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The U. S. has a tradition that in time of great national stress, when the stars show evil portents and the U. S. is in danger, the nation always brings forth a savior, a leader, the Man On the White Horse.
Then, when the crisis is over, the ordeal survived, the strain relaxes. The parade turns a corner, the hurrahs jade away. After the Man On the White Horse always comes the Man With the Broom.
Whenever Robert Alphonso Taft, 50, of Cincinnati, Ohio, has run for office, the electorate has done two things: 1) scoff at him, 2) vote for him. Mr. Taft is no charmer, but he gets elected.
Said Calvin Coolidge: “It is an advantage to a President to know he is not a great man.” This “advantage” is a heritage of the Taft clan. The Tafts never sound their own horn. It doesn’t occur to them; besides, they are usually too busy with the next job.
This quality dour Alphonso Taft brought down from the dour uplands of Vermont in the 1830s. Grandfather Taft, Yale ’33, looking for a quiet, middle-class town in which to practice law (his goal: yearly income of $3,000 to $5,000), was much taken with Cincinnati. There he lived abstemiously, labored industriously, austerely chose himself a Vermont bride. Fanny Phelps died after bearing him five children (three died in childhood) ; and after due consideration, Grandfather Taft chose happy, loving Louise Torrey, who bore him four sons and a daughter. Second of these sons was William Howard Taft, Yale ’78, who inherited his mother’s sweet disposition and good nature. Father Taft, who became the only man in U. S. history to hold both the Presidency and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justiceship, married “fascinating Nellie” Herron of Cincinnati. She was not only fascinating but drivingly ambitious.
No Dimple. Their elder son was Robert Alphonso Taft, born Sept. 8, 1889 in a Victorian house with colored-glass windows and scroll-trimmed porches in Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills, on a bluff above the yellow Ohio River. Robert did not inherit the Taft dimple. His younger brother, Charles Phelps, got that, as well as his father’s famous ability to chuckle along with people, make friends, have fun.
Toward Washington tramped Coxey’s Army dreaming of $500,000,000 in new greenbacks; a big-jawed young Nebraskan, William Jennings Bryan, became a Presidential nominee with one speech; Eugene Debs’s strikers lit the Chicago night-sky with burning Pullman cars.
Robert was the serious one, a solemn child who vainly tried to interest his chums in chess. Chess, and the fire-horses of old Engine Company 10 were his youthful diversions—and No. 10’s firemen eventually gave him a complete list of fire signals when the family sailed for the Philippines. (Returning home alone from Manila for school, he made himself a nuisance aboard an Army transport trying to get up chess games.)
The dirty Pasig River flowed under part of the Malacañan Palace (an overgrown Filipino stilt-house) in the Philippines. From the porch the Taft boys went swimming, and there Bob was stung by a jellyfish.
Uncle Horace had founded the Taft School in Connecticut, and there Bob Taft began to roll up a record of continuous firsts that still depresses his four sons. He was first in his class at Taft, first all the way through Yale, first all the way through Harvard Law. Astigmatic, farsighted, he was more earnest than skillful at sports.
The time was fat and peaceful; sword-rattling young Wilhelm II of Germany had finally succeeded in waxing his mustache upward; no lady ever displayed more than the tip of her high-laced boot.
Not even his father’s gargantuan appetite came down to Son Bob. William Howard Taft liked a big breakfast: two oranges, a thick, juicy, twelve-ounce steak; he would sit at table eating toast and jam, drinking cups and cups of coffee, long after the others had departed. (When he was dieting, Father Taft would ask the housekeeper to cut the steak down to six ounces.) Bob Taft, somewhat to his family’s alarm, had his father’s appetite when he was a baby: to restrain him they would give him cream & sugar with his first bowl of oatmeal, milk and sugar with the second, just milk with the third. After he got his growth he settled down, became a good but not terrific trencherman.
