President William Howard Taft.
PRESIDENT TAFT WELL UNDERSTOOD THE political hazards of his pledge to pursue tariff reform. For more than a decade, the Republican establishment had trumpeted the reigning tariff structure as the engine of American prosperity, the key to the nation’s burgeoning industry.Protectionism had become a central tenet of conservative Republican ideology. While Theodore Roosevelt had sympathized with progressive claims that high tariffs strengthened monopolies and artificially inflated prices, he had persistently evaded the issue, aware that a tariff battle would create a dangerous schism within the Republican Party, pitting western farmers against eastern manufacturers. During the final years of his administration, however, newly elected western progressives had passionately assailed the unjust advantages that the tariff granted the industrial East at the expense of their agrarian region.
As Taft took office, the battle could no longer be postponed. Sensitized to the inequities of the tariff system by his long and futile efforts to reduce the Philippine tariff, the new president was prepared to take the lead. Of all the members of Roosevelt’s cabinet, Taft had espoused the most consistently progressive views on the tariff, tenaciously advocating for revision. Duties, he argued, should be levied simply to “equal the difference between the cost of production abroad and at home.” When excessive duties were built into the tariff structure through the influence of powerful corporations, the system served only to spur monopoly, guarantee disproportionate profits, and raise prices for consumers. At Taft’s insistence, the Republican platform “unequivocally” called for a “special session of Congress” to revise the tariff.
With the Old Guard still entrenched in both Houses, the president faced formidable opposition. Genuine downward revision, reporters predicted, would only be achieved by an “uprising and demonstration of popular opinion” similar to that which had propelled railroad regulation, meat inspection, and the Pure Food and Drug Act. To prompt them to take action, conservative Republican leaders would have to conclude that nothing short of “cataclysm” would result if they failed to alter their policy.
As the tariff struggle began in earnest in the spring of 1909, no journalist was better positioned to clarify the convoluted tariff system for the public—and expose the economic disparities and suffering wrought by that system—than Ida Tarbell. Two years of research and writing had convinced her that the tariff represented “the greatest issue before the people—the question of special privilege, and unequal distribution of wealth.” She launched a passionate crusade “to humanize” the issue by dramatizing the tariff’s role in consolidating wealth and imposing serious hardships on working Americans.
That spring, Tarbell published two influential articles in The American Magazine that framed the arcane tariff schedule as a simple moral issue. In “Where Every Penny Counts” and “Where the Shoe Is Pinched,” she demonstrated how manufacturers’ profits had ballooned under the protective tariff even as the wages of ordinary Americans failed to keep pace with the rising cost of living. Protectionists claimed it hardly mattered if “this or that duty made an article cost a cent or two more at retail,” she observed; in fact, a cent or two clearly did make “a material difference” in the lives of “the vast majority of American families,” who subsisted “on $500 or less a year.” To support a family on an average wage of six or eight dollars a week, Tarbell pointed out, a man “must think before he buys a penny newspaper and he must save or plan for months to get a yearly holiday for the family at Coney Island.” Faced with such limited choices, she continued, “there is practically no possibility of a nest egg, or of schooling for the children beyond fourteen years of age.” Illness inevitably resulted in “debt or charity” for those in such dire circumstances, and “the accumulation of those things which make for comfort and beauty in a home is out of the question.” For working-class families, “every penny added to the cost of food, of coal, of common articles of clothing means simply less food, less warmth, less covering.”
Tarbell trenchantly illustrated this reality in her second article on the “vital importance” of shoes. For the average working-class family, she explained, the cost of buying and mending shoes made up more than a quarter of their total outlay for clothing. One could do without a hat, extra trousers, or a dress, she maintained, but not without footwear. “It was hard enough for the poor to buy shoes ten years ago before the Dingley tariff,” she argued, “but with every year since it has been harder.” In the last decade, the price of ordinary shoes and boots had risen 25 percent. “Why should shoes increase in cost?” she asked, pointing out that “they ought to decrease, such has been the extraordinary advance in shoe machinery and in methods.” The answer, Tarbell demonstrated, lay in the duties on hides and thread—fees that benefited the Beef Trust, the United Shoe Company, and the Leather Trust at the expense of the consumer. For years, legislators had acquiesced to these duties in return for campaign contributions and support for their local machines.
“At a time when wealth is rolling up as never before,” Tarbell concluded, “a vast number of hard-working people in this country are really having a more difficult time making ends meet than they have ever had before.” Because wage increases were not keeping pace with the escalating cost of living, the workingman was left to feel that “no matter how much he earns he will still have to spend it all in the same hard struggle to get on, that there is no such thing for him as getting ahead.” By focusing on workaday living and highlighting the immediate rather than dwelling on the abstract, Tarbell’s articles proved a revelation for many. “I never knew what the tariff meant before,” the pioneering social reformer Jane Addams told her.
DESPITE THE HEIGHTENED AWARENESS SPURRED by Ida Tarbell’s thoughtful explications, President Taft still struggled to transform that growing public sentiment into political capital. The first skirmish in the tariff battle followed immediately upon his election. During the campaign, western proponents of reform had focused their ire on Speaker Joseph Cannon, high priest of protectionism and special interests in the House. The seventy-two-year-old Speaker held the House in an autocratic grasp: no bill could reach the floor without his approval; no member could be recognized to speak without his consent. Deploying his power to appoint all Republican committee members and their chairs, he routinely rewarded conservatives and punished progressives. Conceding Cannon’s strength, Roosevelt had repeatedly bargained with him, pledging to preserve the protective tariff in return for Cannon’s cooperation in allowing anti-trust and regulatory legislation to reach the floor. During the 1908 presidential campaign, however, the tariff issue had caught fire. “Cannonism” had become a successful rallying cry in western districts, prompting the ouster of a half-dozen Old Guard supporters. After the election, a rebellious group of thirty progressive Republicans initiated a revolt, hoping to assemble a majority capable of unseating the Speaker, or at least curtailing his powers when Congress convened in mid-March 1909.
