My Father the Chief Justice

CHARLES P. TAFT

In 1930 William Howard Taft was succeeded as Chief Justice by Elizabeth Gossett's father, Charles Evans Hughes. She did the first piece in the Yearbook about Chief Justices, and I am honored to be asked to follow her example with a memorial piece on my father. Perhaps I can add a few sidelights on history . . .

I AM RESPONSIBLE for William Howard Taft's principal direct violation of the regulations of the Supreme Court of the United States, in November 1924. In January 1922, having passed the Bar examination, I was sworn in as a member of the Bar of the Supreme Court of Ohio. In November 1924, I was in Washington on business, having arrived at my father and mother's house the night before. At breakfast my father asked, "Would you like to be admitted to the Supreme Court Bar?" I said, "Sure!" He said, "All right, I'll call Jim Beck [then Solicitor General] and ask him to present you." We went down and I was set in the front row with the other applicants. When the clerk asked for us, Mr. Beck got up and said, "I am very happy to present for admission to the Bar of this Court, Mr. Charles P. Taft of Cincinnati, who for the three years past has been a member of the Bar of the highest court of the State of Ohio." If you can add and subtract, it was not three years, but two years and ten months for me. Should I say, Stop! This is illegal! Or should I keep my mouth shut? I kept my mouth shut! I was then sworn in and told to go to the clerk's office and sign the roll. I did! I don't believe St. Peter held that against the Chief Justice--or me.

I'm not sure of the correctness of a child's appraisal of his father or even his grandfather. My son Seth, lawyer and County Commissioner in Cleveland, a few months back gave a speech on W.H.T. at the Roosevelt Masonic Lodge in Cleveland. A few mistakes appear:

My grandfather was said to have come out to Cincinnati in 1838 through Cleveland and a canal. No, it was New York, Philadelphia and Harrisburg by train, canal, stage and railroad to Pittsburgh, Columbus and Cincinnati by stage coach, because the Ohio River was low that year.

W.H.T. was not interested in politics, said my son. He may well have disliked some of it, but he was in the middle of it in Ohio, as Collector of the Internal Revenue here, as Solicitor General in Washington, where he met and was charmed by T.R. as Civil Service Commissioner. And continuously until he died, he was really in the middle of political life.

Seth's account left out eight years as Circuit Judge, centering in Cincinnati. His cases then on labor matters had great importance, in an area that affected his life. His experience 1918-1919 in the War Labor Board modified his earlier views very greatly.

W.H.T. had long political inheritances. The original Robert Taft turned up in Braintree and Mendon, Massachusetts, in 1675. He and most of his five sons were Mendon Selectmen at one time or another. They had properties to the west, across the Blackstone River, and made a deal with the town to build a bridge if they were let out of road work required of all citizens. In a couple of years with the bridge built, the Tafts had no interest in beginning road work again! They finally had to be sued. My great grandfather Peter was a probate judge (no law needed) and a member of the Vermont Legislature. Alphonso was a Whig city councilman, an elected judge and ran for Governor.

When W.H.T. became President, I remember his telling Congress members that federal judges were his patronage.

We never had much talk about ancestors or early family around the table. Any references were to people and their characters, like Alphonso's. I learned what they had done long after events. The offices held evidently impressed me because I remember very well standing in front of my mother's pier glass, striking a pose and saying, I am the Governor of the Philippine Islands! But Alphonso was interested in ancestors and was the moving force in the first big family reunion in Mendon, Massachusetts, in 1874. I was fascinated when I found and looked over the printed account of that event and the speeches. Alphonso's, giving the history of the Tafts, was long, and clearly would have taken three hours to deliver, at least. He spared them and left it to the printed volume. I remember a long one by W.H.T. in 1908 at some Virginia or West Virginia County Seat. I listened, but at age 10, without much enthusiasm. In all cases the subject was thoroughly covered. But I inherited the ancestor concern and have the whole Taft-Herron-Chase-Kellogg book. I hasten to add, don't ask me about collaterals, please.

As Governor of the Philippines, W.H.T. treated the Filipinos as persons, while the Army, shot at, with many killed, didn't like any Filipino. The Order of the Carabao later sang, "He may be a brother of William H. Taft, but he ain't no brother of mine." But Mr. Dooley did not write it!

In those presidential years while Bob was in Yale and Harvard Law perhaps doing what he should, I was at Taft School (Uncle Horace's), closely scrutinized by Uncle Horace, and, by deputy, by W.H.T. I was greatly amused the other day to read that Alphonso with W.H.T. at Yale was equally worried that W.H.T. was not devoting his time to academic pursuits. He came out only second in his class. Well, I was first in my class at Taft, which kind of stopped them, partially, and doing besides football, baseball, basketball, hockey, debating, drama and mandolin club. Finally, when I got to Yale (1914 fall) and onto the varsity basketball team, with my good friend and classmate Newell Garfield, grandson of the President, we got lots of national publicity. Uncle Horace wryly complained that he had always been known as son of his father and brother of his brother, but he was damned if he'd be known as uncle of his nephew.

W.H.T. was always kind of snooty about our camping and fishing and so on, although he always went along on H.H.T's tea picnics, and enjoyed them. I'm really annoyed that it was only long after he died that I discovered the camp record book at Gravelle Lake Club, seven or eight miles from Murray Bay. It was pretty rough camping, though in a cabin, even in those days. W.H.T. was a club officer and attended frequently. The trips were all spelled out with the numbers of trout, quite considerable, and more than today, along with number of rods. All of this around 1895-1896 before I was born, and W.H.T. was under 40, rejoicing in what he later kidded us about.

