IV.

President of the United States

In succeeding a president as colorful and popular as Roosevelt, Taft was at a disadvantage. Taft had a judicial, not a political, personality. Although Roosevelt said of Taft that “there cannot be found in the whole country a man so well fitted to be president,” Taft was a procrastinator and a poor public speaker, and he altogether lacked Roosevelt's flair for dramatizing the issues and his intentions.

A.

Relations With Congress

Taft began his term of office thinking of his administration as a “progressive development of that which has been performed by President Roosevelt.” Roosevelt was a symbol of a period of reform, called the Progressive Era, which lasted from the last decade of the 19th century into the second decade of the 20th century. Reformers, or Progressives, were concerned about abuses of power by government and businesses. They wanted to make the United States a better place to live, and like Roosevelt, they believed that the government had an important role to play in change.

Taft, too, was eager to contribute to social progress by laying the legal foundation for this reform. However, by nature, Taft was more conservative than Roosevelt. Furthermore, conditioned by his legal training and cast of mind, he conceived the role of the presidency in different terms: He expected the Congress of the United States to take the lead and refused to extend executive or federal powers without Congressional approval.

Taft soon offended Roosevelt's supporters. Roosevelt had been able to maintain an uneasy alliance between the two wings of the Republican Party, the so-called Standpatters (conservative Republicans) and the Progressives. Unfortunately Taft drove the two further apart.

The Standpatters, led by Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich and House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon, represented financial and industrial interests and supported high tariffs (import taxes), minimal government intervention in business, and few, if any, social and economic reforms. The Progressives, led by United States Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and Nebraska Representative George William Norris, represented Midwestern and Western farming and small business interests and supported lower tariffs, more government regulation of big businesses and social and economic reform.

B.

Republican Party Split

Taft chose almost all Standpatters for his Cabinet, including five corporation lawyers, and then clashed with the reformers on three major issues during his administration, splitting the Republican Party and alienating Roosevelt. The issues were tariff reform, conservation, and revision of the House of Representatives' rules of procedure.

During the campaign, Taft had committed himself to lower tariffs. Tariffs on imports raised money for the government and protected U.S. businesses from foreign competition by increasing the cost of importing those goods. Industries in Northern urban areas and banking interests tended to favor high tariffs because they helped domestic businesses; agricultural areas in the West and the South tended to oppose them because they made it harder for people to buy cheap foreign goods such as clothing. Taft called a special session of Congress early in 1909 to fulfill his low-tariff promise, but he was not as skilled at politics as Roosevelt had been. The Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, which he signed reluctantly, actually raised the tariff on many products and protected special interests. In an attempt to convince the American people that it was a good law, Taft made a 20,920-km (13,000-mi) railroad tour of the United States. In Winona, Minnesota, he said he thought it was the best bill the Republican Party had ever passed—a statement he would long regret. Enraged reformers were certain he had betrayed both them and the people.

The conservation controversy further widened the gap in the party. In forming his Cabinet, Taft had replaced Roosevelt's secretary of the interior, James R. Garfield, with Richard A. Ballinger. Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forestry Service and as much a symbol of conservation as his friend Roosevelt, accused Ballinger of allowing private companies to obtain reserved coal lands in Alaska. In the course of investigating the charges, Taft dismissed Pinchot. His action further alienated Roosevelt and heightened Progressives' accusations that Taft had abandoned the Roosevelt tradition.

Revising the rules of the House of Representatives was the third major issue that divided the party. At stake was the stranglehold maintained on the United States House of Representatives by its dictatorial speaker, Cannon, through his power to recognize speakers and appoint members of the various House committees, especially the powerful Rules Committee. Using these prerogatives ruthlessly the speaker had blocked efforts to pass progressive legislation and reform.

On the private advice of Roosevelt and New York Senator Elihu Root, Taft did not support an assault on Cannon, and the reformers were defeated in 1910. However, in 1911, in coalition with the Democrats, the Progressives succeeded in restricting the speaker's powers, but they accused Taft of betraying the Roosevelt legacy and never forgave him for failing to support them.

Having lost Progressive backing, Taft was forced increasingly to depend on conservative support for his legislative program, and by fall he was actively opposing the Progressives in Republican state conventions and primaries as well as in Congress. As a result, in the 1910 elections the Democrats won a 50-seat majority in the House and an additional 8 seats in the Senate. Roosevelt, back from his trip, campaigned for Republicans in 1910 and blamed Taft for the Democratic gains. The gap between the Republican factions was now unbridgeable.

