Nellie Herron, ca. 1886, the year she married William Howard Taft.
EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD NELLIE HERRON was enjoying her debutante season when she was introduced to twenty-two-year-old Will Taft. “It was at a coasting party,” she wrote years later, recalling a merry gathering where young people went sledding down a steep snow-covered Mt. Auburn hill. Though their parents were acquainted and their younger sisters, Maria and Fanny, were close friends, Nellie and Will had not met before this festive night. “Tall and slender with fine gray eyes and soft brown hair,” Nellie was described as handsome rather than beautiful, with a smile that “lights up her whole countenance.”
Nellie was the fourth of eleven children born to Harriet Collins and John Herron. She was raised with five sisters and two brothers, while three other siblings had died in infancy. Although her mother, Harriet, was born in Lowville, New York, a hamlet in the Adirondack foothills, the family was connected with a larger world of culture and politics. Harriet’s father, Eli Collins, had served in the New York State Assembly and the U.S. Congress before his sudden death when she was eleven. Six years later, Harriet moved to Ohio to reside with her older brother. There, she met and married twenty-six-year-old lawyer John Herron.
John Herron had been a Miami University of Ohio schoolmate of future president Benjamin Harrison. When Herron opened his law practice in Cincinnati, he shared an office with another man who would be president, Rutherford B. Hayes. “Quite like living my college life over again,” Hayes recorded in his diary. “We sleep on little hard mattresses in a little room cooped off from one end of our office.” The lifelong friendship that developed between Herron and Hayes would eventually include their wives, Harriet and Lucy. Years later, Harriet said of Lucy that she “had no other friend with whom there has been such freedom of intimacy, none other so ready to respond with generous sympathy.” This bond between the two couples would play a significant role in shaping Nellie Herron’s ambitions.
When Hayes became governor of Ohio in 1869, he nominated his good friend Herron to the superior court. Herron hungered for the post but could not afford to relinquish his law practice. His wife’s hankering for high society and insistence on private schooling for their children meant that he was forced “to go for money and leave glory to others.” Hayes tried again a few years later. “I wish I could accept it. I may never have such another chance,” Herron replied. “Like other things when I want them, I can’t get them. And when I can get them I can’t take them. At present I haven’t one dollar coming in from a single investment that I have made & so I must look to my profession to support my family.”
While Nellie remembered the three-story gray brick house where she grew up as “not particularly distinguished,” she took pride that her home shared the same street as the Sinton mansion where Will’s brother Charley and Annie Taft lived. Nellie marveled at the elegant facade of the white colonial dwelling; its Doric portico and bay windows, set amid “green lawns and finely kept shrubbery,” reminded her of the White House.
At “The Nursery,” as the exclusive Miss Nourse’s school was known, Nellie excelled. A voracious reader, she carried a book everywhere she went. She read in the afternoons after completing her household chores, read at night in the quiet of her room and on rocky beaches during summer vacations. “A book,” Nellie confided in her diary, “has more fascination for me than anything else.” She possessed a sensibility for the beauty of language. Reading aloud with her girlfriends, she was attracted to the sound of words and the rhythms of passages. The curriculum at The Nursery included literature, history, science, music, French, German, Latin, and Greek, a comprehensive course of study to prepare students for entry into the best colleges. Nellie yearned to continue her education when she graduated, hoping especially to study music, which she considered “the inspiration of all my dreams and ambitions.” While her brothers departed for Harvard and Yale, however, Nellie was informed that her father could not afford to send her to college. Instead, she was expected to “come out” into society and find herself a good husband.
Nellie was sixteen in 1877 when she accompanied her parents on a week-long visit to the White House at the invitation of Rutherford and Lucy Hayes. The president and first lady planned to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary among the friends who had stood with them at their marriage in 1852. The invitation included the prospect of a christening ceremony for the Herrons’ seven-week-old baby in the Blue Room. The child had been named Lucy in honor of Harriet’s closest friend. Harriet was reluctant at first to accept, protesting that “her baby has no fine clothes fit for such a place . . . & that she herself has only the same dresses that she had last March, hasn’t bought a stitch since & hasn’t time now to do it, even if she had any money to pay for them.” But John insisted, and Nellie was thrilled to be included.
“I feel very much complimented that you should have remembered me in the preparations for the holiday festivities,” Nellie wrote her “Aunt Lucy.” “I have been in some doubts as to whether it would do for me to emerge from the chrysalis of school girl existence even for a short time into the butterfly life of young ladyhood, but the temptation has proved too strong for me, and it will give me great pleasure to accept your invitation.”
Because Nellie had yet to make her official debut, she was not included at the anniversary dinner in the East Room attended by cabinet officers, generals, and justices of the Supreme Court. She could hear the music of the Marine Band from her room and spy the elegant gowns amid the splendor of the Blue, Red, and Green parlors, “profusely decorated with choice flowers from the conservatory.” Hayes stated in his diary that Nellie brought “the house alive with laughter, fun, and music.”
She was so elated by the visit that she rapturously confided to “Uncle Rutherford” that she intended “to marry a man who will be president.” With a smile, Hayes replied: “I hope you may, and be sure you marry an Ohio man.” Thirty years later, even as her husband sat in Roosevelt’s cabinet, the allure of that first stay at the White House had not dimmed. In interviews with journalists, she recalled every detail. “Nothing in my life,” she confessed, “reaches the climax of human bliss, which I felt as a girl of sixteen, when I was entertained at the White House.” The vision of that expansive world spurred her sense of purpose. “She was intoxicated by what she saw and heard there,” observed one reporter, “the bigness and breadth of the life.”
For as long as she could remember—Nellie revealed in her diary—she had dreaded the prospect of leaving school, turning eighteen, and “coming out” into society. In the fall before her first season, she and her best friend, Alice (Allie) Keys, shrank from the prospect of becoming young women according to the traditional rituals, obliged to “receive attentions and offers and to wait around calmly to see if any future life will adjust itself.” When the season drew to a close the following spring, though, she noted with surprise that she had “exceedingly” enjoyed herself in the “perfect whirr of gaiety” of the young Cincinnati set. She and her girlfriends Allie, Agnes, Laura, and Mary “stuck valiantly to each other” as they joined their male friends at Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, theatre parties, poker games, and German dances at Clifton Hall.