Bob Taft, a solemn, studious boy, grew up to be stiff, shy, seemingly austere. He shrank from the role of President’s son, became more retiring than ever, dodged photographers, stayed away during campaigns, from school wrote stiff, formal replies to his father’s genial, intelligent letters on national affairs.
The young Roosevelts and Charley Taft were great friends, always in a rowdy ruckus somewhere in the White House but nobody ever said of solemn Bob Taft: “He’s a one!” or “He’s a card!” He was never one of those who sat on the great serving trays, slid bumpity-bump down the White House staircase. Yet he had fun in his quiet way. On holidays Sister Helen would line up dates, Bob Taft would come down from Yale or Harvard Law with a few friends—and there would be parties every night, breakfast rides in the morning to ancient Pierce’s Mill in Rock Creek Park. With pretty, brown-eyed Martha Bowers, daughter of then-Solicitor General Lloyd Bowers, Bob Taft danced the Boston—a modified waltz which was the Conga of its day—and with her he played charades.
No Drawbacks. In 1913 Father Taft was turned out of the White House and Son Bob was turned out of Harvard Law. Bob Taft settled in Cincinnati to practice his profession. It was a good spot for a Taft to do his lawing in.
Talk was of a match between Prince Edward of Wales and Princess Tatiana of Russia; a Princeton professor had unhorsed the bosses who had made him Governor.
Abstemious, strict Grandfather Alphonso had been a leading citizen, a legal light, a Judge, a Cabinet Minister, a Minister to Austria and Russia. Maternal Grandfather John Herron had been a topdrawer lawyer and Judge. Father William Howard had been these things locally, and more nationally. Uncle Charles Phelps Taft had married the city’s richest heiress, Annie Sinton; had organized the most prosperous newspaper, the Times-Star. In this re-assuring atmosphere, Fledgling Taft spread his legal wings and took off successfully—his first clients his uncle and aunt.
The traditional boast of many a U. S. politico has been: “. . . Up from nothing.” Bob Taft came up from plenty. Says he, who had more than one silver spoon in his cradle: “One with a family name has a lot to live up to.” But Lawyer Taft, Yale ’10, put the spoons to work. Uncle Charles had a chunk of Cincinnati’s Street Railway System, wanted the complicated setup reorganized. Specializing in dry, dull, technical cases, Bob Taft worked on this complex chore off-&-on for eleven years, finished straightening it out in 1925. In this job, as in many another since, he displayed his talent for figures, often amazing his uncle, Mathematician Louis More, dean of University of Cincinnati’s Graduate School, brother of the late Princeton Intellectual Paul Elmer More. Said Uncle Louis once: “Bob is the greatest man with figures I ever saw.” (At twelve, Bob Taft first exhibited this talent: sitting down with a collection of timetables, he mapped out all details of a European trip for his parents—a round trip of 100 days, to cost $1,000. The trip came out exactly on schedule, exactly on the figures.)
Country bumpkins and city slickers came out of Plattsburg soldiers; under the pointing finger the posters said: “Uncle Sam Needs You!”
For four years, Bob Taft grubbed earnestly in the old city firm of Maxwell & Ramsey. In 1917, he twice tried to enlist for officers’ training, was twice rejected (eyesight). He met Herbert Hoover, became assistant counsel of the U. S. Food Administration, finally went abroad with Mr. Hoover’s American Relief Administration. For his relief work in Europe he got Polish, Belgian, Finnish decorations, which he never wears.
