In The Tafts, veteran Baltimore lawyer George W. Liebmann provides an account of five generations of the Ohio-based dynasty of Republicans, highly accomplished but less prone to self-advertisement than some of the United States’ better-known political families. Louise Taft Semple, President Taft’s niece, bequeathed her fortune for the promotion of classical studies at the University of Cincinnati, which consequently boasts one of America’s most prestigious Classics departments and one of the world’s biggest Classics libraries. The university itself was rescued by the first of Liebmann’s subjects, lawyer and judge Alphonso Taft (1810-91), who successfully defended the will of the founder, Charles McMicken, which financed its establishment. McMicken was a slave-owner. In 2022 the university removed his name from all its buildings and spaces named after its benefactor because, it argued, not to do so ‘betrays academic values’. What about historical truth?
As a judge of the Ohio Supreme Court, Alphonso Taft dissented in a ruling that allowed the King James Bible to be read in public schools. Alphonso’s insistence on a duty ‘to keep religious partisanship out of the public schools’ was cited in 1963 by the US Supreme Court, which held Bible reading and the recital of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools to be unconstitutional. His principled dissent is said to have cost him three governorships. One of Alphonso’s lawyer sons, Henry Waters Taft, opposed actions for alienation of affections, ‘criminal conversation’ (i.e. adultery) and breach of promise of marriage – as did his British contemporary, Mr Justice McCardie – as degrading and instruments of blackmail. The highly cultivated Taft’s Opinions, Literary or Otherwise (1934) repays reading.
Liebmann devotes most attention to the best known of Alphonso’s sons, William Howard Taft (1857-1930) and his eldest son Robert A. Taft (1889-1953). By all accounts the most genial incumbent of the White House, with a benevolence matching his legendary girth (at its widest over 28 stone), W.H. Taft was president from 1909 to 1913 and (after six years as a professor of constitutional law at Yale) chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1921 until his death in 1930. The only president to occupy both offices, he considered the second by far the more enviable. Liebmann approves his rulings, especially his contribution to labour and anti-trust law. He was a deft manager of his sometimes difficult colleagues and lobbied for the commissioning of the stately Supreme Court building subsequently erected on Capitol Hill.