As summer came, her mood shifted. The cumulative months without intellectual or purposeful activity had grown enervating. “I am blue as indigo,” she wrote on July 13, 1880, from a hammock at Yellow Springs, Ohio, a popular summer resort where she was vacationing with her family. “We are all rusticating up here, doing absolutely nothing, and I am reduced to a queer state of mind. . . . I am sick and tired of my life. I would rather be anyone else, even some one who has not some advantages I have and I am only nineteen. I feel often as if I were fifty.” She yearned to “be busy and accomplish something.” Even her attempts to pursue musical instruction were stymied. While she practiced diligently on her own to become a more accomplished pianist, she required guidance and lessons to achieve genuine virtuosity—lessons that cost more than her father would pay to accommodate what he considered simply a pastime.
“I would much rather give up some of the dresses I am getting,” she wrote, “but Mama thinks I must have them.” Harriet was determined that her daughters should “enjoy all the comforts and privileges of the wealthy class,” even if John had to work long hours and weekends to stay out of debt. Nellie’s biographer Carl Anthony conjectures that “a repressed nervousness” was instilled in the young woman by the chronic strain of the family’s drive to maintain their place in a circle of greater wealth and privilege.
“I am beginning to want some steady occupation,” she confided in her diary. “I read a good deal to be sure . . . but I should have some occupation that would require active work moving around—and I don’t know where to find it. I believe my greatest desire now is to write a book. . . . I do so want to be independent.”
Nellie’s stifled energy and curiosity were quickened by the arrival of “that adorable Will Taft” at Yellow Springs. “Unfortunately I did not recover from my surprise and delight soon enough,” she wrote Allie, “to make that impression which I would have wished.” Will’s solicitous, chivalric nature made a great effect upon Nellie. She was touched when he offered to cut up the meat for her six-year-old sister at a picnic on the Fourth of July, and charmed when he helped the women over brooks as they tramped through the woods the following day. “We had a lovely walk,” she reported, and at an evening dance, Will “was enchanting as ever. You see what a splendid chance I had at Will, but alas!” she noted regretfully, “he strikes me with awe.”
Later that summer, Nellie accompanied her father to Rhode Island’s Narragansett Pier, where she was joined by several friends. Though her days were filled with tennis, croquet, and sailing, she could not rouse herself from her “stupid state.” The thrill of forbidden activities provided some respite from her torpor. She hid in the rocks at dusk to smoke cigarettes with her girlfriend Sallie, gambled at cards, and drank milk punches laced with whiskey late at night.
As fall approached, convinced that her rebellious unconventional nature would forever preclude a great success in society, Nellie pledged to devote five or six hours a day to the piano. She begged her mother to intercede with her father and facilitate the music lessons she craved. She realized, however, that no decision could be made until her parents returned from a two-month trip with the president and first lady to California, a historic voyage that marked the first visit by a president to the west coast. Nellie was left behind with her four younger siblings to take charge of the household, to dust and tidy, sew and darn, set the table for dinner, and wash the dishes. “I have not read one good book, novel excepted, but Schiller’s Life by Carlyle,” she complained.
Nellie gained some leisure time when her parents returned, but the music lessons never materialized. Desperate for a measure of genuine intellectual engagement, she enrolled in less expensive chemistry and German classes at the University of Cincinnati. Her spirits lifted. She relished her studies and joined a walking club that included Annie Taft, several of her girlfriends, John Mack, and Howard Hollister, Will’s best friend. “He is very sympathetic,” Nellie wrote of Hollister. Seated next to him at a supper following one of their hikes, she was “all afire” when he launched into a sentimental debate on the glory of dying for one you loved. Being “exceedingly romantic” herself, Nellie leapt into the conversation. Then, suddenly overcome by self-consciousness, she worried that he was simply drawing her out to “make fun” of her. “Make fun of you,” he exclaimed. “Why Miss Herron there is no one whose good opinion I value as much as yours.”
After a brief flirtation, Nellie and Howard settled down to become good friends. “I am perfectly delighted in the hope that a very ordinary love affair may perhaps have become what I always longed for,” she wrote in her diary, “a warm friendship between two quite congenial people—which is very rare, and so much more to be desired than the other. . . . Such a friendship is infinitely higher than what is usually called love, for in it there is a realization of each other’s defects, and a proper appreciation of their good points, without that fatal idealization which is so blind. . . . From my point of view a love which is worthy of the name should always have a beginning in the other, and should this friendship turn into something higher it is a blessed happiness.”
Nellie counseled Howard through a tumultuous relationship with her friend Agnes Davis while he, in turn, supported Nellie’s struggle to find purpose in her life. In her diary, she recorded diverting evenings in the German section of town where they “drank beer and ate Wiener Wurst.” Mixing with laborers and merchants in raucous beer halls might be unsuitable behavior for a society girl, but Nellie loved the atmosphere. Indeed, the fact that such surroundings “greatly horrified” her proper friends intensified her pleasure. “There being something Bohemian about it which delighted me,” she wrote, “I really felt quite like a comrade & man.”
In the spring of 1883, contrary to her mother’s wishes, Nellie accepted an offer to teach in a private school for boys. “Do you realize you will have to give up society, as you now enjoy it,” Harriet reminded her. “Certainly late hours and dancing parties do not promote the patience and physical endurance required by a teacher. And then is it quite the thing for a young girl in your position to teach in a boys school—and where there are no other ladies? . . . I shrink from thinking of you as making your own way in the world in any inconsequential manner.” Nellie was shaken by the opposition that her mother expressed in “two dreadful letters.” Though several friends admired her decision, the majority questioned her “queer taste.” Disconcerted by her inability to “get along as other girls do,” she was determined to move forward, envisioning a future as headmistress of a school. “Of course a woman is happier who marries, if she marries exactly right, but how many do,” she reasoned. “Otherwise I do think that she is much happier single, and doing some congenial work.”