Now out of law school came Brother Charley Taft, Yale ’18, and a new law firm, Taft & Taft, hung out its shingle in Cincinnati. Later enlarged, the firm is now Taft, Stettinius & Hollister, has six partners. Charley dropped out two years ago when he was elected to the City Council. Taking no criminal or marital cases, the Taft firm steadily built up a solid corporate practice locally (Gruen Watch, Globe-Wernicke, Cincinnati Milling Machine, etc.). Its business base was the management of estates and trusts—especially those of Uncle Charles (d. 1929) and Aunt Annie (d. 1931). Largest asset of these: the Times-Star. To Bob and Charley, Uncle Charles left 1,000 shares each, appraised at $250,000; 2,000 shares to peppery, horse-loving Cousin Hulbert Taft, who runs the paper and is one of Bob’s closest chums; and all the rest to daughters, Mrs. A. S. Ingalls of Cleveland, mother of David S. Ingalls, Bob’s campaign manager and right bower; and to Mrs. Anna Louise Semple, wife of a Latin instructor at Cincinnati University.
No analyst, casting up accounts in U. S. politics, can afford to ignore the fact that seven of the last 14 men in the White House came from Ohio. Many Washington wiseacres underestimate Bob Taft, are constantly surprised when he shows up on top in political scrimmages. What such wisemen do not realize is the depth, solidity and range of Bob Taft’s political machine-shop background. As speaker of the Ohio Legislature’s House, as a State Senator, as a precinct worker all the way up from doorbell-pulling, he long since graduated from one of the toughest political schools in the country — Ohio politics.
Raymond Moley was getting five hours sleep most nights; an old word, lager, came back into the language; the New Deal crowded Washington offices and the G.O.P. went underground.
This experience developed him slowly but certainly, even as his law practice grew. He became a master of State taxation problems, and enough of a fiscal expert to battle the 1937 Gold Clause case shrewdly all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, where he lost, 6-3.
By 1936 Bob Taft was well-enough known in Ohio to serve the Republican bosses as a dummy favorite-son candidate until they were certain the convention was set for Alf Landon of Kansas. By 1938 he was ready to go after the Senate seat of Democrat Robert J. Bulkley. But Republican State Chairman Ed Schorr had decided that hand-pumping, grinning Arthur Day, State supreme court judge, was the natural Republican opponent for Bulkley. Mr. Schorr & henchmen cold-shouldered Bob Taft ; worse, they did the same to his wife.
Bob Taft plugged ahead, in seven months spoke 600-odd times in Ohio’s 88 counties. Martha Taft had asked Boss Schorr to suggest women’s meetings where she could speak for her husband. Smoothly Chairman Schorr tried to head her off. Said Martha : “When I came out I was so boiling mad I made up my mind I’d make a speech that very night.” Learning that Judge Day was to address a Negro women’s group at a Lincoln Birthday meeting, she asked permission to speak, too. “It will have to be on Lincoln,” she was told. Martha Taft agreed, “but when I got through it was hard to tell where Lincoln left off and Bob Taft began.”
Soon Martha Taft had more speaking requests than her husband. Once her car turned over three times, as she skidded to keep from hitting a dog; leaving campaign literature strewn on the fields she drove on, spoke at a meeting, laughed: “Anyway that probably got us the S.P.C.A. vote.” Her best performance was before a crowd of coal miners: in a debate, she listened patiently while Mrs. Bulkley said, “My husband is a humble man. He has simple tastes. He is not one of these highly educated men. He is just an ordinary man —just like you and me.” Came Martha’s turn: “My husband is not a simple man. He did not start from humble beginnings. My husband is a very brilliant man. He had a fine education at Yale. . . . He has been trained well for his job. . . . Isn’t that what you prefer when you pick leaders to work for you?” She wowed the miners.
Commonsensible, low-heeled Martha Taft, who has a way of getting a stocking-run just before making a speech to low-income groups, has become a big Bob Taft asset. But his major asset is a knack of his own—a knack that has been overlooked by experts who try to account for his phenomenal political success. This is a knack of clarity. A Taft speech makes clear, clean sense. Whether the listener agrees or not, he usually admits he has heard an honest, lucid argument. In few places has the case against the New Deal been better stated than in Robert Taft’s speeches.
This power of solid factual argument stands him in poor stead as an after-dinner speaker; but it won him a Senate seat over Robert Bulkley in the November 1938 election; it made him a major Presidential candidate in his freshman year in the Senate — a record unprecedented.