Taft seriously considered backing these “insurgents,” as Cannon’s foes became known. He had “never liked” the Speaker, considering him a vulgar reactionary who consistently opposed “all legislation of a progressive character.” Writing to Roosevelt immediately after his victory, Taft spoke of the movement to defeat Cannon’s nomination. “If by helping it I could bring it about I would do so,” he explained, “but I want to take no false step in the matter.” Roosevelt cautioned against hasty action: “I do not believe it would be well to have [Cannon] in the position of the sullen and hostile floor leader bound to bring your administration to grief, even tho you were able to put someone else in as Speaker.” Elihu Root was even more vehemently opposed to any intervention by Taft, counseling that “it would be very unfortunate to have the idea get about that you wanted to beat Cannon and are not able to do it.”
Nonetheless, Taft remained “very much disposed to fight.” Replying to Root, he cited a speech Cannon had recently delivered in Cleveland that seemed to repudiate the Republican platform’s pledge to revise the tariff. “In our anxiety to get votes,” Cannon had reportedly stated, “we sometimes put in our platform things that are not orthodox.” Such “cynical references” to platform promises could prove “enough to damn the party if they are not protested against,” Taft told Root: “I am willing to have it understood that my attitude is one of hostility to Cannon and the whole crowd unless they are coming in to do the square thing. If they don’t do it, and I acquiesce, we are going to be beaten; and I had rather be beaten by not acquiescing than by acquiescing. You know me well enough to know that I do not hunt a fight just for the fun of it, but Cannon’s speech at Cleveland was of a character that ought to disgust everybody who believes in honesty in politics and dealing with people squarely.”
To better gauge the odds of defeating Cannon, Taft consulted leading Republican editors and state officials across the country, asking them how their local congressmen would likely vote on the issue. “A new irrepressible conflict has begun in earnest,” the New York Times reported, “a conflict which has been threatening every session of Congress for the last four years, but which Mr. Roosevelt has never been able to make up his mind to undertake.” The Times predicted “a desperate fight in all probability, for Speaker Cannon and the close friends around him are not quitters. It will leave deep scars and ensure a warfare that probably will endure throughout the Taft administration.”
Roosevelt continued to caution against alienating Cannon. In a barrage of “urgent telegrams and letters,” he informed Taft that Minnesota congressman James Tawney was “very anxious” to arrange a direct conversation between the president-elect and the Speaker. Roosevelt stressed the importance of the interview, adding that he would provide “a full statement of the facts” on Cannon as soon as Taft returned to Washington from Hot Springs.
As speculation in the press intensified, a delegation of Cannon’s friends made a pilgrimage to Hot Springs to assure Taft that Cannon would “support genuine tariff revision” and “not stand in the way of carrying forward” the new president’s legislative program. He was shown a full text of Cannon’s Cleveland speech, which gave an “entirely different impression” from the troubling excerpt he had read. In fact, the Speaker had promised that within “a hundred days,” Congress would pass a new tariff law. This new law would not be “perfect,” Cannon explained, but it would be“the best revenue law ever written.”
Meanwhile, Taft had received disheartening responses to his inquiries regarding the insurgents’ prospects. On the east coast, Cannon’s support was unshakable; even in Kansas, a center of progressivism, five of eight congressmen stood with the Speaker. Taft was forced to concede that unless he personally went after Cannon “hammer and tongs,” using all the powers of his presidency to fashion a majority, Cannon would be reelected. And even if he prevailed, he would be left with the “factious and ugly Republican minority” that Roosevelt had warned of. In the end, Taft resolved to work through the existing party machinery to accomplish the passage of his legislative proposals.
In itself, Taft’s decision to relinquish the effort to oust the Speaker would have aroused little criticism; the mistake that would haunt his presidency, however, was his public declaration of surrender from Hot Springs, which immediately eliminated any advantage over Cannon. Moreover, as Taft’s biographer Henry Pringle observes, the public concession “sent a chill of discouragement over the valiant but futile band of House insurgents.” After a subsequent meeting with Cannon and Republican members of the Ways and Means Committee, Taft had further dispirited reformers by expressing full confidence in the conservative leadership’s promise “to prepare an honest and thorough revision of the present tariff.” All hope of unseating Cannon vanished. When Congress convened on March 15, 1909, the Speaker easily won reelection.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Taft’s temperament—his aversion to dissension and preference for personal persuasion—would ultimately lead him to work within the system rather than mobilize external pressure from his bully pulpit. But his conciliatory approach left his administration and the American people at the mercy of Joseph Cannon, “the most sophisticated” politician in the country, “the most familiar with every subterranean channel of politics, the most cunning in its devious ways, the most artful in the tricks of the craft.”
PROGRESSIVES NEVERTHELESS REMAINED HOPEFUL THAT the new president would provide vital leadership to combat the special interests controlling the congressional tariff-making process. On March 16, 1909, they waited expectantly for the president’s message, which would signal the start of the special session. Theodore Roosevelt had used this forum as a powerful tool to focus public attention on his legislative agenda, spending weeks preparing each message. He had dictated “page after page, taking a theme and working it up, his mind glowing with the delight of expression.” Though no one anticipated such a definitive or provocative communication from William Howard Taft, his decision to speak about the tariff in his first presidential message augured well. “The Senate and House were crowded,” Robert La Follette recalled. “The attention was keen everywhere. The clerk began to read. At the end of two minutes he stopped. There was a hush, an expectation that he would resume. But he laid aside the paper.”
As realization spread that the clerk was finished, one journalist reported, “statesmen almost fell out of their chairs.” The presidential message, expected to be “historic,” contained only 340 words. In truth, Taft had composed the entire text in fifteen minutes that morning. The address sounded “no clarion call to the people” and made “no allusion, direct or indirect, to the question of what kind of changes should be made.” He simply and straightforwardly called on Congress to “give immediate consideration” to the tariff. Having already discussed the principles upon which revision “should proceed,” Taft believed it unnecessary to reiterate his position. Without an inherent “flair for the dramatic” and hoping he might “avoid the bitter feuding with Congress that had marked Roosevelt’s last days in office,” he had chosen to launch his administration with “no loud noises, no explosions, no disturbances of the atmosphere.”