Harriet Herron’s conviction that her daughter’s decision would inhibit her social life proved unfounded. In fact, Nellie’s occupation bolstered her confidence and buoyed her mood, making her a far more engaging companion. Her insecurity in Will Taft’s presence evaporated as he joined her regular circle of friends. On numerous occasions, she accompanied Will and Howard Hollister to concerts and German dances at Clifton Hall, returning the hospitality with whist parties at her house. “The meeting at Miss Herron’s was a great success,” Will told his sister Fanny, describing an evening of cards, supper, charades, and games. “We made the Herron mansion ring with the merry peals of the young ladies and the harsher but joyous tone of the men until the hands of the clock were pushing us home by pointing towards two o’clock.”
Sustained by this new sense of direction, Nellie no longer found the long summer days depressing. In July 1883, she joined Allie and a group of their friends at “Sea Verge,” the Keys’ summer mansion at Little Boar’s Head in North Hampton, New Hampshire. Alongside the customary swimming and sailing, tennis and card games, she and Allie determined to embark on an ambitious reading program. They resolved daily to read aloud fifty pages of Henry Buckle’s three-volume History of Civilization in England; they shared “long and very tough” readings of John Stuart Mill, and immersed themselves in German and Italian. To “repair” their “exhausted intellects,” they took long walks through the countryside, picked berries, read a little poetry, and watched the tide break around the rocks. In the evenings they plunged into the bracing water of the North Atlantic to stimulate their appetites before dinner.
Returning to her teaching job in the fall, Nellie struggled with her mother’s increasingly strident opposition. “Mamma thinks I am wrong,” she told her diary. “I hope that I am not . . . I should be a miserable apathetic woman without an interest in life unless I bettered myself now while I am young and courageous and engaged in some real work. The usual pottering which an unmarried woman calls work would never satisfy me.” Still, she could not easily disregard her mother’s admonition that a society girl entered the workforce at her peril. “Why should I take life so hard? Other people seem to get through all right without inconvenient ideas,” she lamented. “All week I have been in that state when my eyes fill with tears at the least provocation,” she admitted, “and I take refuge in silence.”
Despite these private misgivings, Nellie was self-possessed and animated among her friends, emerging as the leader of their social circle. The Saturday night salons she hosted, anticipated by her coterie the week long, offered an enlivening combination of entertainment and intellectual pursuits. The regulars included Allie Keys, Will Taft and his brother Horace, Howard Hollister, Agnes Davis, and Maria Herron, Nellie’s younger sister. The group selected a different topic each week and the members of the salon were expected to prepare for discussion with all the reading and research they could muster. For the session on the French Revolution, Will read Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, a History; when the topic was Russia, he read Donald MacKenzie’s Russia. When Rousseau, Cavour, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, and Isaac Newton were selected as subjects, he scoured the public library for their works. The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum suddenly found himself inspired.
“Nellie Herron has made a great success of her salon,” Will reported to his sister. “I feel as if I had really profited greatly by the reading which I have done for it. The pleasure of it has grown as we go on. I value the friendships which have grown out of it very highly. Nobody is absent when he can help it.” Indeed, forced to travel out of town one Saturday, Will sent Nellie roses to express his regret at missing “that sweet school of Peripatetic philosophy in which I am an humble but enthusiastic disciple.”
Writing of one salon session, focused on Edmund Burke, Will wryly remarked to his mother that the discussion became “very heated especially between the men, who knowing less about the subject than the ladies, are naturally more certain of their position.” Burke was not the only topic to stir dissension among these passionate young people; in the aftermath of a debate on slavery, the volatile mixture of historical inquiry and individual points of view left Will much chagrined. “I am not satisfied at all with my bearing in the slavery discussion,” he wrote to Nellie. “I deeply regret that my manner was such as to leave the impression on your mind that I held your suggestions or arguments lightly or regarded them with contempt. . . . So far as holding your opinions lightly, I know no one who attaches more weight to them or who more admires your powers of reasoning than the now humbled subscriber.”
The attachments forged in the salon deepened as the friends consoled each other in difficulties and together celebrated triumphs. The group spent weekends together at the Keys’ mansion in Walnut Hills and escorted each other to the regular Thursday German dances. The girls organized card parties and picnics for which the men provided both the punch and the repast. They put on amateur theatricals for charity. Nellie long remembered the burlesque production of Sleeping Beauty in which Will played the beautiful princess, while Horace, who had fallen in love with Nellie’s sister, Maria, performed as Puck.
With increasing frequency, Nellie’s name appeared in Will’s letters to his family in Vienna. He lauded her as “the only notable exception” among superficial society girls who viewed “a suitable marriage as a proper ending of their social career.” He proudly relayed the news that she had been offered a teaching position at Miss Nourse’s school, declaring that she deserved “the greatest credit” for persevering despite censure from friends and family alike. “It is easy enough to talk about woman’s widening her sphere and being something more than an ornament or a housekeeper but it is not so easy in the present state of society for her to act on that theory.”
In the summer of 1884, Will was invited to spend a long weekend with Nellie and Allie at Sea Verge, the summer mansion at Little Boar’s Head. During those sunlit days, filled with picnics, swims, and ventures into Boston, Will first began to recognize the central place Nellie had come to hold in his life. “After awhile I found myself deferring to her opinion in everything I did or said,” he later told Allie. “Finally what she thought became of much more importance to me than what I thought myself.”
Largely to gain Nellie’s approbation, Will began to carry a book as a matter of course. “Trollope is a great favorite of mine because of the realistic every day tone which one finds in every line he writes,” he told her. “His heroes have failings human character is heir to, and we like them none the less on that account.” He became increasingly solicitous of Nellie’s happiness. When the German opera festival was in town, he accompanied her to hear Tannhäuser, admitting to his mother that while “my own appreciation of Wagner is not intense . . . [I] shall derive most if not all of my pleasure from her enjoyment of the music.”
