Cool Stuff about William Howard Taft
1. It was during his years in the White House that Taft hit his maximum weight of 355 lbs. Anderson doesn’t mention the fact that Taft got stuck in his bathtub (so that may be an urban legend) but she does note that during the renovations in the White House, the bathtubs were all enlarged (see picture!)
2. I thought this was an interesting incident—one of those coincidences of history if you will—because General MacArthur’s (of Korean War fame) father, Arthur MacArthur was the military commander of the Philippines. Just like his son, who would get into it with Truman, MacArthur Senior got into it with Taft. “He [MacArthur] held military charge of the Islands, which he was reluctant to relinquish, and Taft immediately encouraged a struggle between the civil authority and the army” (p. 70). Just remember, people, that we have another MacArthur coming up during the Truman bio. Exciting!
3. Even though the Supreme Court was Taft’s ultimate ambition, he actually turned down the position two times (October 1902 and January 1903) before he became president.
4. We can thank Mrs. Nellie Taft for the abundance of cherry trees that line the streets of Washington DC. “When the mayor of Tokyo heard that she planned to purchase some of these beautifully flowering trees, he decided to make a gift of them to the United States. Consequently, in December 1909, three railroad cars, loaded with two thousand Japanese cherry trees and accompanied by a special agent, were on their way to Washington from the West Coast. As millions of visitors to Washington have seen each spring, they were successfully planted around the tidal basin of the Capitol. The following spring the Tafts rode along the Potomac Drive Way to view the trees, all of which were covered with delicate pink flowers, causing Mrs. Taft to clap her hands in delight” (p. 155-56).
5. Taft was the first president to receive the then-startling salary of $100,000.
6. It was during Taft’s presidency that that the Department of Labor and Commerce split into two separate cabinet positions: the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Commerce.
7. Arizona and New Mexico were admitted to statehood under the Taft administration.
8. We can also thank Taft for legalizing the income tax, along with the 17th amendment, which legitimized the direct election of senators. “…the Sixteenth Amendment (Income Tax) was passed; and the Seventeenth Amendment enacting a reform long desired by Populists and progressive Republicans, the direct election of senators, was finally adopted” (p. 199).
9. Taft was the very first president to ever actively campaign in a primary election. “Reporting that Taft would be the first president ever to stump in a primary, the New York Times, which strongly opposed Roosevelt, happily noted that Taft’s underdog position and the ‘radical’ pronouncements of Roosevelt had finally activated the president” (p. 228).
10. Mrs. Taft was quite the innovative lady and she liked to open figurative doors for the women of Washington DC. For instance, she was the first First Lady to ever attend a nominating convention for the opposite political party. “Mrs. Taft was so concerned about the outcome that she broke all precedent by attending the [Democratic] convention” (p. 241).
11. Nellie also became an author, a distinction that most First Ladies did not have. “New Haven offered a lively assortment of people and cultural events, and for the first few years she was busily, though guardedly, completing her memoirs, Recollections of Full Years, which was published in 1914” (p. 256).
12. The Tafts were the first presidential couple to be buried at Arlington Cemetery.
13. The Taft children—Robert, Helen, and Charles—also ended up doing some interesting things as well. Robert became a long-time Senator and even was considered for president at that several Republican nominating conventions. Charles became a lawyer and was an active reformer. Helen seemed to be a professional student, garnering a PhD and also a law degree, while authoring several books, and speaking out for reform.
I mentioned in the beginning that I thought this biography a trifle boring. The reason for that hasty statement was due to the fact that I definitely got a PhD-dissertation-vibe from the pages of this book. I’m not really sure how to explain the PhD vibe to you but basically, it has to do with word usage, esoteric topics, and a sort of dry delivery that are indicative of dissertations. No offence to those worthy academic benchmarks, of course.
Another dislike I had with this work was with Anderson’s rampant speculation with which she surrounds the facts. I was chillingly reminded of the John Wilkes Booth book when that author went off for pages and pages about imaginary thoughts and conversations. Ugh! This is history, people, and not if you’re not writing historical fiction, speculations about your topic really do not apply here. Anderson had a bad habit of hypothesizing on various motives and feelings connected with the Taft family. I find that aspect extremely frustrating in a good biography.
In general, I just wasn’t a fan of the layout of this book. Anderson uses a lot of what I call “psycho-babble” during her prognostications on Taft’s life. Here is a good example of what I mean:
The parent who constantly directs and supervises his child with endless reminders and demands often ends with a child who has learned to rely excessively on just this sort of external direction. Children require a certain freedom to pursue their own interests and develop a personal motivating force, and that part of their development is retarded by too much parental coerciveness. Demanding perfection from the child, such parents usually withhold approval or full acceptance until superior achievement is forthcoming. Children usually respond to demanding parents by striving to meet their standards and consequently develop and overconcern for accomplishment. In addition, they learn always to demand more of themselves than most people, and, also, to become dissatisfied with their achievement. William Howard Taft strove to be the ‘model schoolboy’ that his parents desired, but at the same time he developed the life-long habit of dissatisfaction with himself and his accomplishments, hence the tendency to belittle his own abilities. Since he felt he could not drive himself enough, he sought someone to require him to ‘do better and be better,’ as he himself once put it.
A second common reaction to demanding parents is in opposition to the first, that is, the child sporadically tries to assert his independence as an individual in whatever ways he can, often by stubbornly resisting being pushed. These ways usually involve a kind of passive resistance to constant parental coercion—such as dawdling, daydreaming, and procrastinating. These tactics were, of course, precisely what young Taft adopted, causing his parents to wonder anxiously if he was a lazy boy. Because procrastination is not active resistance to parental demands, the risk of the child’s losing his parents’ love and approval is minimal, since he feels he can, and usually does, make up his losses before they become irretrievable.
The pattern which develops from this kind of parent-child relationship—labeled the ‘command-resistance’ cycle by Dr. Hugh Missildine—is continued into adult life. People tend to recreate within themselves the same sort of emotional and psychological atmosphere in which they were raised. They simply feel at home in it. Adults are, in a way, ‘parents to themselves’; once they leave home, they internalize the parental attitudes they learned as children. Recreation of this ‘emotional atmosphere’ includes both the pleasant and the painful attitudes that characterized their childhood relationships at home. In addition, adults often invite their spouses to treat them much as their parents hasd, continuing to seek their approval in the same way they once sought it from their parents. This is precisely what William Howard Taft did upon marrying Nellie Herron” (p. 46-7).
Did you guys get that!?! Yes, it was just this impossible to consume the first time I read it.
For the most part, I merely felt sorry for William Taft because in today’s vernacular, he was “whipped.” First, he had an independent and domineering mother and then he goes from that to an independent and domineering wife (see above). But Taft was such a sweet, easygoing dude that this was probably the best thing for him. After all, I can probably safely say that he never would have been President of the Untied States had it not been for Nellie’s influence on his life. Actually, after reading about 27 presidents, I had yet come up against such an interesting phenomenon—a gentleman that sincerely did not want to be president of the United States. Huh.
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