National Affairs: Helping Hand

The 300 Republican women had completed the familiar rite of gathering to take a part in politics. They had driven to downtown Seattle from their homes on Capitol Hill and Magnolia Bluff, in Laurelhurst and suburban towns. They had spent a few seconds wondering if the gas was on at home. They had walked into the basement auditorium of the Masonic Temple, trilling greetings, eyeing other women’s hats and adjusting their own. They had eaten cold cuts and chicken salad, leaned back, and surreptitiously eased the heel straps of their shoes. A certain air of solidity had crept over them as they finished their coffee and eyed the speaker of the day.

Martha Taft, as they had suspected she would, looked unexcitingly like something out of Helen Hokinson. When she rose, a homey-looking woman in a purple suit and a blue maribou toque, they applauded vigorously enough, but it was dutiful applause (after all, only the night before. Mrs. Taft and the Senator had been booed by those awful Communists). But then the atmosphere changed abruptly. A few minutes later the assembled ladies were not only applauding spontaneously but giving vent to that peculiar, breathless shriek with which U.S. women invariably express delight when gathered in groups of twelve or more.

High Old Time. By the time Martha Taft had spoken for ten minutes it was easy to understand why a Cleveland newspaper had headlined Ohio’s 1938 election news: BOB AND MARTHA TAFT ELECTED TO THE SENATE. Martha Taft had grown up amid the excitement of politics—her father, Lloyd Bowers, was Solicitor General under her husband’s father. She went to school at Rosemary Hall, Greenwich, Conn., studied at the Sorbonne, danced as a debutante at White House balls and embassy parties in Washington. She met Bob Taft in 1910, married him in 1914. But as a wife and the mother of four sons she saw no reason for abandoning her interest in politics (just as she saw no good reason for putting aside her passion for trout fishing). When her husband decided to enter public life, she was ready to play her part.

She was plainly a wise and experienced political campaigner in her own right. She was also, in contrast to her husband’s reserved and legalistic approach, graceful, friendly, bright, and capable of barbed epigram and pointed storytelling. She not only temporarily stole Bob Taft’s show (he was talking to the Rotary Club to less applause at the moment), but made her audience like him better in the process.

As she talked about “Bob” or “my husband” it was clear that she was seeking applause for him, not herself, that she admired him tremendously, and was doing nothing more than paraphrasing his arguments.

Like her husband, Martha concentrated on defending the record of the 80th Congress—and the record of Bob Taft. She explained his contribution to the Taft-Hartley Act with warm pride: “My husband could have had a nice, peaceful job as chairman of the finance committee, but he took the labor committee. There were extremists on the right and the left and there was Bob Taft in the middle.”

Highboy Government. In between chuckles she drove home some sound political advice. “The trouble with Republican meetings is that only Republicans come.” To get a Republican President to match the Republican Congress, she advised Republicans to get out and sell the party door-to-door.

Smiling, she offered the ladies some ammunition. Before the Both Congress took over, she quipped, “we had a highboy government—one bureau on top of another.”

She also made it plain that she was sure the G.O.P. would win. After 1948, she said, “fellow traveler will have a new meaning—a fellow traveling away from Washington.”