Just Man

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT--Henry F. Prlngle--Farrar & Rineharf (2 vols. $7.50).

Noting resemblances between the first and the second Roosevelt has been the pastime of many a pundit. Along about 1942, equally instructive parallels may perhaps be noted between their successors. To any such exercises, Henry F. Pringle's biography of Taft should be indispensable. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Pringle was well qualified to write about the man whom T. R. picked for President and, later, bitterly denounced. Nearly 500,000 Taft letters and papers were placed at his disposal by the Taft family. The result: a play-by-play account of an underestimated administration, a just portrait of a just man.

"Big Lub" to other ball players and rock fighters in Cincinnati when he was a boy, William Howard Taft was large but not lubberly. At Yale he worked hard, though he complained about it. As a young lawyer he was sound if seldom successful. As an Ohio Circuit Judge between 1892 and 1900 he was happier, and in one anti-trust decision soberly took issue with a more lenient Supreme Court. As president of the Philippine Commission, he replaced military rule with the rule of law, achieved one of those enormous successes that make diffident men more diffident. Time after time his enthusiastic friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, invited "Dear Will" to return to Washington, finally got him back as

Secretary of War. At heart Taft dreaded the next step, but "Dear Theodore" and Mrs. Taft won out. In 1909 he was President and T. R. was no longer there to guide him; T. R. was in Africa hunting" lions.

Taft himself shared the inability of the country at large to shake off the spell of the Rough Rider; but Pringle's evidence makes it clear that in certain essential particulars Roosevelt left his friend to face the music. T. R.'s liberalism had somehow avoided the high tariff; Taft had to cope with that. T. R. had swung the big stick against the trusts; Taft had to make it connect. T. R. had been supple enough to play politics with a conservative Congress without seeming to do so; Taft had to temper Uncle Joe Cannon and was promptly accused of bowing to him. T. R.'s bouncing spirit rode the ground swell of the Progressive movement; Taft was too solid to bounce. His great girth, white walrus moustaches and booming chuckle made it easy for people to like him at first, just as easy for them to see him later as an affable pushover for Big Business.

In fact, Taft was too scrupulous for his own good. In his private letters he said the things he should have said in public. He was almost smug about refusing to use his patronage powers to bring Congressmen into line. He outmaneuvered the silken Senator Nelson Aldrich on the tariff, forced substantial cuts, then watched the whole country go hog-wild over a headline which twisted a few forthright words in one of his speeches. The muckrakers were abroad in the land and Taft lacked T. R.'s flair for handling them. The great "scandal" of his administration, and a chief cause of Roosevelt's resentment, was drummed up by Norman Hapgood of Cottier's against Secretary of the Interior Ballinger. Taft knew, and Pringle proves, that the evidence was inaccurate. Taft stuck by Ballinger and fired Roosevelt's protege, Gilford Pinchot, for joining in the clamor.

When Roosevelt got back in 1910, the two old friends could not face the ordeal of seeing each other alone. The split was agony for Taft, who felt only admiration and gratitude for Roosevelt and considered that T. R.'s program had been faithfully carried on. "Theodore can't hear a dog bark," he said sadly, "without wanting to try conclusions with him." When Roosevelt campaigned against Taft in 1912, Taft refuted him point by point in Boston, then went back to his train with tears in his eyes.

Biographer Pringle thinks that a little more patience and steady thinking on Roosevelt's part might have averted all the discomfort. But he shows also that Taft became more & more conservative as the years passed, that he never had T. R.'s energy nor his intuitive understanding of the progressive movement, that his judicial temper fitted him less for the Presidency than for the Supreme Court, on which he sat as Chief Justice from 1921 until shortly before his death in 1930.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.