Taft understood, he later said, that it was vital for a president to communicate “the facts and reasons sustaining his policies.” Cultivating good relations with the press afforded “a great advantage” to a leader. Nevertheless, he confessed, from his first days in office he was “derelict” in his use of the bully pulpit. The weekly press conferences he had promised soon became a chore. “There was none of the give and take, the jokes, and the off-the-record comments” that had characterized Roosevelt’s interactions with the journalists. Before long, Taft discontinued the weekly sessions, attributing his discomfort with the press to his years on the bench, where he was unaccustomed to freely expanding upon his positions. “When the judgment of the court was announced,” he explained, “it was supposed that all parties in interest would inform themselves as to the reasons for the action taken.”
Many of the reporters were eager to help him, Taft later acknowledged, “but they properly complained that I did not help them to help me.” In the spring of 1909, William Allen White, Ray Baker, and Ida Tarbell all signaled their readiness to support and publicize tariff revision, postal savings, and the rest of the president’s progressive agenda. “If ever at any time I may serve you in any way,” White wrote after the inaugural, “kindly let me know.” Taft thanked him for his offer, and the two men exchanged a few letters, but the president never found a way to properly utilize the Kansas editor. “I am not constituted as Mr. Roosevelt is,” he explained to White, “in being able to keep the country advised every few days of the continuance of the state of mind in reference to reforms. It is a difference in temperament. He talked with correspondents a great deal. His heart was generally on his sleeve, and he must communicate his feelings. I find myself unable to do so. After I have made a definite statement, I have to let it go at that, until the time for action arises.”
Baker, too, hoped to assist the president’s endeavor to revise the tariff. “I knew what a hard fight he had ahead of him, and I wanted to help him, in my own small way, if I could, with my pen,” the journalist remembered. Baker had become increasingly disillusioned with Roosevelt’s failure to confront the issue. “Although the tariff storm was steadily rising,” he lamented, “Roosevelt said not so much as a single word on the subject. Though the issue was driving his party straight upon the reefs, he offered no counsel, suggested no remedy. He left the brunt of the storm for poor Mr. Taft to meet.” Now that the new president had made tariff reform his signature issue, Baker was anxious to meet with him and see how he might aid the cause.
An interview was arranged not long after the special legislative session had commenced. The Cabinet Room was filled with people waiting to see the president. Emerging from his private office, Taft asked that Baker “remain to the last,” so they would have an opportunity to talk. “I had liked him on previous occasions when I had met him,” Baker recalled. Now, watching “his frank, free, whole-hearted way of greeting his visitors,” his expansive manner of draping “one of his great arms over the shoulder of a congressman,” the journalist liked him “better than ever.” Entering the private office where he had previously met with Roosevelt, Baker was struck immediately by the contrast. The small room had formerly exuded “the air of a quiet study.” Books of history, works of fiction, and volumes of poetry had been strewn upon the table, “a riding crop and a tennis racket leaning in the corner.” Now, Taft had transformed the study into a staid law office: “On all sides of the room were cases filled with law-books, nothing but law books.” The shift in decor was “not without significance,” Baker concluded, revealing “the legal mind” of the new occupant, a temperament desiring “everything carried forward quietly; according to the rules of the court,” without “emotional appeals” to the public.
Initially fearful that the new president’s “dislike for publicity” would prevent him from mobilizing public opinion to pressure Congress, Baker was “impressed” by “the perfect freedom” with which Taft discussed the tariff. “He outlined his position with a degree of frankness and earnestness that left in my mind no doubt of his essential sincerity,” Baker remarked, noting that the president evinced an “easy optimism” that admitted no doubt about the eventual outcome. “I went away from the White House that day fully convinced that Mr. Taft not only would do what he said he would, regarding the tariff, but that he could do it.” In the wake of this encouraging visit, however, Taft never called on Baker as the battle dragged on and the prospects for significant revision diminished.
No journalist fathomed the history of corporate efforts to evade downward tariff revision better than Ida Tarbell. As the special session was getting under way, she published a revealing article called “Juggling with the Tariff” that used the example of the wool schedule to illustrate the arcane tariff-making process. “Fifty years ago wool was disposed of in perhaps fifty words, which anybody could understand,” she wrote; “to-day it takes some three thousand, and as for intelligibility, nobody but an expert versed in the different grades of wools, of yarns, and of woolen articles could tell what the duty really is.” If Congress actually relied on such “disinterested experts,” the process might nevertheless produce a decent tariff; instead, Tarbell explained, “Congress consults the wool-growers, the top-maker, the spinner and the weaver, and these gentlemen, being particularly human, each asks for an amount which will give him the advantage in the business—and he who is cleverest gets it.” Not surprisingly, those who secured the desired duties also happened to be the largest campaign contributors to the congressmen and senators on the relevant committees. “Mr. Taft is right,” she declared, laying out a blueprint of necessary proceedings for reform: “What is wanted in making the present bill is evidence—evidence of the cost of production here and abroad, gathered not by the interested, but by the disinterested, not by clerks, but by experts. When provision has been made for obtaining that, the first step toward putting an end to the present tariff juggling will have been taken.”
Throughout the spring, Tarbell remained hopeful that the new president’s leadership would help secure the first genuine revision. She considered William Howard Taft “one of the most kindly, modest, humorous, philosophical of human beings.” At a cabinet dinner shortly after the election, she found herself seated next to him. “There was something very lovable about the way the President talked of his election—not at all of any pride or pleasure he had taking the place,” but rather of the deep pleasure it had afforded his family. With her warm feelings toward Taft and passion for tariff reform, Tarbell would undoubtedly have supported the president in much the same way Baker had helped Roosevelt during the battle for railroad regulation—sharing extensive research, providing advance copies of upcoming articles, and collaborating through subsequent conversations. Yet there is no record that the president ever followed up their dinner meeting with correspondence or an invitation to the White House.
