Episode 10: William Howard Taft

A full transcript of this episode can be found here.

Show Notes

Overview:

Today’s episode is all about William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States.

The only person on our nation’s history to serve both as Commander-In-Chief and as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Taft is one of those people in history with the sad fate of having his name forever recalled…alongside someone else’s. But really, what did you expect would happen to the man Theodore Roosevelt picked to be his successor. As we’ll soon see, with friends like these…..

First, a primer on Taft’s life and presidency. Born on the cusp of the Civil War and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Taft like so many other presidents grew up in an environment of high expectations. His father had been Secretary of War and Attorney General under President Grant, and then minister to Austria-Hungary and to Russia under President Arthur, and demanded similar success from his son.

Portly and bookish, the young man complied, graduating near the top of his class at Yale University and then studying the law at the University of Cincinnati, before undertaking a series of increasingly important judicial and administrative posts, including U.S. Solicitor General and then as a judge on the US Court of Appeals. He had his eyes set on the Supreme Court, but took a mighty long detour in 1901 when President McKinley asked him to serve as governor of the new American possession in the Philippines recently acquired in the Spanish-American war.

We’ve talked before about the empire Americans enthusiastically embraced at the start of the 20th century, or reluctantly accepted, depending upon your point of view. One thing we haven’t stressed is how indigenous peoples who suddenly became part of that empire reacted. In the Philippines, initial enthusiasm for American occupation turned quickly to an outright insurgency and bloody gorilla war. Taft’s job was to put this house in order, and by the time he left the islands in 1903, American forces had largely pacified the country and established a functioning civil authority. Indeed, military historians stress that the hard-won lessons and tactics of counter-insurgency won by the American Army in the Philippines would be largely forgotten by the era of the Vietnam War, learned and then lost again until Iraq and Afghanistan in our own times. Sadly, we should recall that even those who study history are still likely to repeat it.

But let’s refocus on Taft, whom TR named Secretary of War in 1904, promising his friend that the next open slot on the Supreme Court would be his. Taft proved too valuable to TR to ever let go, however, and instead became Roosevelt’s choice as a successor, winning the Republican nomination and then election in 1908 with ease.

President Taft proved what might best be called a “progressive conservative” in office. He believed in reform, but unlike the manic Roosevelt who thought the president could and should do anything he desired that wasn’t explicitly banned by law or legislation, Taft thought the system worked best when the president was calm, constrained, and did only what the law enabled and nothing more. His administration thus continued the government’s broad assault on monopolies, trusts, and the railroads, but Taft rarely garnered headlines for his quiet accomplishments.

By 1911, Roosevelt wanted back into politics. Bored as an ex-president and disturbed by Taft’s deliberate pace, TR campaigned for the Republican nomination in 1912, and then launched an insurgent third-party bid for the White House when Taft retained the Republican banner. A four-way race for the White House ensued, featuring Taft the Republican, TR the progressive, Woodrow Wilson the Democrat, and Eugene Debs the Socialist candidates respectively. Debs drew 6% of the national vote in fact, the high-water mark for a socialist candidate in American history. More critically, TR’s campaign split the otherwise rock-solid Republican hold on the Electoral College, enabling Wilson to win as the only Democrat in the White House between Cleveland in 1895 and TR’s young cousin Franklin in 1933.

The lesson, as applicable to both Democrats and Republicans alike in 2020 and beyond as it was in 1912: infighting and division leads, in the end, to someone else—someone you really don’t want—taking victory in the end. The thoughtful and judicious Taft thus served only a single term as president, but in the end achieved his life-long dream of sitting on the Supreme Court, when President Warren Harding nominated him to be Chief Justice in 1921.

Today we will hear from two experts on Taft’s life and era, and how he dealt with the racial issues of his day. Together they highlighted two critical themes:

The national conversation about race no longer focused predominately on African Americans and Native Americans, but turned toward Eastern European and Asian immigrants as well.
The role of science in racial thinking

Guest One: Dr. Christopher McKnight Nichols

Christopher.Nichols-Credit-Mina-Carson.jpg — Christopher McKnight Nichols teaches history at Oregon State University. Nichols is Director of the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities. He founded OSU’s Citizenship and Crisis Initiative. Nichols specializes in the history of the United States and its relationship to the rest of the world, particularly in the areas of isolationism, internationalism, and globalization. In addition, he is an expert on modern U.S. intellectual, cultural, and political history, with an emphasis on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1880-1920) through the present. In 2016 Nichols was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. In 2017 Nichols became an Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer. Nichols’ 2018 TED Talk is entitled “The Untold Story of American Isolationism” (aka “Why History Matters Today”).