In 1909, John Hays Hammond gave me a sailing dory at Beverly, Massachusetts, to my ignorant delight. The Sylph was a presidential yacht run that summer by Lt. jg Train, now a retired Admiral, and father of Russel, now head of EPA. W.H.T. wired to my mamma not to let me in it until he got there, knowing even less about it than I did. That restraint did not work, and an early day found me sailing sideways to leeward because I did not know what a centerboard was for. Fortunately, Lt. Train's sharp-eyed boys spied me and sent a launch after me; disaster was avoided and I learned about centerboards. The President never entered the dory or provided instruction.

There was golf at Murray Bay before that, but not from me. W.H.T. had played in the footsteps of Justice Harlan, whose family were long-time visitors at Murray Bay. After the White House we went back in 1913 and the golf course was the center of attraction. The John Harlans were regulars from Chicago and John, Jr. was brought up there, too, with his sister, now Mrs. Derby. When my wife and I were engaged as the First War began, she came up to visit and was overwhelmed by the conversation. W.H.T., Uncle Horace, Aunt Maria Herron, and Bob's wife Martha were great talkers, and most amusing, but as a combination absolutely nonstop. We should have had tape recorders in those days, for it should have been preserved. Much of the talk was around the daily golf matches; Eleanor was tennis, not golf.

Grandchildren of W.H.T. came along beginning in 1915, and as each new one arrived an additional room was added at Murray Bay. We ended up sleeping 26, including servants, with seven bathrooms. Helen had her own house, and Bob and I divided time so that I came in July and Bob and his family in August. There was too much noise, so that a big playroom was added at the end of the house by the tennis court. On W.H.T.'s 70th birthday (September 15, 1927), we had a real bash. That was late in the summer for most, but that year they stayed, and 105 sat down to lunch. Not only that, my mamma and Maggie McNamara, the cook, picked enough lobsters (from Maine, of course) to feed the whole crowd. Sir Lomar Gouin, Premier of Quebec, made the speech and Miss Sally Tibbitts presented a most delightful painting by T.S. Coburn of a Canadian snow scene. It's in the Auburn Avenue house. I did a movie of the whole affair which shows all the ones we should remember, from Aunt Jennie Anderson and Aunt Agnes Exton to Sir Charles Fitzpatrick, Chief Justice of Canada.

There was no law clerk at Murray Bay, and W.H.T. did the work on the law himself with the help of Misch. Wendell W. Mischler had been with him since the War Department (1904-1908). His court objective was to reduce the burden of cases by the certiorari process, and he did it. It was only granted if the petitioner got three judges (now increased, I believe), but the Chief did them all first. The other objective was to induce agreement and avoid 5-4 decisions if possible.

He succeeded in both. When Justice Sanford was ill and had to give up the complicated patent cases, W.H.T. took them on, and it was a burden he felt he could not trust to any other Justice.

By this time he had to stop golf, because blood pressure was sure mounting on him. He kept his weight down, but still had to diet; he stayed around 255. In spite of various accounts to the contrary, he was 5'10 1/2 ", compared to Bob who was 5'11 1/2'', 175-185, and Charles P. Taft (me) who is 6'1" and 195. That 255 was heavy enough. I remember well as a boy at Murray Bay watching him walk across the floor over my head, before he had to move downstairs to avoid the climb.

He was fascinated by the idea of a Supreme Court Building. He insisted on Cass Gilbert (whose son was a classmate of mine at Yale). That enterprise took longer than the basic change in the volume of Supreme Court business reduced by limiting appeals (passed 1925), and the administrative reorganization of the federal courts, almost equally necessary, took until 1939, long after W.H.T. was gone. The old-time "Progressives" retained their enmity all the way from 1912 to 1930+, quite irrespective of the merits of the W.H.T. program, about which no one would even argue today.

For the Court itself, McReynolds was a headache. He would not speak to Brandeis, was clearly anti-Semitic, and was a disruptive force. McKenna was old and wholly incompetent at the end, 30 years after McKinley appointed him.

W.H.T. was criticized for his conservative opinions. My own first contact with that was when I represented the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (Sidney Hillman's union) in a strike case and found one of W.H.T's first opinions, American Steel Foundries (1921), which sustained picketing by other than the company's employees, and overruled an extremely anti-labor opinion by Justice Pitney in 1917. W.H.T. dissented vigorously in the famous women's minimum wage case, sustained child labor regulations under the Commerce Clause, and laid down in the Stockyards case and the Grain Exchange case the whole theory of the stream of interstate commerce on which the Wagner Act and those like it were upheld. So I'm not worried about the modern charge of conservativism that I see snidely referred to on occasion. That is just ignorance. Bill Severn's book, William Howard Taft (1970), does the defense very effectively.

When William Howard Taft was ill at Ashville in his last sickness, he was greatly worried that President Hoover would appoint Stone instead of Hughes as Chief Justice. My brother Bob was willing to be the messenger, and was able to get from Mr. Hoover a commitment to appoint Hughes. W.H.T. was greatly relieved before he came back to Washington to die--and very pleased. W.H.T's satisfaction was wholly sound, as Hughes' service for eleven years and more clearly established, before he resigned for health reasons in June 1941. He achieved a colorful Supreme Court image of real importance even if gently joshed in Of Thee I Sing.

I will close this slight memorial with the letter W.H.T. wrote me when the 12th F.A. and its 2d battalion sergeant major (me) was ready for France and the 2d Division AEF:

"Whatever happens, we know you will do your duty with a pure heart and a clear conscience and a spirit that either in you or in others will win the war for the right. . . . It is a solemn and sacrificial moment, and I am glad you are there, much as it presses my heart to think of the possibilities. We are all proud of you."

Copyright 1976, Supreme Court Historical Society