THE LEGISLATIVE BATTLE PLAYED OUT in three acts. Deliberations began in the House and moved on to the Senate, culminating in a conference committee to reconcile the bills produced by each chamber. Early on, Cannon and Aldrich advised Taft to wait until the final conference committee stage to exert his influence. Trusting that the two men would honor the party’s pledge to revise the tariff downward, Taft agreed “to keep his distance” from the congressional deliberations. If adjustments were necessary, he could make a personal appeal afterward, persuading each side to do what was best for both party and country.
“I have got to regard the Republican party as the instrumentality through which to try to accomplish something,” he explained to William Allen White, when cautioned that public sentiment in the West had turned against the traditional party leadership. Indeed, the resentment against Cannon and Aldrich was so strong, another friend warned, that “no matter what tariff bill passes, or what you do, you are bound to be soundly abused.” Taft remained imperturbable in the face of such admonitions. “I am here to get legislation through,” he countered, “not to satisfy particular parts of the country.”
Taft considered the Payne bill, passed by the House on the evening of April 9, “a genuine effort in the right direction,” though reductions were “not as great” as he anticipated. The bill put hides, oil, coal, tea, and coffee on the free list and reduced the duties on lumber, scrap iron, and a host of other items. To Taft’s disappointment, the controversial wool schedule was not changed. The combination of “the Western wool growers and the Eastern wool manufacturers,” he lamented, rendered it “impossible” to get lower duties “through either the Committee or the House.” The bill also made what the president considered “inappropriate” increases in food, spices, mustard, gloves, and hosiery. Despite these shortcomings, the free trade Evening Post judged the Payne bill “a more enlightened and promising measure than any tariff ever fathered by the Republican party.” For the first time, the Post acknowledged, “the forgotten consumer is given a thought.”
If the Senate retained all the reductions in the House bill and struck out the higher rates on food, hosiery, and gloves, Taft told the New York Times, the final product “would be satisfactory to him.” He would not engage in a struggle with Congress “at this early stage.” The measure had passed the House with an almost straight party-line vote of 217 to 161, a good omen for Republican unity. Now it was “up to the Senate”—or, as many believed, to a single senator. “The House makes the tariff,” the New York Press quipped. “Senator Aldrich, pretty much single-handed, remakes it.”
Taft had reason to be skeptical of Nelson Aldrich. He had witnessed the Senate leader’s machinations during Roosevelt’s fight to regulate the railroads and blamed Aldrich for the repeated failure to reduce the tariff on imports from the Philippines. Initial reports from the Finance Committee indicated that the senator had crafted hundreds of amendments to the House bill, the great majority cleverly constructed to raise, not lower, duties. “I fear Aldrich is ready to sacrifice the party, and I will not permit it,” Taft told his secretary, George Meyer. Even more troubling, Aldrich soon openly revealed his antagonism to the president’s agenda. On April 22, a scant two weeks after the Senate had taken up the Payne bill, Aldrich stood on the Senate floor and asked, “Where did we ever make the statement that we would revise the tariff downward?” This was the time when Taft should have summoned the press and upbraided Aldrich and his reactionary allies. But whereas Roosevelt spoiled for dramatic fights, public confrontation was not in the new president’s disposition. “There is no use trying to be William Howard Taft with Roosevelt’s ways,” he conceded.
While Taft hesitated to challenge Aldrich openly, La Follette, Beveridge, Nelson, and a small group of progressive Republicans mobilized for a major intraparty battle against the Senate leader. Aware that Aldrich had abundant experience in devising obscure classifications for each of the 4,000 duties in the tariff schedule, they agreed to concentrate on a few major products. For efficiency, they divided the daunting research: Dolliver chose cotton, La Follette selected wool, A. B. Cummins focused on metal and glass, and Joseph Bristow tackled lead and sugar. Time was short, for Aldrich was determined to move the bill through the upper chamber as quickly as possible. “It has been tariff, tariff, all the time, literally morning, noon and night,” Lodge reported to Roosevelt, complaining, “I have never been so worked in my life.” It was often past midnight when the insurgents left their offices, only to continue sifting through hundreds of pages of material at home until the small hours of the morning. On weekends, they gathered in Albert Beveridge’s apartment, sharing information and discussing strategy.
In private meetings, Taft encouraged the insurgents to “go ahead, criticize the bill, amend it, cut down the duties—go after it hard,” promising, “I will keep track of your amendments. I will read every word of the speeches you make, and when they lay that bill before me, unless it complies with the platform, I will veto it.” Had the president truly followed the devastating critique presented in the insurgents’ extended speeches, he would have been far better equipped to influence the final shape of the bill. At the close of a harried day, however, Taft wanted nothing more than to provide Nellie with comfort and companionship, patiently working to help her regain her speech. By June, he confessed to a group of woolen manufacturers that he was “bewildered by the intricacies of the tariff measure” and would have more confidence if he possessed “more technical knowledge.”
The Senate debate dragged on, becoming increasingly bitter and unprofitable. The insurgents blasted Aldrich and his lieutenants as “reactionary tools of the trusts and eastern corporations”; the Senate leader, in turn, accused the insurgents of treachery to the Republican Party. During one savage indictment of the cotton schedule, Aldrich attempted to bolt from the chamber. “The Senator will not turn his back upon what I have to say here without taking the moral consequences,” Dolliver shouted at him. Taft worried that the insurgents were becoming “irresponsible,” exposing the party’s rift to the nation, and making compromise impossible.
Aldrich himself, the shrewdest and most discerning political animal in the Senate, knew precisely where to yield and where to hold fast. He bartered reductions on some schedules for increases in others, confident that in the end, the bill would emerge essentially his own. William Howard Taft was the only real obstacle that Aldrich faced. The president possessed the power to mobilize public opposition, use patronage as a club, and ultimately to withhold his signature from a bill. Accordingly, Aldrich set to work on the good-natured Taft. He spent relaxing mealtime hours repeatedly assuring him that the final tariff bill would be worthy of his support. On a number of items, Aldrich acknowledged, the Senate had restored duties cut by the House. When the bill reached the joint committee, however, he promised to “confer” with the president, assuring him that his suggestions would carry “great influence.” Knowing Taft’s enduring allegiance to the Philippines, he guaranteed that the islands would finally see the reductions Taft had long advocated. Moreover, he claimed to accept the president’s plan for a tariff commission composed of experts who would furnish objective information during future debates. Most importantly, the senator pledged that once the tariff was settled, he and his lieutenants would cooperate to move forward the rest of the legislative program outlined in Taft’s inaugural address relating to trusts, interstate commerce, postal savings, and conservation—all considered vital to the “general carrying out of the Roosevelt policies.”
