Republicans

William Howard Taft: An Intimate History by Judith Icke Anderson

Bob Timmermann11 Comments

President #27, C-SPAN historians’ ranking #24

Why Am I President? It Was On My Wife’s To Do List.

taftWhen it came time to find a biography of President William Taft, it wasn’t easy. Despite holding office during a time when Constitutional Amendments introducing the income tax and the direct election of senators, the admission of two states (New Mexico and Arizona), and running in an election against two of the 20th Century’s most famous presidents (Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson), Taft hasn’t received much interest from historians.

This left me finding this book, which was published commercially in 1981, but was actually a more commercial version of a UCLA dissertation by a woman for whom I can find no trace further trace of.

“An Intimate History” is the same subtitle that Jefferson biographer Fawn Brodie used for his study of our third president. That book was published in 1974. Brodie was Anderson’s adviser at UCLA and she followed in her footsteps. And in this book, the reader learns about William Taft, the man, and why he did what he did. And in Anderson’s view, Taft’s actions in all aspects of life were mostly an attempt to please his mother, and, then later, his wife.

And Anderson goes on at length about Taft’s weight. It is not something that can be ignored, especially since Taft tipped the scales at up to 355 pounds while he served as President.

Why was Taft so heavy? According to Anderson, Taft was someone who took solace in eating when he was either stressed out or felt a need to please someone. And when Taft was in the White House, he was stressed out. His enormous weight likely gave Taft a case of apnea as he often dozed off at inappropriate times and snored loudly during public gatherings.

Taft’s career path to the White House was not a normal one. The son of a former Secretary of War, Alphonso Taft, William went to college at Yale and then to law school at the University of Cincinnati. His mother assumed that William, like all Tafts would achieve greatness.

But first, Taft needed to find a wife. And he eventually met Helen “Nellie” Herron at a sledding party in Cincinnati. Taft courted Nellie for years before she agreed to marry him. Nellie’s hesitancy stemmed from the fact that she considered herself to be fairly independent. However, she also wanted to be attached to important people. And she sensed that William Taft was someone who could bring up her to the highest circles of power, even the White House.

But, Taft’s ambition was to be a judge. He served in a local court in Ohio and loved it. However, he was picked to go to Washington by President Benjamin Harrison to serve as Solicitor General.  Nellie loved the change of scenery. Although Taft was a good judge, he was a lousy litigator. He did not have an adversarial nature. He wanted to be everyone’s friend. Although I am not a lawyer, I’m guessing being conciliatory and jovial isn’t the tone you’re looking for.

In Washington, Taft became friends with a young man who was serving as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His name was Theodore Roosevelt.

President William McKinley offered Taft a position on the Federal District Court back in Ohio, so Taft returned there to a job he loved above all other.  Later, McKinley asked Taft back when he needed someone to serve as the first civil governor of the newest United States territories, the Philippines.

The people of the Philippines didn’t particularly enjoy being under Spanish control, and they didn’t particularly like having Americans tell them what to do either. The American military governor, General Arthur MacArthur (who had a son named Douglas), had to suppress an insurrection. MacArthur did so, but in a brutal fashion that often involved torture.

Taft had to work to repair America’s image both in the Philippines and the world while building up a system of government for the people of the Philippines. Anderson describes Taft as being well regarded by the Filipinos, although coming after MacArthur, that’s not much of a surprise.

By 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt needed a new Secretary of War and he asked his old friend William Taft to take over that post. Taft didn’t know much about running the Army, but Roosevelt thought well of him. Taft actually spent much of his time travelling on diplomatic missions as Roosevelt had stretched U.S. interests to all parts of the globe.

Roosevelt had promised Taft that he would get him a seat on the Supreme Court, preferably Chief Justice, if one ever came up. But the time was never right, so Taft remained in Roosevelt’s Cabinet.

When Roosevelt was elected to a full term in 1904, he promised he wouldn’t run again. This was a bit of a problem for him in 1908 because he was still relatively young (50 on Election Day) and extremely popular. But Roosevelt felt he couldn’t go back on his promise, so he designated Taft to be his successor.