Eager to acknowledge Nellie’s own desire to accomplish something worthy, he spoke with disdain of two wealthy acquaintances whose chief literary nourishment was drawn from stock reports. “It seems to me that with their money and opportunities they could do so much good in this country where we are in such need of disinterested public work that their listlessness and idleness is little better than a sin. . . . If all the wealthy were of their kind I should become a communist.” He found validation for the more progressive ideals he and Nellie shared in reports from the East that “young men of wealth who do not have to devote their time to making a livelihood, are taking an interest in politics.” This is “a good augury,” he maintained, for it would infuse a generation’s political life with a growing zeal for public service. He was likely referring directly to Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, whose reform efforts on behalf of George Edmunds were then making news.
By winter, he later confessed, “I was wakened to the fact that I loved her.” The truth of his feelings struck him “with overwhelming force,” and in late April 1885, he finally asked her to marry him. The proposal stunned Nellie, who feared that his precipitous declaration would compromise a friendship that had become vital to her. Moreover, she feared that marriage would destroy her hard-won chance to accomplish something worthy in her own right. She turned him down and told him never to speak of it again.
Undeterred, Will remained certain that in time he could bring her to love him as he loved her. Only five days later, he penned a long letter, assuring her that the hesitation she felt about the institution of marriage was perfectly understandable. “I never have been certain that marriage was the happier state for women. I know it is for a man. Then too a mistake with him does not involve his entire life. With a woman a mistake is worse than death for in marriage she gives her all.” During a long walk a few days after that, he pressed his case, following up with another heartfelt letter. “I love you Nellie,” he declared. “I love you for all that you are. I love you for your noble consistent character . . . for all that you are, for all that you hope to be. . . . Oh how I will work and strive to be better and do better, how I will labor for our joint advancement if only you will let me. You will be my companion, my love and my life.”
Her initial resistance to his entreaties only confirmed his admiration and intensified his own determination. “My love for you grew out of a friendship, intimate and of long standing,” he noted, methodically laying out his appeal. “That friendship of course was founded on a respect and admiration for your high character, your sweet womanly qualities and your intellectual superiority over any woman I know and for that quality in you which is called sympathy but I call it self forgetting companionableness. . . . Much as I should love to have you love me now and say so now, there is proud satisfaction I feel in that such a heart as yours can not be won in a moment.”
Finally, Nellie agreed to an engagement. Far from curtailing her ambitions, she sensed that marriage to a man of Will’s enlightened temperament would create enhanced opportunities for them both. With her direction and support, he could be her emissary to the wider world she craved.“You know,” she told her mother soon after the engagement, “a lot of people think a great deal of Will. Some people even say that he may obtain some very important position in Washington.” Although her ambitions for her fiancé had a worldly aspect, Nellie clearly expected far more from him and from herself than mere status and stability.
Will was ready to shout the news of their betrothal from every street corner. Nellie insisted that it remain a secret from all but their parents until she was ready for a public announcement. Forced to maintain a pretense of mere friendship before Howard, Allie, Horace, and all his friends, Will had to content himself with long letters to his parents, who were still in Europe. “The more I knew her,” Will told his father, “the deeper grew my respect for her, the warmer my friendship until it unconsciously ripened into a feeling that she was indispensable to my happiness. . . . I know you will love her when you come to know her and will appreciate as I do her noble character and clear cut intellect and well informed mind. She has been teaching for three years and has been no expense at all to her father. She has done this without encouragement by her family who thought the work too hard for her because she chafed under the conventionalities of society which would keep a young lady only for evening entertainments. She wanted something to do in life. . . . Her eagerness for knowledge of all kinds puts me to shame. Her capacity for work is wonderful.”
That summer of 1885, when Nellie left for the Adirondacks with her family, Will experienced an unfamiliar sense of desolation. “Your sweet smile today as you stood on the stoop, I shall carry in my memory as something to console me with your absence,” he wrote only hours after she departed. “And now Nellie I fold you in my arms and imprint on your lips the kisses I was cheated out of by Fate today.” Solace came in the form of the daily letters he wrote. “The only real pleasure I take is in writing you,” he told her, “and in the hope, so often in vain, that the mail carrier’s appearance inspires in me. When I don’t get a letter I read all the old ones over again.” His familiar surroundings only exacerbated his restless loneliness. Everywhere he went—the library, the homes of their friends, the corner of Pike and Fifth—heightened his awareness of her absence. “It is the one who stays at home that feels the parting. New scenes, new interests, quickly dispel the pleasant sadness of the parting for the one who leaves.”
To mollify his impatience for her return, he narrated the minutiae of the day without her, filling pages with political news, gossip about their friends, and images of the life they would lead once they were married. “I long to settle down in a home of our own,” he told her, adding, “we must continue the salon.” Nellie’s father had promised them a plot of land in Walnut Hills, where they planned to construct their home. “I shall have the greatest pride in entertaining my classmates, Bonesmen, under our roof where you and they can know each other.” Although Will’s vision of domestic bliss included social entertainment, it focused on the bond of marriage. His letters conjured evenings seated “comfortably and cosily before a bright fire,” reading and talking “with such demonstrations of affection as the unruly husband can not restrain.” While he acknowledged that his ideal might seem “commonplace” or “prosaic,” he fondly anticipated a married life resembling those depicted in Victorian novels, “where the husband was working hard, materially assisted and buoyed up by the earnest sympathy and intelligence of the wife.”
He repeatedly assured Nellie that he would strive to make himself worthy of her. He had labored diligently in college to satisfy his parents; now he would persevere and please his wife. “His temperament,” one insightful journalist later reflected, “requires settled authority.” With Nellie to replace his father’s role of “guide, counsellor and friend,” he would find far greater success than he could ever have secured on his own. “You are becoming responsible for the actions of two persons now,” he frankly admitted to Nellie. “I feel a weight lifted from my shoulders.” While they might never be wealthy, they would build a rich life together. With her encouragement, he promised to overcome his reluctance and exact suitable payment for his legal work. “It is hard for me to learn to charge a fee without apologizing for its amount,” he confessed. “That is one of the defects in my character you must remedy. You must stiffen me in the matter of fees.” He pledged that theirs would be “an equal partnership. You earn half of everything that comes in just as much as if you wrote the briefs or honeyfugled a jury. You may write the briefs, who knows?” He proudly reported that “business had been brisker” and that he had “done twice as much work” in the months since their engagement, a circumstance which his partner Major Lloyd attributed directly to Nellie’s influence.