By early summer, as the futility of the insurgents’ struggle on the Senate floor grew increasingly apparent, newspapers called on the president to intervene. “Mr. Taft is not proving a courageous captain,” the New York American charged, extending the metaphor to suggest a purloined presidency: “His course was clearly charted and the prospect at the outset was for a quick and fair voyage. But he has surrendered the command to Senator Aldrich, and the latter, as was to be expected, is steering the vessel into pirate-infested seas.” The president’s sympathizers argued that it was premature “to form definite conclusions until results begin to show,” suggesting that Taft’s benign temperament and beaming smile might well “cloak a determination as unrelenting as Mr. Roosevelt’s own.”
In mid-June, Taft finally abandoned his “hands off” approach to the legislature, sending a special message to Congress on an issue intimately connected to tariff reduction. To balance the projected loss of federal revenue resulting from overall reductions, some additional form of taxation would be necessary. The House had proposed an inheritance tax, but the Senate roundly objected “on the ground that the States—some thirty-six of them—had already adopted inheritance taxes, and this would be a double tax.” Hoping to resolve this contentious standoff, Taft called on Congress to pass both a tax on corporations and a constitutional amendment establishing an income tax. In principle, the president supported the progressives’ preference for a bill to impose an immediate federal income tax. But in practice, he feared that the conservative Supreme Court, which had ruled the measure unconstitutional just a decade earlier, would refuse to “reverse itself,” exposing the Court to severe criticism at a time when its reputation was “already at a low ebb.” A constitutional amendment granting Congress power to levy an income tax would settle the question for good.
As he pursued his tax agenda with Aldrich, Taft engaged in “some pretty shrewd politics.” He met individually with members of the Finance Committee and “committed them separately” to both tax propositions before dispatching his message to Congress. The corporate tax, he persuasively argued, would simultaneously provide needed revenue and empower the federal government to oversee the transactions of a wide range of corporations. It would “go a great way” toward securing the protection from “illegitimate schemes” and anti-trust violations that Roosevelt had long hoped to provide. During their previous conversations, Aldrich had reluctantly accepted the corporation tax, thinking that Taft had been persuaded to drop the income tax amendment. But with the president’s support, Congress passed both measures. “Just when they thought they had him sleeping,” Archie Butt observed, “he showed them he was never so alive in his life.” Later that summer, the states began ratification of what would eventually become the sixteenth constitutional amendment; the process was completed before Taft’s term came to an end.
With the revenue question resolved, the Senate’s tariff bill passed just before midnight on July 8 by a margin of 9 votes. The Senate bill made some reductions that the House had neglected, but also restored duties on hides and raw materials and left intact the controversial wool and cotton schedules. The Democratic vote along party lines was expected; that ten Republican senators followed La Follette in joining the Democrats made headlines. These dissenting votes revealed the very party split Theodore Roosevelt had feared, and long carefully avoided, further complicating matters for Taft.
As the conference committee began its deliberations, Taft remained hopeful that he could persuade the dozen conferees to combine the best elements of both bills in a final product that both progressives and conservatives could support. Newspapers across the country called on the president to take charge. “Congress has had its inning,” the Baltimore Sun observed. “It is now the President’s inning, and he has the masses of the people behind him.” The Boston Journal declared it time for the president “to make good,” calling the proceedings “the greatest crisis of his career as Chief Magistrate.” The final tariff legislation, press reports agreed, would be a defining moment in his young presidency. “If he allows a bill to come from conference which disappoints the country,” the Journal concluded, “he will have forfeited a large share of the stock of popular confidence with which he was invested when he became President.”
In the days that followed, Butt observed, Taft “used the White House as a great political adjunct.” He invited Payne to dinner one night and Aldrich the next; both men dined with the president the following evening, then retired to the terrace where they continued their conversation until long after midnight. The president put his yacht “at the disposal of the conferees in the hope that they might take a comfortable trip down the Chesapeake and adjust some matters under the influence of such a favorable environment.” He took breakfasts with the insurgents, lunches with the standpatters, and late evening automobile rides with Speaker Cannon.
Throughout these intensive negotiations, Taft found time for almost daily letters to Nellie. He was “longing” for her company, he assured her, and would proceed to Beverly the moment the tariff struggle ended. In the interim, he was “delighted” that Bob and Helen had arrived. “I hope that you will feel more like making the effort to talk with them than you have heretofore,” he cajoled tenderly, “because it is practice that brings about the changes you seek.” The pace of recovery might be frustrating, he acknowledged, but he predicted that progress would come “by jerks.” Meanwhile, she was fortunate to enjoy the cooling onshore wind. “Last night was as hot a night as I have ever passed in Washington,” he told her. “I slept in three beds, and changed because each time I waked up I found myself so bathed in perspiration that the bed was uncomfortable.”
Taft’s stream of letters, continuing through July and into the second week of August, provide insight into his strategy during the final stage of the tariff battle. The newspapers, he explained, had overstated the increases in the Senate bill, leading the public to view “the Senate bill as a very bad bill, and the House bill, by contrast as a good one.” The primary difference between the two, he told Nellie, lay in the Senate’s treatment of raw materials. If he could make the conferees return raw materials and hides to the free list and reduce the lumber rates, he believed he could “reconcile the country to the view that a substantial step downward has been taken.”
On July 16, Taft made his first public move to influence the legislative process. Since he had called Congress into special session four months earlier, the president had patiently allowed lawmakers to work their will. Now, as tensions escalated within the conference committee, he issued a forceful statement that “he was committed to the principle of downward revision.” Unless he was presented with evidence that the producers of oil, coal, or hides were unable “to compete successfully, without reduction of wages, then they did not need a duty and their articles should go on the free list.” He understood that such action might hurt politicians in specific districts, but “with the whole people as his constituency,” the president was obliged to provide a “broader point of view.” The insurgents were “jubilant.” Republican senator Bristow of Kansas commented that the president’s statement “greatly strengthens the hands of the progressives.” Congratulatory messages flooded the White House and newspapers predicted that the final product would be “the Taft tariff bill—not the Payne or the Aldrich, or the Payne-Aldrich bill.”