Taft was not particularly interested in becoming President, but Nellie was quite interested in being First Lady. And in most discussions between William and Nellie, Nellie won. Taft was elected easily over Democratic nominee, and three-time loser, Wililam Jennings Bryan.

Almost as soon as the election was over, things went wrong for Taft. The President-elect had sent a telegram to supporters thanking two people for his election: Roosevelt (for his popularity that made it easy for another Republican to win) and his brother Charles Taft (for extensive financial support). Roosevelt was appalled to be lumped in with someone who just wrote checks.

One of the first major pieces of legislation Taft wanted to get passed was a tariff reform bill. Roosevelt advised Taft that tariffs needed to be lowered, but he didn’t do while he was in office because he knew the issue was too sensitive with an election coming up.

In 1909, the Republicans were the party of high tariffs. And the more conservative Republicans liked the tariffs to be as high as possible. The bill that passed Congress, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff ended up raising duties on nearly every type of imported goods. Conservatives were happy, but Progressive Republicans (who were Roosevelt supporters) were appalled. Taft was immediately branded as a weak leader.

Also in 1909, Taft faced a major political crisis in the Interior Department. Taft had appointed former Seattle mayor Richard Ballinger as his new Secretary of the Interior. However, Taft kept on in the Forestry Service, a Roosevelt loyalist named Gifford Pinchot.

Pinchot, who would likely be called an environmentalist now, although “conservation” was the term used in the day, accused Ballinger of leasing public lands in Alaska to large corporations for mining and other ways to tap their natural resources. Charges flew back and forth between the two men. Pinchot was eventually fired by Taft, an action that Roosevelt’s supporters could not abide. Eventually, Ballinger resigned as well. Taft bungled the matter every way possible. And mostly this happened because Taft didn’t want to take command of the situation, but rather just try to make everybody happy.

Another problem for Taft was one that was not of his own making. Roosevelt had established himself as a Progressive Republican, with a penchant for going after big business. Taft was a conservative. Roosevelt had to know this. Yet, Roosevelt backed a man for President whom he had to believe was going to reverse some of his policies.

In the midterm elections, the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress. Soon after, Roosevelt returned from a long trip to Africa to great national acclaim. And soon set into his old friend Taft and started to position himself for another run at the White House.

Taft pretty much knew that he couldn’t get reelected in 1912. He just didn’t have the national support. His only reason for being elected in the first place was that he was Theodore Roosevelt’s friend. And now Roosevelt hated him. That left Taft without much to go on.

But Nellie was determined that her husband at least not lose the Republican nomination to Roosevelt. And Taft agreed with his wife. He decided he wanted to make Roosevelt run as a third party candidate.

Fortunately for Taft, there were only a handful of these newfangled things called primaries during the nominating season. Roosevelt won the majority of those, but Taft, through the power of patronage, was able to control enough delegates to win the nomination. Roosevelt was left to run on his own as the Progressive Party Candidate. Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated the nerdy, yet popular, governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson.

Almost nothing went write right for Taft during the campaign. His trusted confidante and personal aide, Archie Butt, had left him because of personal issues in 1912. Butt had served as Roosevelt’s personal aide as well and he couldn’t decide whom to work for. So, he went to Europe to think about it. Butt booked passage on the Titanic for the trip home. He didn’t make it.

Taft’s Vice President, James “Sunny Jim” Sherman, died a few weeks before Election Day as well. Taft made odd statements to the press, including one where he said he would campaign “like a cornered rat.”

When the counting was done, Wilson was an easy winner. Taft won just two states, the worst showing of any incumbent President ever. And Taft won one of the states, Vermont, by just 923 votes. In 1912, Vermont was not yet run by the Ben & Jerry’s types, and was one of the most conservative states in the country.

Losing the election relieved a great burden from Taft. He no longer had to be the bad guy who told people “no.” Not that Taft said “no” all that often.

Once leaving office, Taft taught law at Yale, but finally got his dream job in 1921 when President Warren Harding appointed him to be Chief Justice of the United States. Taft loved this job more than any other. And according to Anderson, his weight dropped into the 260 lb range. He no longer had to eat his way through stress. He had found his dream job, the one he had thought about since he came to Washington in 1886.

