Robert Taft

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Taft, Robert (1889–1953), U.S. senator, Republican party leader, and son of President William Howard Taft.Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Taft graduated from Yale University, earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1913, and married Martha Wheaton Bowers the following year. They had four sons.

Taft got his start in politics by serving in the Ohio House of Representatives (1921–1926) and the Ohio Senate (1931–1932). An arch critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, he won a U.S. Senate seat in 1938 and was reelected in 1944 and 1950. While strongly opposed to FDR's interventionist foreign policy in the later 1930s, Taft supported the war effort after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Following World War II, he remained skeptical of the so‐called bipartisanship in foreign affairs—voting for American membership in the United Nations but opposing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Taft also condemned President Harry S. Truman's commitment of American troops to Korea in 1950 without a formal declaration of war, calling the action unconstitutional. In domestic affairs, he coauthored the Taft‐Hartley Act (1947), which limited the activities of labor unions, and he encouraged the early Red‐hunting activities of his junior Republican colleague Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Known as “Mr. Republican,” Taft was deeply skeptical of federal power, which grew dramatically in the 1930s and after. Running as a conservative, he unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1940, 1948, and 1952, failing each time to win the support of the more liberal and internationalist Eastern wing of the party. Following President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration in 1953, Taft enjoyed his greatest political success as an effective Senate majority leader. In June of that year, however, rapidly progressing cancer forced him to relinquish his leadership role.
See also Conservatism; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate; Isolationism; Korean War.

Bibliography

James T. Patterson , Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft, 1972.
Robert Merry , Robert A. Taft: A Study in the Accumulation of Legislative Power, in First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, 1991, pp. 163–98.

Gary W. Reichard

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