Nellie was relieved to hear that her husband had intervened at last. “I see today you made a statement as to what you were going to stand for,” she wrote. “I hope you won’t have to come down much on it dear.” While Nellie’s handwriting remained poor, her desire to support her husband was fiercely conveyed. Indeed, as the trials of Taft’s presidency commenced in earnest, the loss of her acute judgment and indomitable presence was a source of sorrow and frustration for both of them. For the first time in their marriage, Nellie was distracting Will from the difficulties he faced rather than offering sound guidance and solace.
The tariff situation, Taft acknowledged to his brother Horace, was “a good deal more of a muddle than the papers make out.” Despite repeated promises to follow the president’s lead in the conference proceedings, Aldrich refused Taft’s request to commit himself “in writing” concerning free hides and raw materials. Although Taft had developed genuine respect for the Senate leader during the eighteen-week ordeal, he understood that he was dealing with “an expert and acute politician” and that he might “be deceived.” He was particularly worried about the cotton schedule of duties. “Aldrich insists that it is not an increase,” he confided to Nellie, “but I fear he is not borne out by the facts.” Meanwhile, Speaker Cannon threatened to defeat the entire bill unless the conferees agreed to the House-sponsored duties on gloves and hosiery. Apparently, Aldrich explained to Taft, the Speaker felt he “owed his victory” to the glove manufacturer Lucius Littauer, “and therefore it was a personal matter with him” to keep the measure intact. The Speaker’s blatant demand outraged Taft. “It is the greatest exhibition of tyranny that I have known,” he declared. “Aldrich and I continue to be good friends although we differ somewhat, but he is a very different man from the Speaker.”
On July 28, Taft sent an ultimatum to the conference committee, insisting that he would not sign any bill that did not contain both the free raw materials agreed upon by the House and the Senate reductions in gloves and hosiery. “They have my last word,” he told Archie Butt, before departing for a round of golf followed by a dinner party. Ten minutes into dinner, Butt recorded, “the message came by phone from the White House that the conferees had agreed and had accepted the rates as laid down by the President. For a moment, Taft remained perfectly silent, staring incredulously at the paper before him.” Then, smiling broadly, he shared his satisfaction: “Well, good friends, this makes me very happy.” When the round of congratulations ended and the party drew to a close, Butt accompanied Taft to the White House. “There was no one waiting for him,” Butt observed. He was “lonelier in his victory than he had been in his fight.”
On the afternoon of Thursday, August 5, the president arrived to sign the Payne-Aldrich bill. The sun was shining on the Capitol; the president wore a “cut away suit” and carried “a straw hat in his hand,” appearing “fairly radiant” to the assembled spectators. Cabinet officers along with members of Congress filled the president’s chamber, where Taft’s relief and good humor were evident to all. “Do you think I ought to adjourn Congress before I sign it?” he joked. “I certainly do not,” Aldrich replied, as the audience broke into laughter.
For weeks, correspondents had speculated about the possibility of a presidential veto. Progressives, still desperately unhappy with the bill despite the last-minute improvements, had called upon Taft to reject this version and start over in the full session the following year. Well aware that he “could make a lot of cheap capital” and “popularize [himself] with the masses with a declaration of hostilities toward Congress,” Taft felt that such an action “would greatly injure the party.” Moreover, he was delighted by many aspects of the bill, including the reduced duties on raw materials, the formation of the tariff commission, the corporate tax, the income tax amendment, and the free trade provision for the Philippines. At this juncture, he had worked too hard and too long with congressional leaders to turn against them.
At six minutes after five o’clock, the president signed the Payne-Aldrich bill. Three minutes later, he appended his signature to a companion bill that established free trade with the Philippines, fulfilling a promise made long before. “A broad smile of satisfaction overspread his face,” one reporter observed, “and he wrote his name with a flourish not in evidence when he signed the other bill.”
In the midst of the ceremony, Butt recorded, “a terrific thunderstorm broke out.” The room suddenly darkened. “Heavy black clouds rolled up, and the electric lights had to be turned on. Peals of thunder and vivid flashes of lightning came from the sky.” Correspondents straightaway declared the storm a portent, auguring the “storm of protest” that would inevitably follow as the public understood the disappointing limitations of the bill. The measure was not “perfect,” Taft admitted in a public statement, but it nevertheless represented “the result of a sincere effort on the part of the Republican party to make a downward revision and to comply with the promises of the platform.” Later that night, he celebrated with cigars and wine at a White House dinner. “Practically all the prominent figures in the tariff fight” attended, the New York Times noted—“except the ‘insurgents’ in both branches of Congress.” Trusting that the animosities of the debate would soon be forgotten, the president expressed sincere thanks to every member who had helped steer the measure through “its long and stormy journey.”
Public reaction to Taft’s role in the passage of the tariff bill was mixed. The New York Tribune offered a positive assessment, claiming that his “patient leadership” had “borne fruit in the many material concessions forced from the Senate,” easing the way “for intelligent and fair-minded tariff legislation in the future.” The New York American was less optimistic; while conceding that the president had made the final bill “less shocking,” it insisted that slight improvements to a bad bill did not relieve him of his obligation to carry out his party’s pledge. A tariff law that retained and even increased duties on “the necessities of the common people,” such as cotton and wool, many editorials proclaimed, could only be judged an “empty victory.” Most agreed that the president had “vindicated his personal sincerity,” but the fact that “he erred in his strategy” could not be denied. It was “his own fault,” the New York Times charged, that the final result had fallen short of his promised reform. “It is clear that he made the mistake of holding aloof too long; that he waited until after the horse was stolen before locking the stable door.”