William Taft passed away in 1930 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the first President to be so honored. His wife Nellie wanted that honor. However, few people wander over to the section of Arlington to see Taft’s grave. Just like finding a biography of Taft, it’s something you have to seek out. Perhaps a better story of Taft’s life is still to be written.

But the life of Willam Howard Taft teaches us one thing: if you want to be remembered by historians as president, don’t have your term fall in between those of two far more famous presidents.

Psychobiography was a popular discipline in the 1970s, but it isn’t used now. Brodie was able to apply it to it someone like Jefferson because there was quite a bit to work on. The inner workings of the psyche of William Howard Taft may not be that be interesting. Especially since Anderson spells it all out very early in the book. The final 200 or so pages are more repetitions of the theme of “Taft tries to please wife, eats too much, becomes less happy, repeat.” Perhaps there is more to Taft than just a domineering wife and a battle with obesity. However, that book hasn’t been written yet.

But Nellie Taft got a major biography written about her just three years ago. Sorry Bill, you can’t win this game.

Other stuff: Taft, despite his great size, was an avid sportsman and he tried to play a round of golf nearly everyday. Taft was also the first U.S. President to throw out the ceremonial first pitch to mark the beginning of baseball season. This started in 1910.

The National Park service operates the William Howard Taft National Historic Site in Cincinnati.

Taft’s son, Robert, served as a Senator from Ohio and ran for the Republican nomination for President in 1940, 1944, and 1952. A William Howard Taft IV (great-grandson of the president) worked for a time in the George W. Bush Administration. Robert Taft III, who went by Bob Taft, served as governor of Ohio. Generally, if you run into something in the U.S. with the name “Taft” in it, it’s probably this president’s family.

James Garfield by Ira Rutkow

Bob Timmermann7 Comments

You should put some Bactine on that

President #20, C-SPAN Historians ranking #28

jamesgarfieldJames Garfield served as President from March 4 through September 19, 1881, the second shortest tenure of any person to hold the office. Garfield’s assassination was  tragic, although the most tragic part was not the violence perpetrated by Charles Guiteau, but rather by the the incompetent medical care that Garfield received from a group of doctors who refused to adopt some of the most basic medical principles that we take for granted today.

Because Garfield’s presidency was so short and he spent much of it (80 days) dying from his bullet wound, this biography of Garfield was given to Ira Rutkow, a surgeon who has written numerous books on medical history. Garfield’s biography is intriguing, although if reading about gruesome medical conditions is not your thing, you may wish to pass this book by.

Rutkow does discuss Garfield’s rise from his humble beginnings in Ohio (he was the last president to be born in a log cabin) to the White House. And Garfield was undoubtedly a brilliant man, although politically, his greatest gift was giving good speeches.  He was not an especially inspiring leader, but he was respected.

Garfield rose to fame during the Civil War serving as the chief of staff to Union General William Rosecrans, although Garfield left the Army in 1863 to take over a House seat for Ohio. Rosecrans was relieved of his command of the Army of the Cumberland after a terrible defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga. Garfield and Rosecrans are linked in the city of Paramount, California where streets named after them intersect. (Although some sources say Garfield Avenue is actually named for Garfield’s widow, Lucretia.)

While serving in the House, Garfield aligned himself with the Radical Republicans and he even came out against the reelection of Abraham Lincoln. But he built a reputation as a thoughtful and well-read Representative and someone to watch out for in the future.

And like so many politicians of the era, Garfield was touched by scandals, including the Credit Mobilier scandal (it’s another one of those events you hoped your teacher didn’t put on the midterm) and also for receiving excessive fees for serving as a lobbyist for a company. But compared to what was going in the Grant Administration, Garfield looked pretty clean.

In 1880, the Republican Party, which barely held on to the White House in 1876 thanks to some last-minute Electoral College chicanery (the Democrats were equally guilty of chicanery. It was a very chicanerous time.), was divided into two factions: the Stalwarts who wanted to bring back Ulysses Grant for a third term. This faction was led by New York Senator Roscoe Conkling. The Stalwarts liked the spoils system and political appointments for cronies all around.