C.

Reform Program

Despite the attacks on him, Taft made important contributions to reform. He actively and consistently prosecuted monopolies (one company supplying a commodity or service, and therefore controlling its price) and trusts (one company running several companies as though they were one company to control prices).

Almost twice the number of antitrust cases were brought to the courts in Taft's four-year term than during Roosevelt's seven and a half years in office. In 1910 Taft signed the Mann-Elkins Act, which placed various communications companies, including telephone, telegraph, radio and cable services, under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which had been created in 1887 to help regulate the economy. This act increased the commission's powers and jurisdiction, giving it the right to set railroad rates and intervene in freight classifications, and formed a Commerce Court inside the commission to review and enforce its decisions.

During Taft's administration, Congress passed the 16th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which gave the U.S. government the right to collect income taxes, and the 17th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of U.S. senators. His Commission on Efficiency and Economy pioneered major changes in federal finances and cut the cost of government by making operations more efficient. He helped to improve the U.S. currency and banking system. Furthermore, he signed the Publicity Act, which required political parties to divulge the sources and amounts of money they spent in federal election campaigns.

Taft's social legislation was also impressive. Under him, Congress divided Roosevelt's Department of Commerce and Labor into two departments and established within the Labor Department a federal Children's Bureau. He set up a Bureau of Mines in the Department of the Interior to help reduce mine accidents and fatalities. He also signed bills to introduce railroad safety devices, compensation for injured workers, and the eight-hour day on federal work projects. Many of these reforms were progressive, but Taft failed to convince many people that he was responsible for pushing them forward.

D.

Dollar Diplomacy

Taft, like Roosevelt, had ambitious plans to expand U.S. influence abroad. Aided by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, Taft substituted “dollars for bullets,” as he put it, a plan soon known as dollar diplomacy. Taft encouraged U.S. bankers and industrialists to invest abroad and used diplomatic pressure to force U.S. capital into regions where “it would not go of its own accord.” One of the first regions he chose was China, where he persuaded U.S. bankers to finance railroad construction. Taft and Knox also conceived a plan to help China purchase Japanese and Russian railroads in Manchuria. When Japan and Russia objected, however, the plan was abandoned, because U.S. military power was too weak to force these nations to agree to the plan. Roosevelt disliked this waste of U.S. diplomatic effort and told Taft that he shouldn't pursue policies unless he was prepared to back them up with force.

To safeguard the Panama Canal, Taft intensified dollar diplomacy in Latin America. He promoted U.S. investments in the Caribbean, arranged it so that Americans were in charge of Latin American finances whenever possible, and used U.S. Marines when persuasion failed to accomplish his objectives. His policies, although applauded by some, were severely criticized by many, both within and outside the United States. Less controversial were his support of an international agreement in 1911 to preserve seal herds and his settlement of the Newfoundland fisheries disputes.

Still in need of a major accomplishment in foreign affairs, Taft turned to Canada and in 1911 negotiated and pushed through Congress a reciprocal trade agreement to lower tariffs between the two countries. To Taft's dismay the Canadians, who held an election on the issue, rejected the treaty. He encountered even greater difficulty with treaties he negotiated with Great Britain and France the same year because the Senate amended them beyond recognition. Taft did not even go through the process of ratification, hoping, as he later stated, that “the senators might change their minds, or that the people might change the Senate; instead of which they changed me.”

E.

Election of 1912

Theodore Roosevelt made it clear early in 1912 that he wanted the Republican nomination for president. By now the former friends were bitter enemies, and Taft was determined that Roosevelt should not succeed. With his control over the party machinery, Taft prevented the seating of many Roosevelt delegates at the 1912 national convention and kept the official Republican nomination for himself. However, his hopes for reelection were limited, for as he himself put it, his administration was uninteresting and failed to attract anybody's attention or enthusiasm. Roosevelt agreed and led his supporters out of the Republican Party to a new party, the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party (see Progressive Party: The Bull Moose Party).

As a result of the Republican-Progressive split, the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, easily won the election. Although the popular vote for Wilson was less than the combined popular vote obtained by Roosevelt and Taft, he received 435 electoral votes against Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's 8. Even Arizona and New Mexico, which had become states during Taft's administration, supported the Democrats.