Robert Taft: life, ideas and books

Life

Robert Alphonso Taft was born in Cincinnati in 1889, the son of President William Howard Taft. He practised law, served in the Ohio House of Representatives from 1921 to 1931, where he was Speaker in 1926 and 1927, and in the Ohio Senate from 1931 to 1933. He was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1938 and served from 1939 until his death.

He chaired the Senate Republican Policy Committee from 1947 to 1953 and the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee from 1947 to 1949, and in January 1953 he became Senate Majority Leader. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1940, 1948 and 1952, and lost to Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower in turn. He died in July 1953 of a cerebral hemorrhage while being treated for cancer.

Ideas

Taft favoured limited government, balanced budgets, low taxes and a pro-business policy, and he opposed the expansion of the New Deal. He led the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats that held back new federal programmes after 1938. His best-known legislative work was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which banned the closed shop and allowed 80-day injunctions against strikes that threatened the national interest; Congress overrode President Truman's veto to pass it.

He was not a purist about the role of government. He supported the Housing Act of 1949, which funded slum clearance and low-income housing, and he proposed federal aid to the states for medical care of the poor and for education. In foreign policy he was a non-interventionist who opposed the creation of NATO and the peacetime draft, and some historians describe his political philosophy as libertarian.

Major works

• The Taft-Hartley Act (1947).
• The Housing Act of 1949.
• A 1947 proposal for federal aid to states for health care for the poor.

Why conservatives read him

Taft is the figure the postwar right looked back to as its leader before the movement had a name. His career connects the older, Midwestern Republicanism of Calvin Coolidge to the movement that gathered around Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr.. A Senate committee named him in 1957 one of the five greatest senators in American history.

His record also shows that Republican conservatism in his day was less doctrinaire than later images suggest. His support for public housing and federal aid to education was criticised by purists, and his opposition to NATO and the Nuremberg trials has been debated since. Taft's insistence on constitutional limits, on the right of Congress to question the executive and on fiscal restraint remains the core of what many conservatives mean by limited government. His loss to Eisenhower in 1952 is still remembered as a turning point, and the right that Ronald Reagan later led drew on Taft's inheritance.