No Corners. Dull, prosy, colorless, with not a tithe of Franklin Roosevelt’s great charm and personal magnetism, Bob Taft of Ohio is nevertheless today the No. 1 Republican Presidential possibility, according to the wisemen. Dopesters agree that Thomas E. Dewey looks good for the Vice-Presidential spot; that Michigan’s Senator Vandenberg is too honestly disinterested in the Presidency to command the convention; that only a miracle could give the nomination to Herbert Hoover or Wendell Willkie; that hardheaded Joe Martin of Massachusetts would still prefer the Speakership to any other job in the world. So they get around to Robert Alphonso Taft.
No purple prose has been written, or is likely to be, about Candidate Taft. He has no corners, no handles, no edges. His personal drawback and his political strength lie in the fact that he looks like a composite picture of 16,000,000 Republicans. To voters weary of charm he is as reassuring as old carpet slippers; to those weary of excitement, reform, change, he comes as gently as a soft spring rain. To voters fed up with slick politicians he stands out as a man who cannot remember names, who isn’t obsessed with handshaking, backpatting. Last week Bob Taft was still on the campaign trail, forthrightly determined that the U. S. voter will know where he stands on every issue—a determination that horrifies veteran politicos as much as would a plump for atheism. In Milwaukee Mr. Taft doubted Franklin Roosevelt’s ardor for peace—doubted, too, the President’s ardor for nonpartisanship.
Bob Taft bumbles, drops things, forgets things; poses for cameramen in an immaculate business suit 1) holding gingerly a dead turkey someone else shot, 2) mowing a lawn, 3) looking affectionately at a cow. Not since Calvin Coolidge has there been a U. S. politico who will look worse in an Indian war bonnet than Bob Taft, when, as all U. S. politicians must be, he is inducted into some tribe. To many a U. S. citizen he looks like any other U. S. citizen—a fact political historians regard as very significant. For the U. S. Presidents that have come from Ohio have been mostly good, solid Republican stuff: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Harding.
Robert Taft would fit in well in such a gallery. There is nothing unpresidential about him. He is a big, calm-looking man with a portly stomach, a pleasant baritone voice. He has large grey eyes, thinning light-brown hair, sandy eyebrows, overlarge, protruding teeth, a wide, comfortable mouth. His head, a little too small, sits awkwardly on his neck. He doesn’t smoke, drinks only an occasional highball, munches 5¢ candy bars, eats whatever is set before him, exercises only on Sunday, when he golfs from 85 to 90 on Washington’s Burning Tree course. No dude, he buys one brown suit, one blue suit, whenever he thinks of it, which is about once a year. He carries a briefcase everywhere. For Christmas Martha Taft gave him the biggest briefcase she could find—a yellow cowhide contraption that holds about 50 lbs. Like many U. S. citizens and Presidents, he likes to fish, to read detective stories. He is thrifty, careful, genial.
Bob Taft would be perfectly at home in the White House. No U. S. family has been so familiar with the Executive Mansion as the Tafts. Grandfather Alfonso first went there in Abraham Lincoln’s time, saw much of it as War Secretary and Attorney General under President U. S. Grant; Grandfather Herron was a classmate of President Benjamin Harrison, was also intimate with President Rutherford B. Hayes. Grandmother Herron, a friend of Mrs. Hayes, stayed at the White House many weeks. And from 1901, when President Theodore Roosevelt moved in, to 1913, when Father William Howard moved out, Bob Taft was a constant guest or resident there.
A witty woman who knows him well, and who once got credit for the crack that Calvin Coolidge seemed to have been weaned on a pickle, is Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Princess Alice takes Bob Taft seriously as a G.O.P. possibility. Last week she said, thinking of the possibility that Bob Taft might succeed Franklin Roosevelt : “It would be like drinking a glass of milk after taking a slug of benzedrine.”
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