Along with directing the OSU Center for the Humanities, since 2014 Nichols designed and has directed the innovative new OSU “Citizenship and Crisis Initiative” with an emphasis on issues at the intersection of citizenship, crisis, politics, international relations, civics, and engaged democracy, along with the centenary of World War I (WWI). Outreach and engagement includes OSU, Corvallis, Portland, and across Oregon, as well as via radio, podcast, and film coverage.

Nichols was honored as a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a prestigious academic fellowship for social sciences and humanities scholars. In May 2015 he received the OSU and Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society “emerging scholar” of the year for “outstanding research or creative activity.” At the April 2015 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (in St. Louis, MO) Nichols received the 2015 Roger D. Bridges Distinguished Service Award by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Since early 2017 he has served on the editorial board of the dynamic new “Made by History” section of the Washington Post. He is an elected Member of the Board of Trustees of the Oregon Historical Society (2016-). Nichols also is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. Nichols is at work on a number of new research and writing projects. First, tentatively entitled Republican Revival (Oxford University Press), is a book on the early Cold War, Robert Taft, Dwight Eisenhower, the election of 1952, and the end of conservative isolationism; second, is a sweeping exploration of “American Isolationism” as part of his Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Nichols has worked extensively on the role of religion in U.S. foreign relations and international relations broadly construed. Nichols also is in the early stages of studies of the global dynamics of the Monroe Doctrine and a project on the U.S. role in the world and global anti-imperialism over the past one-hundred and fifty years.

Publications:

Dr. Nichols is the author, co-author, or editor of six books, including two forthcoming in 2021, a seventh book is tentatively scheduled for 2022, and another several book projects are currently in research, writing, or production. His most well known book is Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011, paperback in 2015), which explains the origins of modern American isolationism and the dynamic interplay of international engagement, isolationist thought, and domestic reform from the 1890s through the 1940s. Promise and Peril named a top-12 “best global book of 2011” by Bailard International/Institutional and a top-25 “overlooked political book of 2011” by the Huffington Post.

Nichols co-edited and co-authored, with Charles Mathewes, Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Nichols is Senior Editor, with David Milne, and Editor-in-Chief Timothy Lynch, of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Selected as a “best reference book of 2013” in “law and politics” by the Library Journal.

Nichols, with co-editor Nancy Unger, published what they aim to be the most up-to-date and comprehensive state of the field book (ca. 425k words) of the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: The Making of Modern America (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017).

Nichols worked with co-editors Elizabeth Borgwardt and Andrew Preston on the soon to be released, state of the field project: Rethinking American Grand Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming March 2021).

Nichols, with co-editors Danielle Holtz and David Milne, is completing Ideologies and U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming in late 2021).

Follow Dr. Nichols on Twitter.

Dr. Nichols website.

Guest Two: Dan Okrent

Elman vert 2019.jpeg — Daniel Okrent is the author of six books, most recently *The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America*. It is his third book since he concluded his term as the first Public Editor of the *New York Times* in 2005. His earlier works include *Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition*, winner of the American Historical Association’s prize for the year’s best book of American History; and *Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center*, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history.

Before his tenure at the Times, Okrent spent 13 years at Time Inc., where he was successively managing editor of Life magazine; editor of new media; and corporate editor-at-large. Earlier in his career, he worked extensively in book and magazine publishing in various editorial and executive positions. He has lectured at the Columbia School of Journalism, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (where he was the Edward R. Murrow Fellow in 2009-2010), and other universities. He is currently on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Skyscraper Museum, and is a former chairman (2003-2008) of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Follow Dan Okrent on Twitter.

Dan Okrent’s website.

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Show Notes

Overview:

Call to Action:

Further Readings

Episode 11: Woodrow Wilson Part I

Episode 9: Theodore Roosevelt