RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Republicans have this much trouble choosing a speaker of the House, they can’t consider policy. If they can’t consider policy, they can’t build a strong platform. And if they can’t build a strong platform, they will have nothing to stand on in the next presidential election.

The default will be a mêlée of loyalists of various stripes — traditional Republicans, the odd libertarian, Trump revivalists — and of course, Donald Trump himself. The result is that policy itself will get neglected in the crucial 2024 year, to the enormous detriment of the American economy.

The price of such a free-for-all becomes clear when you go back to another point when Republicans brawled: the year 1912.

Playing the Trump role in that period was Theodore Roosevelt, though TR hadn’t started out as a powermonger. In his early years TR was a reformer, shining a spotlight on corruption in New York state. The early TR was also an American expansionist and a warrior — the Rough Rider who breached a steep ravine to emerge victorious at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt became president after an assassin felled William McKinley in 1901.

And the presidency went to Roosevelt’s head. As president, he electrified the nation with impulsive forays — to call some of them “policies” would be a stretch. He forced a coup in Colombia to secure the Panama Canal, a step so brazen that Senator S. I. Hayakawa of California would comment of Panama, “We stole it fair and square.” But it was on the domestic front that most Americans focused. Here Roosevelt proved equally heedless, wielding the Department of Justice like a cudgel against business leaders he branded as “malefactors of wealth.”

Roosevelt selected as successor his friend William Howard Taft, who had a certain Burkean incrementalism. “We are all imperfect,” Taft once intoned. “We cannot expect perfect government.” Taft was also a fine jurist who could lay out the value of the separation of powers with all the skill of Montesquieu. “Wise deliberation,” Taft said, “may constitute the salvation of our republic.”

When it came to defending the Constitution, Taft managed to convert theory into action: persuading Congress to back legislation that gave the Supreme Court more independence to set its own agenda, as well as supporting funding for a symbol of that independence, a separate Supreme Court building. It is this champion of judicial independence some of us hope to learn more of in Walter Stahr’s forthcoming Taft biography.

Meanwhile we can study the Taft whom we know — the one who, against his own nature, opted to play the loyalist in his era’s electoral theater. As Jeffrey Rosen shows in his own perspicacious biography, after his 1908 election Taft devoted his first years in office to dignifying Roosevelt’s excesses by forcing them into a constitutional corset.

Roosevelt had fiddled with tariffs on foreign nations, most particularly the recently liberated Cuba. Taft fiddled some more, accepting a wrongheaded tariff, the 1909 Payne-Aldrich bill, because it decreased tariff rates slightly. Roosevelt had busted trusts, and Taft busted more, outdoing TR in the sheer number of antitrust actions his administration undertook.

Taft told himself he was doing the right thing because he was honoring Teddy, and because whatever he did, he did within the letter of the Founders’ documents. Before, during, and after his presidency, Taft cited the Constitution so often it became a ritual. “He stood firmly by the Constitution, as usual,” his wife Nellie would sigh.

Rosen rightly emphasizes Taft’s worthy efforts. Taft efficiently cut government’s expenses. He pushed the 62nd Congress into passing a strong free-trade agreement with Canada.

But even here, his loyalty got in the way. When he wrote to TR to boast, Taft commented that the result of the Canadian Tariff Reciprocity Agreement would generate so much commerce that it would render Canada “on an adjunct to the United States.” The letter was leaked. The Canadian prime minister promptly slammed Taft as “tricky Taft,” and, Brexit-wise, the Canadian people voted down the treaty in a referendum.

But Taft’s constitutionality did not mean that the policy that resulted from it was optimal policy, or any more constitutional than optimal policies would have been. Or that TR appreciated the loyalty. As Candice Millard shows in River of Doubt, TR, uncomfortable with retirement, could not long resist second-guessing Taft. As TR distanced himself, an unnerved Taft, already rotund, ate himself to a BMI of 45.

Comments on his size had started out in the nature of friendly ribbing: Taft was “corpulent, good natured, fond of food, gleefully participating in a golf game or joyously cheering the flight of an airship.” Gleeful cartoons of his girth, however, obscured the 350-pounder’s legal arguments, damaging the president’s authority. Aides and cabinets politely looked away when Taft’s nightly sleep apnea caused the chief executive to doze off in daytime meetings. An Ozempic counterfactual flickers willy-nilly across the reader’s mind.