He conceded a natural tendency toward laziness and procrastination, a condition Nellie’s influence was certain to remedy in order to make him “a good and just member of society.” Indeed, just two weeks before his proposal, he had delivered “a very hastily prepared paper before the Unity Club on Pontifical Rome,” which, he acknowledged, did him “no credit.” Horace agreed. “As usual,” he told his mother, “he put the thing off until he had only two or three days to prepare it and then he had to toil like a slave. I told him I thought it would be a lesson worth a fortune to him if he were to make one complete & ignominious fizzle at this early period of his life from want of preparation. He did not do it this time but it was enough to serve as a warning. His was the best piece of the evening, but that is not saying much and he might have done much better. He has a wonderful power of work when he once gets started and the only danger is in his trusting to it too much.” Will’s own recognition of these deficits, and of the corresponding drive in Nellie’s character, contributed to his profound admiration for the woman he loved and to his deep-seated reliance upon her judgment and resolve.
Will joined Nellie in the Adirondacks for two weeks in early August 1885. “Each day has found Nellie and me on the lake and in the woods,” he joyously reported to his mother. “She sews or sketches while I read aloud to her. We finished Their Wedding Journey by Howells and have begun The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.” At summer’s end, Nellie finally assented to make public the engagement.
“I knew you would be delighted to hear,” Will wrote to Allie Keys. “Didn’t I know that you were hoping for this for so many months? Didn’t I tingle to my finger tips with gratitude to you for the many little schemes which you concocted to help me on in my suit, you little conspirator. . . . Oh, Alice, you do know the prize I have won . . . that no more perfect character than Nellie’s is among all our friends. You know what a constant source of comfort and strength she is to everyone who seeks it from her. . . . She has already made me a better man. My ideals of life are higher and I believe my purpose to attain them is stronger. Certainly there could not be given to a man a stronger motive for upright consistent, hardworking and kindly living than the approval and intelligent sympathy of such a wife.”
“How much I appreciate your confidence in me,” Allie elatedly replied, “your telling me so much of what is in your heart. To have had either you or Nellie marry anyone I did not know or even did not love would have been hard for me, but I should have been happy in your happiness and tried not to be selfish. But to have you marry one another is such a joy to me that the sky has been bluer and the sunlight brighter ever since I heard. Yes, Will, I do know her, and it makes me so happy to think that some one is to have her who appreciates what she is who has known her long enough to understand her, for I do not think she is soon known or easily understood. . . . You and Howard—you have been the two best new friends I ever had, and I hope and believe I shall never lose you.” Allie’s fervent wishes were soon realized: she and Howard became engaged, and the two couples would remain devoted friends to the end of their lives.
Certainly, Will and Nellie’s match met with resounding approval from friends and family. “What a pair you will be!” Horace told Will. “In all my acquaintance she is the girl I would have picked for you long ago & ever since and you are the one I would have chosen for her.” Indeed, it had appeared for a time that the two brothers might marry two Herron women, but Horace could not persuade Nellie’s beautiful sister Maria to accept his proposal of marriage. Nevertheless, their lives would intersect frequently in the years ahead.
In late February 1886, Nellie and Allie traveled east together for two weeks. In New York, they stayed with Allie’s wealthy Aunt Phoebe, mistress of Sea Verge, the summer home where Will first realized the depths of his feelings for Nellie. The two old friends enjoyed their time together, walking around the city, shopping for books and clothes. They perused furniture stores and curiosity shops, looking for tables, sideboards, lamps, and etchings for their new homes. From Cincinnati, Will wrote frequently to Nellie, describing his daily routine in detail only a lover would not find exhausting. “I went to the gymnasium today wholly because of you,” he proudly reported. “It was Washington’s birthday and I felt lazy,” he admitted, but the thought of his fiancée mobilized him. Four days later, he returned to the gym, though he acknowledged, “I have given up weighing myself each day. ‘A watched pot never boils,’ and I shall try to surprise myself by waiting until you get home before I weigh again.”
Proceeding to Washington, Nellie selected her wedding dress, “a superbly-fashioned satin robe with embroidered front.” Pining at home, Will tried to inject some levity into his letter: “I hope you will think of me tomorrow when you take your Sunday afternoon walk along the beautiful streets of Washington. I wonder, Nellie dear, if you and I will ever be there in any official capacity? Oh yes, I forgot, of course we shall when you become Secretary of the Treasury.” A few days later he wrote again, musing on the ten short months which had affected a sea change in both their lives since she had finally accepted his proposal: “The parlor is unchanged, the street is unchanged, the new custom house as it was then, but to me they all wear a different look, so different indeed that I almost forget how they did look before you made silent promise to be mine. . . . In that ten months we have had very few differences of any kind.”
Nellie Herron and William Taft were married on June 19, 1886, in the parlor of the Herron house on Pike Street. Alphonso and Louise, who had returned from Europe the previous October, were present to celebrate their son’s marriage. Maria Herron and Fanny Taft served as bridesmaids. Horace was his brother’s best man. After what the Cincinnati Enquirer described as “a brilliant reception,” the young couple traveled to New York and prepared to embark for Europe and the honeymoon Nellie called “my first taste of the foreign travel of which I had always dreamed.”
Aboard ship, they read aloud from Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield and the collected poems of Coleridge and Shelley in preparation for their visit to the English countryside. They visited Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-on-Avon, reveled at the sight of Gladstone’s Welsh castle in Hawarden, and dined in English country inns. Nellie pored through reports of parliamentary speeches by Gladstone and Parnell and hungered to hear live orations and debates. They continued through Scotland, Holland, and France, managing to travel for a hundred days on “just one thousand dollars,” thanks to Nellie’s unremitting budget.
They returned to a home still under construction in Cincinnati and spent their first month living with Will’s parents. Nellie developed a strong attachment to Alphonso, whom she considered “gentle beyond anything I ever knew . . . one of the most lovable men that ever lived.” Both Alphonso and Louise, she wrote, “had created a family atmosphere in which the children breathed in the highest ideals, and were stimulated to sustained and strenuous intellectual and moral effort in order to conform to the family standard.” She marveled at the “strong minds, intellectual tastes, wide culture and catholic sympathies” that generated the loving yet rigorous environment of the Taft household.
