off for Texas and Mexico, where he toasted the capitalist dictator Porfirio Díaz.92 This was the first visit to Mexico by an American president and Taft’s first excursion into “dollar diplomacy,” or a foreign policy designed to advance America’s business interests. “I am glad to aid him,” he wrote to Nellie, “for the reason that we have two billions [of] American capital in Mexico that will be greatly endangered if Díaz were to die and his government go to pieces.”93 As it happened, the government did go to pieces: the idealistic revolutionary Francisco I. Madero would overthrow President Díaz just eighteen months later. Still, Taft’s visit produced at least one decent joke. When his aides expressed relief that Taft had escaped Mexico without an attempted assassination, the president replied with a ready smile, “If anyone wanted to get me, he couldn’t very well have missed such an easy target.”94
In Taft’s final speeches of his tour, he reflected on the limits of his constitutional powers as president. In an address, “Wisdom and Necessity of Following the Law,” delivered at the state fairgrounds of Macon, Georgia, on November 4, Taft embraced a strikingly restrained conception of the presidency. “The thing which impresses me most is not the power I have to exercise under the Constitution, but the limitations and restrictions to which I am subject under that instrument.”95 He also denounced presidential efforts to circumvent Congress’s will through executive orders: “The best way of getting rid of a legal limitation that interferes with progress … is to change the law, and not rely upon the Executive himself to ignore the statutes and follow a law unto himself.”96