The other faction was called the Half-Breeds and they were led by James Blaine, who had been Speaker of the House. This group tended to be a bit more conciliatory toward the South and wanted some civil service reform. The Half-Breeds had two candidates: Blaine and Ohio Senator John “my older brother burned down Georgia” Sherman.

Three strong candidates at a political convention lends itself well to a deadlock and one quickly developed. Garfield, who was hoping for such a deadlock, ended up being the compromise choice and he prevailed in the general election over Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock (another Union General) by margin of about 7,000 votes (Rutkow uses a figure of 2,000). The Electoral Vote wasn’t as close with Garfield winning 214-155.

Upon election, nothing went well for Garfield. Conkling demanded that his faction of the party be represented in Garfield’s Cabinet, even though the Vice-President, Chester Arthur, was a Conkling crony. Garfield ended up piecing together a Cabinet that no one liked.

After his inauguration, Garfield soon discovered that his campaign manager was involved in a scandal where he took exorbitant fees to deliver mail to rural areas through companies he controlled. But the mail never got delivered in those areas.

The biggest headache for Garfield came when he tried to appoint someone to the lucrative position of Customs Collector for the Port of New York who was not acceptable to Conkling, who tried to block the move with some parliamentary tricks. Conkling’s effort failed and, out of spite or pique, Conkling resigned his Senate seat (as did New York’s other Senator, Thomas “Me Too” Platt) hoping to be reelected to the Senate by the New York legislature. The New York legislature chose two other people.

So Conkling was out of the picture and life seemed better for James Garfield as he was heading to catch a train to  his alma mater of Williams College and a vacation with his wife in New Englad.

Enter Charles Guiteau. Guiteau was a man with many psychiatric problems (this amateur psychiatrist thinks he was schizophrenic) and he was disappointed that Garfield and his new Secretary of State, Blaine, had not appointed him to be a U.S. consul in either Vienna or Paris. People in Washington knew Guiteau as “that crazy guy who keeps asking for a job.” But they didn’t know that he wasn’t harmless. He had a gun and he fired twice into Garfield’s back.

The first medical officer to examine Garfield stuck his unsterilized finger into the wound to look for the bullet, but couldn’t find it. (Rutkow speculates that the first person examining Garfield may have had manure on his hands.) Then another doctor came in and he tried to find the bullet with his finger. Then he took a metal probe and stuck it inside Garfield’s bullet wound and poked around, but didn’t find the bullet. However, it was assumed that the bullet hit Garfield’s liver. It hadn’t.

Garfield was taken back to the White House where the doctor who took over the case, a man who was literally a doctor in name only. The man’s name was Doctor William Bliss. Was he Dr. Doctor William Bliss? Who knows for sure? It didn’t take much in 1881 to call yourself “Doctor” as licensing of physicians hadn’t started, but Doctor was the man’s given name. Bliss wasn’t even the Garfield family physician. They frequented a homeopathic doctor in Washington.

Bliss never could figure out that Garfield kept suffering from high fevers, extreme nausea, and a rapid heart rate because he had developed massive infections from his wound being continually poked and prodded at with unsterilized instruments. Garfield spent the last 80 days of his life in misery and agony that would have been easily preventable today and could have been prevented back in 1881 if Bliss hadn’t held on to his belief that antiseptic practices were just a fad. Alexander Graham Bell was even brought in to help out and that was pretty much a disaster.

Rutkow’s description of Garfield’s care can be quite harrowing to read. It’s also remarkable to find out how much medical science has changed in the past 128 years. Rutkow compares the treatment that Ronald Reagan received in 1981 to the treatment that Garfield received 100 years later earlier. Garfield’s wound would have been treated fairly simply in 1981 and he likely would have been out of the hospital in a day or two. Reagan’s injuries in 1881 likely would have killed him within a day if Bliss had taken over the case (mostly because Bliss wouldn’t have bothered to check on Reagan’s respiration or blood pressure.) Guiteau’s bullet did not hit any of Garfield’s vital organs nor did it cause any spinal cord damage.

Bliss would later publish articles on his treatment of Garfield in an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation. Here is an example of one such document, but I don’t suggest clicking that link until you’re sure you aren’t going to eat for a while.