But worse yet, for Taft and the country, was that the beleaguered chief executive proved too loyal to switch economic policies, or put his shoulder into changing the Grand Old Party’s tariff-and-trust-busting combo. Not even after the unexpectedly long Panic of 1910–11, which saw the stock market lose nearly 20 percent of its value, would Taft change his stance. This was the moment to shift away from trust busting, or to disavow class war. Thus Taft earned his place in the distinguished ranks of Yale men who do the wrong thing for the right reason.

Come the election of 1912, the door was therefore open for TR to thunder in. In the GOP primaries Taft campaigned on the Constitution, while Roosevelt campaigned — successfully — on being different from Taft. TR collected more delegates, but at the Republican convention, another party loyalist, Elihu Root, ensured Taft got the nomination. Incandescent with rage, TR founded the Bull Moose Party and called for “pure democracy.”

On a policy level, Taft and TR battled over narrow differences on antitrust. Both ignored the costs in attorneys and growth that antitrust incursions had inflicted on the economy since Roosevelt took office and the potential protectionism had to hurt the average worker. So did the party platform, which forthrightly promised to uphold the tariff: “We reaffirm our belief in a protective tariff.” The platform also assailed, in what seems to us all-too-familiar lingo, “special privilege” and “monopoly.”

Republicans probably told one another — in the too-rare moments that they took their eyes off the TR–Taft quarrel — that either candidate would be better than the Democrat, the progressive Woodrow Wilson. What the Republicans failed to note were the meritorious elements of Wilson’s agenda: “that the Federal government, under the Constitution, has no right or power to impose or collect tariff duties, except for the purpose of revenue.” And that it was the stiff Wilson who came off as more of a leader in the Taft–Roosevelt fight.

In the latter stages of the campaign, Roosevelt fat-shamed Taft, calling him a “fathead.” TR likewise took aim at his intelligence too, dismissing him as a “puzzlewit.” Taft responded, at times, by veering into despair: “It is hard, very hard,” he told his aide Archie Butt, “to see a devoted friendship going to pieces like a rope of sand.” At other moments, the president fought back, noting, accurately enough, that Roosevelt’s populist reforms did not guarantee prosperity: “Voters are not bread, constitutional amendments are not work, referendums do not pay rent or furnish houses.”

After all, allowed Taft, “even a rat in a corner will fight.” Rosen reports that Taft even went so far as to concede once that he preferred to see Wilson elected over TR, though he later would characterize Wilson’s speaking style as “purring and ladylike.” Those who knew Taft and TR best — voters in their home states, Ohio and New York — signaled their disgust by handing a plurality to Wilson.

Wilson likewise won the rest of the land. Wilson’s national plurality — it was only that — enabled the new president to put through reforms that Republicans would rue the rest of the century, most especially the progressive income tax. Though the boom of World War I masked the damage of Wilson’s laws for a while — wars do that — it all came out afterward. Wilson nationalized the railroads and then, messily, denationalized them. Loose money and high taxes forced both inflation and joblessness on post-war America.

One can find consolations in this drama. Two terms out of power concentrated Republicans’ minds, resulting in a 1920 platform that assailed progressive policies rather than seeking to outdo them. “The burden of taxation imposed upon the American people is staggering,” the 1920 platform said. “We are opposed to government ownership and operation or employees’ operation of the railroads.” Private ownership was the answer. This clear profile as the party of smaller government swept the Republicans in.

Loyalty becomes biographers more than U.S. presidents, and Rosen is the right kind of biographer loyalist: Without ignoring flaws, he takes care to underscore the true achievements in Taft’s presidential record. International agreements stewarded by Taft, whether failed or watered down, nonetheless served as precedents for both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the International Criminal Court. At home, “Taft’s talent for administration allowed him to fulfill his campaign promise to oversee a government that was constitutionally limited and economically efficient.” Taft inspired later presidents, especially Calvin Coolidge, to defend the Constitution with rigor.

Yet Coolidge also made clear that serving the Constitution meant serving the ideal of smaller government. Taft’s incrementalism and innate conservatism inspired his son, Robert Taft, who kept the flame of small government alive as a U.S. senator in the 1940s–50s, a period when his party neglected markets yet again. To his eternal credit Taft himself, more than content in his post-presidential job as Supreme Court chief justice, treated his adventure as chief executive lightly.

Speaking of his failed treaties — the Canadian agreement for example, and an early iteration of the World Court — Taft told others, “I put them on the shelf, and let the dust accumulate on them in the hope that the senators might change their mind, or that the people might change the Senate. Instead of which, they changed me.”

In the end Taft came to regard his White House stay as an unpleasant interlude, better forgotten. For Republicans today, however, both the stubborn adherence to poor policy and the infighting of the Taft period warrant study — especially if the party wants to preclude a 1912 replay.