In January 1887, Nellie and Will moved into their redwood-shingled home overlooking a splendid stretch of the Ohio River and the lush hills and valleys on both the Ohio and Kentucky sides. The library, lined with bookshelves of solid walnut, housed Will’s accumulating legal texts, which he would continue to accrue until he had proudly amassed a catalogue of scholarly volumes that was estimated among the foremost in the country.
NO SOONER WERE THE NEWLYWEDS settled in their new home on McMillan Street than Will was surprised by Governor Foraker’s decision to appoint him to the bench. Hurrying home to share the astonishing news with his wife, he tried to appear casual. “Nellie,” he coyly questioned, “what would you think if I should be appointed a Judge of the Superior Court?” “Oh, don’t try to be funny,” Nellie answered. “That’s perfectly impossible.” A twenty-nine-year-old, she reasoned, would never receive an appointment over much more experienced lawyers. Quickly realizing that Will was not teasing, she was stunned and gratified by “the honour which came to us so unexpectedly.” Horace was thrilled. “Wasn’t it immense,” he wrote Nellie. “How does his Honor bear it? You’ll have to help him work with a vengeance now Nellie. Tie wet towels around his head. You & I know what kind of a judge he will make. We can afford to let the world find out.”
Nellie’s elation soon gave way to misgivings, however, as she reflected that the appointment “was not a matter for such warm congratulation after all.” Indeed, the more she considered his new post and colleagues, the more unsettled she felt. “I saw him in close association with men not one of whom was less than fifteen years older than he, and most of whom were much more than that. He seemed to me suddenly to take on a maturity and sedateness quite out of keeping with his actual years and I dreaded to see him settled for good in the judiciary and missing all the youthful enthusiasms and exhilarating difficulties which a more general contact with the world would have given him. . . . I began even then to fear the narrowing effects of the Bench.” For the young woman who had hoped her husband’s career would carry them both to an exciting life in Washington, the superior court in Cincinnati assumed the aspect of a stumbling block rather than a stepping-stone.
Nevertheless, Nellie grudgingly acknowledged that her husband “did not share this feeling in any way. His appointment on the Superior Court was to him the welcome beginning of just the career he wanted.” Upon completion of Will’s interim appointment, Foraker successfully backed him for election to a full five-year term. This ballot marked Taft’s only bid for elected office until he became a candidate for president of the United States. He flourished as a judge, proud to sit on the bench where his father had once presided. He immersed himself in work entirely suited to his temperament, enjoying legal research and finding precedents for a broad range of cases covering contracts, wills, trademarks, suits for libel and negligence, disputes between the rights of property and the rights of labor. His profound satisfaction and facility in his vocation were evident to all.
Will Taft’s most significant action as a superior court judge was a ruling in 1890 that addressed the balance of power between the burgeoning labor movement and industrial interests. The case involved a secondary boycott, a sanction intended to punish one business by wielding pressure against another business unrelated to the original cause of grievance. In this instance, the Bricklayers’ Union had declared a boycott against the contracting firm of Parker Brothers on grounds that the company had discriminated against its members. The union called on all suppliers of the firm’s building materials to honor the boycott. When the Moore Lime Company continued to supply Parker Brothers, the union declared it would no longer use lime supplied by Moore’s. Moore’s & Co. sued the Bricklayers’ Union for damages caused by the secondary boycott. Their suit was upheld by the lower court in Hamilton County, which awarded a verdict of $2,250 to the plaintiffs. When Moore’s & Co. v. Bricklayers’ Union et al. reached the superior court on appeal, Taft sustained the lower court decision, affirming that a secondary boycott against a firm with whom there was no dispute was illegal. His decision was upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court. Decades later, it remained a leading case on the law of secondary boycotts.
While his decision worked to limit the power of organized labor, Taft revealed a sympathy for the rights of workers that his more conservative colleagues did not share. He was careful to underscore the union’s prerogative in withdrawing its members from Parker Brothers; when the union turned on an unrelated company, however, it had exceeded its legal bounds. Though Taft refused to condone the union’s action in this case, he argued strongly for a laborer’s “right to work for such wages as he chooses, and to get as high a rate as he can.” He maintained that an individual “may lawfully notify his employers of his objection and refuse to work,” and concluded that “what one workman may do . . . many may combine to do.”
Taft sought to delineate union rights at a hazardous time in Cincinnati, when the memory of a violent general strike was still raw. Calling for an eight-hour day, 32,000 Cincinnati workers had joined workers in other cities in a crippling general strike commencing on May Day, 1886. Singing a version of the Marseillaise, they marched through the city, brandishing Springfield rifles and red flags. For days, “no freight moved in or out of the city; garbage went uncollected; laundresses, streetcar conductors, waitresses and machinists cooperated in shutting down the city.” The militia was called out and the workers returned to their posts, but the horror of the strikers’ “revolutionary fervor” had impressed itself upon Cincinnati’s propertied classes. It was in this context that Taft, in his judicial sphere, tried to balance the rights of labor with the rights of capital.
NELLIE’S CAREFUL ALLOCATION OF WILL’S $6,000 annual salary allowed the couple to furnish their new home and still save enough to fund a second trip to Europe the following summer. With the house fully settled, Nellie returned to work, taking a teaching position at the kindergarten recently opened by Miss Nourse to serve the children of the poor. Earlier in the decade, Louise Taft had served as the first president of the Cincinnati Free Kindergarten Association. In the 1880s, Ohio laws had forbidden public funding of education for children younger than six. Public kindergartens would eventually be established, but meanwhile Louise and a group of her friends helped raise money to open a series of charity kindergartens. “If the little ones who wander neglected in our streets are to be reached,” she proclaimed, “private benevolence must come to the rescue. We therefore appeal to the friends of education and humanity to help us in this effort.” The first kindergarten was established in 1880, followed by others, including Miss Nourse’s school. There, Nellie devoted herself to teaching, experimenting with colored balls, cylinders, cubes, and spheres to convey concepts of number, color, and geometric forms to younger children. Determined to allow her young charges every avenue she could devise to quicken their understanding and facilitate its expression, she explored all manner of mediums, hoping to engage them through music, art, and play.