THE DAY AFTER SIGNING THE bill, Taft departed for Beverly. He planned to spend five relaxing weeks with Nellie and the children before embarking on a two-month tour of the West. As the presidential train pulled into tiny Montserrat Station on the edge of town, Taft was thrilled to see Nellie waiting to greet him. The train had barely “come to a standstill,” a reporter for the New York Times noted, “before he ran down the steps of the observation platform,” pushing his way through the “enthusiastic” crowd to reach his wife. He embraced her with kisses “which could be heard by everyone present.” While the president and his family motored to their seaside cottage, members of the White House staff drove to the office suites arranged at the Board of Trade building in Beverly. Once Taft escaped to the Myopia Hunt Golf Course that afternoon, the Baltimore Suncorrespondent discerned an unmistakable message in his expression: “If anybody says the word tariff to me within the space of several days he will get hit with a golf stick.”
Taft soon settled into a pleasant routine. After working with his secretary or meeting with visitors in the morning, he played a round of golf, returned to his papers and documents in early afternoon, and then gave “the rest of the day” to Nellie. He sat with her on the veranda, telling stories “to make her forget her illness,” and when breezes cooled the late afternoons, he accompanied her on long drives in the countryside and along the shore. Seated beside his wife in the back of the open touring car, Taft directed the chauffeur to travel “over every beautiful road,” trying each day “to find some new and pleasant route.” They always returned from these forty- or fifty-mile excursions by seven-thirty, when their children joined them for “the family dinner hour” and everyone exchanged stories about the day’s activities.
Taft watched the weeks slip by with growing dread, aware that at the end of his holiday his 13,000-mile western tour would commence. “If it were not for the speeches, I should look forward with the greatest pleasure to this trip,” he told Captain Butt. “But without the speeches there would be no trip, and so there you are.” During the Beverly respite, Taft had hoped to prepare four basic speeches, but as the end of August approached, he had not drafted a single one. “I would give anything in the world if I had the ability to clear away work as Roosevelt did,” he confessed. “I have never known any one to keep ahead of his work as he did. It was a passion with him. I am putting off these speeches from day to day, and the result will be that I shall have to slave the last week I am here and get no enjoyment out of life at all.” Three days before the trip began, Taft was still unprepared. “I do not know exactly what to say or how to say it,” he told a friend. “I shall stagger through the matter some way, but not in any manner, I fear, to reflect credit on the Administration.”
Before Taft set out on his trip, he explained to reporters that he hoped to “take the people into his confidence regarding the tariff contest.” He would travel from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, where rebellion against the Republican Old Guard and the tariff was “rampant.” He was optimistic that straightforward conversation with his critics might “prepossess them in favor of his standard.” He would readily acknowledge that “the bill was unsatisfactory in many ways,” but insisted that “it was the best he could obtain from the Congress under the circumstances.” A future fight for deeper reductions loomed, for Taft believed that the American people had “learned a great deal about the tariff” and were prepared to elect new representatives pledged to remedy the “shortcomings” in the present bill. Most important, Taft believed this comprehensive tour would allow him to engage directly with “tens and hundreds of thousands” of his “fellow citizens,” creating a “personal touch” between people in all sections of the country and their president.
In his strategy to realize this ambitious agenda, Taft stumbled badly from the outset. He opened his speaking tour at a black-tie banquet sponsored by the Boston Chamber of Commerce. The audience of nearly 2,000 included “cabinet members, diplomats, congressmen, clergymen and distinguished business leaders.” The diners greeted him with hearty applause, but soon settled into a “grim silence” when he announced that he would refrain from any tariff discussion in order “to leave something” for future audiences. He chose instead to expound upon the Monetary Commission, appointed by Congress in the wake of the 1907 Panic. Chaired by Nelson Aldrich, the commission was leaning toward “a central bank” with sufficient reserves to meet future financial crises. The president characterized Aldrich as “one of the ablest statesmen in financial matters in either house,” a leader eager “to crown his political career” with the creation of “a sound and safe monetary and banking system.” While Aldrich would one day be credited as the “Father of the Federal Reserve Banking System,” he was then regarded throughout the West as a servant of special privilege and the chief architect of the disappointing tariff bill. Taft’s inept decision to lionize the senator in his very first speech cast a shadow on his tour before it had even started.
The president’s train traveled from Boston to Illinois, making short stops along the way. Reaching Chicago that evening, he spoke at Orchestra Hall, where the massive crowd gave him a hearty reception. At Milwaukee the next day, he detailed his plans for postal savings legislation and dedicated a building in La Crosse before moving on to Winona, a small Minnesota city on the banks of the Mississippi, where he finally delivered his first statement on the tariff.
The choice of Winona, home to Representative James Tawney, was dictated, one correspondent noted, by Taft’s “omnipresent good nature . . . his most endearing trait.” Minnesota was a “hotbed of insurgency.” Tawney, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, was the only member of the ten-person state delegation who had voted for the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill. The legislation was so unpopular in Minnesota that Tawney was in danger of losing his seat in the next election. Republican leaders in the House had implored the president to present a strong defense of Tawney’s vote in the congressman’s home district.
Though Taft knew that his first major speech on the tariff would be widely reported, he continued to procrastinate on the necessary preparation. The day before the scheduled address, he confessed his anxiety to Nellie: “Hope to be able to deliver a tariff speech at Winona but it will be a close shave.” On the train from La Crosse to Winona, he finally settled down in his private stateroom to work. He had “a mass of facts and figures before him,” along with a lengthy statement prepared by Representative Payne. Two stenographers stood ready to take dictation. A draft was completed when the train reached Winona at eight o’clock that evening, but there was no time to solicit comments or make revisions. “Speech hastily prepared,” he telegraphed Nellie, “but I hope it may do some good.”
