Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg

Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg 1884-1951, American politician, b. Grand Rapids, Mich. He was editor and publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald from 1906 to 1928, when he was appointed to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy. He won election to the seat in the same year. In the upper house he became an influential Republican leader. Before World War II he was generally considered an isolationist, but by 1945 his views on foreign affairs had changed, and he became one of the chief proponents of a bipartisan foreign policy. He served as U.S. delegate to the San Francisco United Nations Conference in 1945 and as a delegate to the General Assembly of the United Nations (1946). As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs (1947-49), Vandenberg was the leading proponent of bipartisan support for President Truman's foreign policy. He was instrumental in securing Senate approval of the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He wrote several studies about Alexander Hamilton.

Bibliography: See The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (ed. by A. H. Vandenberg, Jr., and J. A. Morris, 1952); biography by C. D. Tompkins (1970).

Taft, Robert (1889–1953), U.S. senator, isolationist.Born in Cincinnati, the son of William Howard Taft, later secretary of war and president, young Taft graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School. He practiced law in Ohio and served in the state legislature before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1938.

A conservative, isolationist midwestern Republican, Taft opposed most of the domestic and international policies of Democratic presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Favoring hemispheric rather than forward defense, he voted against the prewar draft in 1940 and Lend‐Lease and the Destroyers‐for‐Bases Agreement with Britain in 1941.

In the postwar era, he was not converted to internationalism like former Republican isolationist Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. Instead, although Taft voted for the establishment of the United Nations, he came to believe it unsound and voted against U.S. participation in it. Taft opposed NATO as a provocative and expensive act that would stimulate the arms race and eventually force the United States to send troops to Europe. He later condemned President Harry S. Truman's Korean War policy, opposed his stand on Formosa, and challenged Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Like former President Herbert C. Hoover, Taft favored neutrality and nonintervention, and recommended a defense policy based largely upon naval and airpower (called the “cavalry of the sky”) rather than the deployment of U.S. ground forces.

Taft, “Mr. Republican,” sought the presidential nomination in 1952 but lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower, representing the GOP's eastern, internationalist wing. Taft extracted concessions for his support of Eisenhower, but he died within six months of becoming Senate majority leader.
[See also Isolationism; Lend‐Lease Act and Agreements.]

Bibliography

Robert A. Taft , Foreign Policy for Americans, 1951.
James T. Patterson , Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft, 1974.

John Whiteclay Chambers II