The first serious breach in the close-knit Taft family occurred in early June 1889. Following a divorce from his wife Tillie, the mental condition of Peter, Will’s older brother, had seemed much improved. He resumed his law practice and appeared to be leading a quiet life, devoting his leisure time to his young son, Hulbert. His agitation and paranoia gradually returned, however, rendering him incapable of work. He complained that mysterious forces “were conspiring against him,” preventing the medicine from taking effect. Throughout his illness, his father’s support never wavered. “You may rely upon one thing,” Alphonso lovingly assured him, “and that is that my heart is always with you.” The deterioration of Peter’s mind was accompanied by a progressive wasting of his body, most likely from consumption. Though the family knew he was unwell, his death early that summer came as a shock.
The funeral was conducted at the home of Charles and Annie. One of Peter’s Yale classmates delivered the eulogy, recalling the halcyon days when Peter achieved “the highest rank in scholarship ever reached at Yale,” bringing “lasting honor on himself, his family, his class.” Annie found solace in the knowledge that young Hulbert was able to hear “what sort of a man his father was.”
“Poor Peter!” Harry Taft wrote to his father, remembering the brother who was once “the sunniest of us all.” In the end, he reflected, “his was a sad life and while I had hoped that life near the old home would add much to his comfort and perhaps to his happiness, it could never have restored him to what he was and perhaps the Lord has done wisely to remove him.” Harry had moved to Manhattan after his marriage to Julia Smith, daughter of a wealthy lawyer from Troy, New York. He had begun his legal career at Simpson, Thacher, & Barnum but had recently joined Cadwalader’s, a leading corporate law firm that would eventually bear his name. His absence from Cincinnati contributed to an increasing sense of distance at the dispersal of the Taft family.
Will worried about the impact of Peter’s death on his father, who was still suffering from the effects of typhoid pneumonia contracted in St. Petersburg. The disease had thickened Alphonso’s lungs and affected the right ventricle of the heart, making it difficult for him to breathe. In recent months, he had seemed to improve, but the trauma of Peter’s death brought on a marked deterioration in his health. “Every time the telephone rings I am fearful lest it be a sudden summons,” Will confided to Horace.
Horace, meanwhile, harbored anxiety and a measure of guilt that he had added to his father’s sadness. Disconsolate after Maria Herron refused his marriage offer, he had abandoned Cincinnati and the practice of law, which he had never enjoyed, for a teaching position in Kansas City. “My chief regret about it,” he acknowledged, “came from my father’s disappointment, for his heart was set on my going on in the law.” He had taught in Kansas City only briefly when he was offered a faculty position at Yale, where he conceived the plan of founding a boys’ school. The year after Peter’s death, he opened a private school in a redbrick house in Watertown, Connecticut, instructing ten boarders and seven day students. In those early years, Horace taught nearly all the classes himself; but in time the institution, known as the Taft School, would become a prestigious preparatory school, boasting a distinguished faculty and more than five hundred students.
On September 10, 1889, Nellie gave birth to an eight-pound son christened Robert Alphonso to carry the patriarch’s name into the next generation. “Nellie took the pain bravely,” Will reported to his father. “It is a treat to see how happy she is.” Will was ecstatic at the arrival of his first son. “On the whole, sitting as I do judicially in this case, I am obliged to give judgment for those who contend that the boy is one of the most remarkable products of this century,” he jauntily pronounced. “I have been accused of the unjudicial conduct of rushing out into the street after the boy came and yelling, ‘Hurrah!’ For a man is born unto me.” As Will only presided in court on Tuesdays and Saturdays, he was able to spend prolonged stretches at home, surrounded by the books of his own library, writing opinions. Horace heckled him over this arrangement with a friendly jibe: “I suppose you wish me to deny the report that you adjourn Court whenever Robert Alphonso has the colic. I am trying to keep it out of the papers.”
These were happy days for Taft. A New York Times correspondent, analyzing his work on the bench, noted: “He breathes good will and suggests mental, moral, and physical wholesomeness. Yet, with all his pleasant informality and his frequent laughter, he has a dignity of manner and carriage that commands respect and attention.” In his opinions, he presented the facts and his well-reasoned conclusions in a cogent, if sometimes verbose style. Ohio court records reveal that his thorough, thoughtful decisions were “upheld by the State Supreme Court to a gratifying extent.”
Taft’s equanimity and penchant for research deeply impressed his two older colleagues, Judges Hiram Peck and Frederick E. Moore. When the death of Stanley Matthews left a vacancy on the Ohio Supreme Court in 1889, they joined other Ohioans in recommending their thirty-two-year-old colleague Taft to President Benjamin Harrison, despite his youth and mere two years on the bench. Governor Foraker concurred, assuring Harrison that Taft’s appointment “would be satisfactory to an unusually high degree to the Republicans of this state and no Democrat could justly criticize it.” From New Haven, Horace reported a conversation with Will’s classmate John Porter, now editor of the Hartford Post. His well-connected friends in Washington called Taft’s prospects “pretty hopeful.” Porter had recently spoken with Congressman Butterworth, who suggested that Will, if passed over for the supreme court, should run for governor. Horace was less enthusiastic about that possibility, much preferring that his brother become “a fine old Justice.”
When President Harrison visited Cincinnati that August, Taft joined the welcoming party at the train. Asked later if he had noticed Taft, Harrison replied: “O Yes, what a fine looking man he is. What a fine physique he has.” Although Taft dined with the presidential party that night at the city’s leading hotel, the Burnet House, he had no opportunity to speak with the president again. He reported to his father that his “chances of going to the Moon and of donning a silk gown at the hands of President Harrison are about equal. I am quite sure if I were he, I would not appoint a man of my age and position to that Bench.” Taft felt some disappointment yet small surprise when, in December 1889, Harrison nominated circuit court judge David Brewer, a twenty-eight-year veteran on the bench.
