Presidency of William Howard Taft

Taft sought to lower tariffs—a tax on imports—then a major source of governmental income. However he was out-maneuvered. The new Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 raised rates when most people expected reductions. Taft expanded Roosevelt's efforts to break up trusts, launching legal cases against U.S. Steel and other very large companies. Taft made six appointments to the United States Supreme Court, more than all but two other presidents. In foreign affairs, Taft focused on China and Japan, and repeatedly intervened to prop up or remove Latin American governments. It followed a policy of Dollar Diplomacy, using American banking investment to bolster influence in Latin America and China, with little success.


His administration was filled with conflict between the conservative wing of the Republican Party, with which Taft often sympathized, and the progressive wing, led by Theodore Roosevelt and Robert M. La Follette. Controversies over conservation and over antitrust cases filed by the Taft administration served to further separate Taft and Roosevelt. Roosevelt challenged Taft at the 1912 Republican National Convention, but Taft was able to use his control of the party machinery to narrowly win his party's nomination. After the convention, Roosevelt left the party, formed the Progressive Party, and ran against Taft and Wilson in the 1912 election. Roosevelt had already blocked LaFollette's ambitions, so he endorsed Wilson. The deep split among Republicans doomed Taft's re-election, giving Democrats control of the White House for the first time in sixteen years, as well as control of Congress. Historians generally consider Taft to have been an average president.

Moving apart from Roosevelt[edit]

Stanley Solvick argues that President Taft abided by the goals and procedures of the "Square Deal" promoted by Roosevelt in his first term. The problem was that Roosevelt and the more radical progressives had moved on to more aggressive goals, such as curbing the judiciary, which Taft rejected.^[117]


The arbitration issue opens a window on a bitter dispute among progressives. Taft and many progressives looked to legal arbitration as an alternative to warfare. Roosevelt—a warrior not a lawyer—rejected that line of thought as the product of a too-soft business culture.^[118] Taft was a constitutional lawyer who later became Chief Justice; he had a deep understanding of the legal issues.^[119] Taft's political base was the conservative business community which largely supported arbitration and often talked peace. His mistake in this case was a failure to fully mobilize that base. The businessmen believed that economic rivalries were cause of war, and that extensive trade led to an interdependent world that would make war a very expensive and useless anachronism. One early success came in the Newfoundland fisheries dispute between the United States and Britain in 1910. Taft's 1911 treaties with France and Britain were killed by Roosevelt, who had broken with his protégé in 1910. War and peace became issues in their duel for control of the Republican Party.^[112][113] At a deeper level, Roosevelt truly believed that arbitration was a naïve solution and that great issues had to be decided by warfare. The Rooseveltian approach had a near-mystical faith in the ennobling nature of war. It endorsed jingoistic nationalism as opposed to the businessmen's calculation of profit and national interest.^[114]


During Roosevelt's fifteen months in Europe and Africa, from March 1909 to June 1910, neither man wrote much to the other. Taft biographer Lurie suggested that each expected the other to make the first move to re-establish their relationship on a new footing. Upon Roosevelt's triumphant return, Taft invited him to stay at the White House. The former president declined, and in private letters to friends expressed dissatisfaction at Taft's performance. Nevertheless, he wrote that he expected Taft to be renominated by the Republicans in 1912, and did not speak of himself as a candidate.^[120] Taft and Roosevelt met twice in 1910; the meetings, though superficially cordial, did not display their former closeness.^[71]


Roosevelt gave a series of speeches in the West in the late summer and early fall of 1910. Roosevelt not only attacked the Supreme Court's 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York, he accused the federal courts of undermining democracy, and called for them to be deprived of the power to rule legislation unconstitutional. This attack horrified Taft, who privately agreed that Lochner had been wrongly decided but strongly supported judicial review. Roosevelt called for the "elimination of corporate expenditures for political purposes, physical valuation of railroad properties, regulation of industrial combinations, establishment of an export tariff commission, a graduated income tax ... workmen's compensation laws, state and national legislation to regulate the [labor] of women and children, and complete publicity of campaign expenditure".^[121] John Murphy writes that, "as Roosevelt began to move to the left, Taft veered to the right."^[121] Taft had become increasingly associated with the conservative "Old Guard" faction of the party, and progressive Republicans such as Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette became dissatisfied with Taft's leadership.^[122] La Follette and his followers formed the National Republican Progressive League as a platform to challenge Taft in 1912 presidential election, either for the Republican nomination or in the general election as a third party.^[123]