Speaking for over an hour, Taft touted the bill’s merits and admitted its faults, particularly acknowledging its failure to reduce the wool schedule. Had he left the matter there, promising to revisit the tariff in the next congressional session, the speech would have stirred scant criticism. Instead, the president pressed on with a clumsy argument to vindicate the embattled Tawney. “What was the duty of a Member of Congress,” he asked, who favored more dramatic reform but realized the genuine benefits of compromise? Taft was “glad to speak” in support of Tawney’s decision to vote for the bill. In certain situations, party members had to “surrender their personal predilections” for the sake of unity. He would not criticize those Republican legislators who felt the divide between their desired course and the current bill “so extreme” that they “must in conscience abandon the party.” In the end, however, he concurred with Representative Tawney that party unity trumped specific reductions “in one or two schedules.” Party solidarity was essential to establishing the broader regulatory package that would “clinch the Roosevelt policies.” This lumbering argument was effectively a reprise of Taft’s earlier justification for his own decision against a veto. The real self-inflicted wound occurred in his twenty-four-word verdict on the bill itself: “On the whole,” he concluded, “I am bound to say that I think the Payne tariff bill is the best bill that the Republican party ever passed.”
This succinct, ill-considered statement made headlines across the country, obscuring the more nuanced argument presented in the president’s address. By stating “without hesitation” that the bill represented the Republicans’ signal legislative achievement, the New York Times charged, William Taft “has decided to abandon the cause of tariff reform.” A majority of editorials echoed this view. “Western Republicans have made up their minds that they are not going to be ruled by New England,” the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Tribune observed. “Instead of softening the antagonism between the two factions of his party, he has very clearly intensified it.” His blundering Winona speech, the Indianapolis Star declared, proved that the president was “out of touch with American public sentiment on the tariff question.” Even Horace Taft concurred with his brother’s critics. “I did not write to you about it,” he told Will, “because my secretary is a lady and no language that suited the speech could be dictated. I will swear at you about it when I see you.”
In Minnesota, Taft’s “commendation” of Tawney was widely interpreted as an effort to undermine insurgent members of the state delegation. This surge of public resentment rekindled a sharp nostalgia for Taft’s predecessor. “Theodore Roosevelt’s good fortune has not deserted him,” theNew York Times observed. “The stars in their courses seem to fight for him. If he still cherishes an ambition to return to the White House, the path has been opened to him by President Taft, and no thoroughfare could be more inviting or easier to travel.” If Roosevelt were to return and proclaim the tariff a failure to honor his party’s pledge, the Times added, there would be no way of staying “the overwhelming demand” for his renomination in 1912. In actuality, Roosevelt fully endorsed the Payne-Aldrich tariff. “You have come out as well as we could hope on the tariff question,” he told Lodge in a private letter. Like Taft, he regarded the corporate tax as a critical achievement, for it permanently established “the principle of national supervision.” When Lodge lauded the critical role Nelson Aldrich had played in the passage of the bill, Roosevelt offered no objection. “I never appreciated his ability so fully before,” Lodge wrote, calling Aldrich “a man of real power and force.” Roosevelt replied that he was not “surprised” by Lodge’s admiration, noting that his own interchanges with Aldrich gave him “a steadily higher opinion of him.” Roosevelt remained, of course, 10,000 miles away in “the wilds of Africa.” None of these comments became public, and western insurgents continued to enshrine him as the exemplar of true reform, projecting their dissenting views of the tariff onto the former president.
Despite the onslaught of criticism, Taft trusted that the public would ultimately recognize his Winona speech as a “truthful statement.” Indeed, he insisted, compromise was “the only ground upon which the party [could] stand with anything like a united force and win victories.” He remained convinced that the insurgents would relent when Congress convened in December, and began work on his proposed reform package to strengthen control over corporate interests. In Iowa and California, he delivered rousing speeches designed to regain the confidence of the reformers. “Of course we want prosperity,” Taft assured them, “but we wish prosperity in such a way . . . so that everybody will get his share, and that it shall not be confined to a few who monopolize the means of production or the means of transportation, and thus prevent that equality of distribution which we all like to see.”
Indeed, it appeared the hostility might dissipate as the crowds grew in size and enthusiasm along the president’s route. Nearly 7,000 people cheered him at the Armory in Portland; in Phoenix, he spoke “practically to the entire town of 20,000 people”; at the Seattle Exposition grounds, 80,000 poured through the gates. “Winning Taft Smile Spreads Radiance,” the local paper in Albuquerque declared. “Taft’s personality again has stood him in good stead,” chimed the Chicago Tribune. “The distrust has faded.” It was clear to those inside his administration that the president’s desire to connect with the citizenry was unfeigned. He “really and sincerely likes people,” Archie Butt observed. “He likes different types and he enjoys studying them. Whereas most people in his position try to avoid handshaking,” the president “will stop a dozen times on his way in and out of a room to shake hands with anybody who calls to him.”
Scarcely absent from Taft’s side for the duration of the tour, Butt felt “more real affection” for the new chief than ever before. He noticed that Taft showed anger only on a few occasions when he had been savaged in newspaper editorials. Incensed, Taft gave instructions to stop sending him such clippings, particularly from the free trade New York Times. “They are prompted by such wild misconceptions and such a boyish desire to point the finger of scorn, that I don’t think their reading will do me any particular good,” he wrote, “and would only be provocative of that sort of anger and contemptuous feeling that does not do anybody any good.” He assured Nellie that he could not have misread the friendly support he encountered everywhere. “Whatever their judgment as to particular things I have done,” he told his wife, “I certainly up to this time have their good will, and that is a considerable asset.”
Near the end of his transcontinental journey, Taft remarked that he had “enjoyed every moment of the trip.” When people wondered how he endured the long days, filled with “266 speeches and 579 formal dinners, luncheons and breakfasts,” he said it was a matter “of temperament, one of taste, and possibly one of disposition.” For a person like him, who loved meeting with people and hearing about their lives, the trip was “as stimulating as champagne.” When his train pulled into Union Station on the evening of November 10, an enthusiastic crowd, including members of his cabinet, was there to welcome him home. “Well, I’m back again,” he announced with a broad smile, “feeling just as well as when I went away or even feeling better.”
Behind the ebullience and the cheerful faces that greeted Taft when he stepped off the train, however, tensions were brewing that would prove calamitous for the new president’s administration. Taft’s optimism was soon punctured by the realization that his inner circle was “full of despair and predicting all sorts of evil”—harboring personal and political wounds that Taft’s honorable nature had small hope of suturing.