Harrison had not forgotten the imposing young man. A month later, when U.S. Solicitor General Orlon Chapman suddenly died from pneumonia, Harrison nominated William Howard Taft for the prestigious post of chief barrister for the government. “It is a great event in your career, & you should accept without hesitation,” Alphonso counseled from San Diego, where he and Louise were spending the winter. Louise was also enthusiastic. Alphonso had been certain the news would leave him sleepless, she wrote, “but it was I who lay awake . . . it is so hard not to be with you in this excitement.” She too emphasized the importance of the appointment—not just for Will but for Alphonso as well, whom the news had imbued with “a new interest in life.”
For Nellie, the appointment offered a chance to realize her goals both for herself and her husband. “I was very glad,” she later wrote, for it offered Will “an opportunity for exactly the kind of work I wished him to do; work in which his own initiative and originality would be exercised and developed.” They would escape the confining world of the Cincinnati Superior Court, where Will fraternized with much older men and dinner conversations too often focused on tedious legal questions. Moreover, she fondly anticipated life in the capital, where her husband’s eminence would gain admission to an exciting world of cabinet officials, congressmen, and senators, and where she would attend White House receptions, observe legislative debates, and discuss the vital topics of the day. She was immediately willing to find and furnish a new house, leave behind supportive parents and relatives, and uproot their small son from his routine—all in search of a more fulfilling and exciting existence.
Only Will was reluctant. As solicitor general, he would argue cases as an advocate, standing to present “one side of a case” rather than weighing evidence and rendering judgment, temperamentally a far more congenial role. In his early days as a lawyer, arguing before the court had quickly become his least favorite aspect of the job; his affinity was for administering justice with fairness and integrity. Moreover, he was “entirely unfamiliar with the rules of practice” before the federal court, and had “very little familiarity” with federal statutes. And he knew he would have little time to orient himself. Straightaway upon his arrival, a backlog of cases to be argued would greet him. Furthermore, he took no pleasure in the prospect of leaving behind the close friendships and comfortable life he had built in Cincinnati.
“Go ahead, & fear not,” his father advised. “You will have a full library at your service, in your own room, with messengers to get the books, besides Assistant Atty Generals to examine law points & make briefs for you; and you will have a short hand reporter take down & write out with type writing what you wish to have written.” He continued to encourage and prod his reluctant son in a string of letters. “To a large extent the legal field of inquiry will be new,” Alphonso wrote, “but you can master it, as you have mastered other things.” His mother agreed: “You have learned the duties of a Judge so soon you can certainly hope to acquire those of an advocate.” Alphonso was intent on stamping out any doubt his son might experience, faced by a change of such magnitude. “I believe you are equal to it,” the father proclaimed with confidence, “although I do not believe the experiment has ever before been tried with so young a man. I receive more compliments than I know what to do with for having such a son. I try to behave with becoming modesty. . . . We are intensely proud of you.”
The formidable combination of his father’s high expectations and his wife’s desires proved irresistible for Taft. He wrote to President Harrison, accepting the position. His confirmation was celebrated with a “brilliant reception” at the Lincoln Club. Four days later, Taft set out alone on a sleeper train for Washington, determined to find proper lodging before Nellie and the baby joined him.
Nellie’s depiction of Will’s anxiety upon reaching the nation’s capital evinces a novelist’s empathy: “He arrived at six o’clock on a cold, gloomy February morning at the old dirty Pennsylvania station. He wandered out on the street with a heavy bag in his hand looking for a porter, but there were no porters. Then he stood for a few moments looking up at the Capitol and feeling dismally unimportant in the midst of what seemed to him to be very formidable surroundings. . . . He was sure he had made a fatal mistake in exchanging a good position and a pleasant circle at home, where everybody knew him, for a place in a strange and forbidding city where he knew practically nobody.” Nellie’s account clearly reveals, beneath her insistence that he establish himself in Washington, a compassionate knowledge of her husband’s nature. She relates that he dropped his bag off at the Old Ebbit House and walked to the Department of Justice for his swearing-in. Then he went to examine his office, where he “met the most dismal sight of the whole dismal day. His ‘quarters’ consisted of a single room, three flights up.” Nor was the busy hive of assistants his father had forecast waiting to greet him. The sole shorthand reporter on the premises did not work for Taft. He was a telegrapher in the chief clerk’s office and could only take Taft’s dictation when not engaged in his primary duties. “Altogether it must have been a very disheartening outlook,” Nellie wrote. “He wondered to himself why on earth he had come.”
Taft’s mood brightened considerably once Nellie arrived with Robert. They happily settled into a rented three-story town house at 5 Dupont Circle, which was easily affordable on his yearly salary of $7,000. “It is not a large house, but it is very pleasantly situated,” Taft told Judge Peck, “with an outlook on a delightful little park, and is very convenient to the street cars, which are constantly passing to and fro in front of the house.” His satisfaction with both their temporary home and the neighborhood, “one of the nicest and most convenient in the City,” is evident in a letter to his father: “Our house is what is called a swell front, so that we are able from the front windows to look up and down the street and get such a view and so much light as to make the three front rooms of the house charming. The front room on the first floor is a reception room; the front room on the second floor is a library and sitting-room and the guest room is on the third floor immediately back of the nursery.” The dining room was completed with a new table and eight new mahogany chairs, a Chippendale sideboard, and a new rug. For Will, the most important feature of the house was the sanctuary of a large library, lined with shelves sufficient to accommodate his treasured law books. “I find that without a place to work, it is difficult to work. I look forward with the greatest pleasure to the use of my books at night at home.”
The most fortuitous and enduring aspect of the new Taft residency, however, lay neither in cheerful accommodations nor access to the city center. Rather, 5 Dupont Circle stood only 1,000 feet away from the modest house at 1820 Jefferson Place which Theodore Roosevelt, newly appointed member of the Civil Service Commission, and his second wife, Edith Carow, had rented, and where they had come to live just two months earlier. The proximity of those two addresses in northwest Washington, both within walking distance of the White House, would give rise to the legendary friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.