James Garfield didn’t want to leave a legacy of dying at a young age (49) from medical malpractice, but that’s what history remembers him for. But at least he helped get doctors to wash their hands and sterilize their instruments.

Notes: James Garfield’s home, dubbed Lawnfield by reporters during the 1880 campaign, is run by the National Park Service as the James A. Garfield National Historic Site. It is located in Mentor, Ohio.

Garfield was the first president whose mother watched his inauguration. Garfield’s widow, Lucretia, moved to Pasadena, California for the winters after her husband’s death and passed away in 1918, although she is buried alongside her husband in a cemetery in Cleveland.

Gerald Ford by Douglas Brinkley

Bob Timmermann10 Comments

President #38, C-SPAN ranking 22

Pardon me!

geraldford2Gerald Ford had a unique presidency. He was not elected to be vice president. He was not elected to be president. His vice president was not elected either. He was the first president to born with an entirely different first and last name than what he used while in office. He was a remarkably successful politician who never lost an election, until he ran for president on his own.

But what will history remember Gerald Ford for? He was the man who pardoned Richard Nixon. And that one act, something which Ford did not regret, is like that big  blemish on someone’s face that you just can’t help staring at.

Douglas Brinkley, who has written a biography of Jimmy Carter among his many other books, writes the Gerald Ford obituary and does a good job of presenting the two sides of Ford. One side was the grandfatherly, pipe-smoking calm leader who led America out of the dark years of  Watergate. The other side was the man who spent most of this adult life in politics and based many of his decisions based on what was feasible in a hostile political climate.

Ford came into the world with the name Leslie King, but his mother took her son away from her abusive husband and moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she remarried a successful local business man, who adopted  young Leslie King and renamed him Gerald R. Ford, Jr. The R stands for Rudolph, which was originally Rudolf, but Ford changed that spelling too.

Ford was an All-America center for the University of Michigan’s football team in 1934.  That Michigan squad went 1-7 and scored just 21 points.

Eventually Ford went on to Yale Law School, served in the Navy in World War II, and then came back to Grand Rapids and started a law practice and went into politics and won a House seat in 1948 and held it until he resigned to become the replacement for Spiro Agnew as Vice President in 1973.

Ford remained loyal to Nixon for as long as he could, but even he had his limits. When it became clear that Nixon had to resign, White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig came to Ford with a series of scenarios. One of them was that Nixon would resign in exchange for a pardon from Ford. Did Ford agree to this? According to Brinkley, Ford didn’t. But he also didn’t explicitly say he wouldn’t pardon Nixon. And in such gray areas, Ford’s legacy was made.

The rest of Ford’s presidency featured events such as an attempt to end inflation by getting people to wear WIN (Whip Inflation Now!) buttons and telling people that it was their patriotic duty to spend less, the signing of the Helsinki accords on human rights (which made Ford a pariah to the Republican right, aka Ronald Reagan), watching South Vietnam fall into the hands of Communists, sending Marines to rescue a captured U.S. freighter in Cambodia, and getting to look very presidential during the Bicentennial.

One aspect of Ford’s presidency that Brinkley mentions is Ford’s role in  East Timor. When the Timorese tried to break away from Indonesia, Ford, upon advice from his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, gave the Indonesians free rein to suppress the insurgency. Hundreds of thousands died in a conflict that lasted over 20 years. In his memoirs, Ford pointed to his actions in this matter as one of his biggest mistakes.

Ford lost his chance to be elected in his own right in 1976. Reagan almost denied Ford the nomination and did little campaigning for him in the general election against Jimmy Carter. And despite having the stain of the Nixon pardon and making a huge gaffe in a debate (“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”), Ford narrowly lost in 1976, 50.1%-40.8% 48.0%.

Gerald Ford, unlike the other presidents with official libraries, opted to have the museum attached to it in a different city. Ford’s papers are at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, while a museum dedicated to his life is in his home town of Grand Rapids (I’ve been to it. TWICE!). Ford’s widow, Betty, is of course better known for the rehab clinic she and her husband helped to open in Rancho Mirage, California.

Rancho Mirage is where Gerald Ford passed away on December 26, 2006 at the age of 93. Ford lived longer than any other President, 45 days longer than Reagan.