William Howard Taft and the
First Motoring Presidency,1909-1913

 

Bromley's Taft Bibliography

While there isn't near as much on Taft out there as the better known presidents, there's plenty enough, especially for one of the supposed "lesser" presidents. And much of it is wrong.

My goal here will be to organize the Taft bibliography, both books and articles in order to give a sense to perspectives and purposes of the various works.

Meanwhile, and for starters, below you will find the bibliography from my book, straight out of pp. 421-427.

Excerpted from William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency, 1909-1913

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Copyright 2003 by Michael L. Bromley

Bibliography

The library on the progressive era is huge. Many a Ph.D. has gone towards its understanding, and encyclopedias are full of stock definitions. With this brief look at Taft and his automobiles, your author hopes you will find a new layer to the period. Whatever progress means, it does not always mean charging ahead. Taft found plenty enough progress in the American Constitution, and he saw that drastic changes from it were not progress but retreat. In automobiles, he bursted progress, frequently at some speed himself. At the personal level, Mr. and Mrs. Taft have been skewered in history for many and sometimes any reasons. As you follow this bibliography, the author suggests the salt shaker.

The historical elevation of Roosevelt and Wilson has come at Taft’s expense. The most friendly biography of Taft was Duffy’s of 1930, which was a eulogy as much as a biography. It is nice to read, as its assumptions are not twisted to bleakness like later works, starting with Pringle who seems to have written his episode of Taft’s presidency in a dark room. Reading Duffy one can almost hear the sneers from the academy; try it, though, and you will have fun. Duffy’s work is unstained by the varied emotions of the Butt letters from which historians have readily drawn opposite conclusions, sometimes from the same page. Duffy had access to the Taft papers, but not as extensively as Pringle, a few years later. Pringle was more thorough and exact. His conclusions, however different, were as lofty as Duffy’s, and must be understood in the same light. Pringle was particularly poisoned by his enmity towards Republicans of the Harding era, which he unfairly applied backwards to 1910.

The more recent Taft biographies have tended, like Pringle’s and this work included, to focus on one aspect or another of Taft, rather than to review his life chronologically. As such, the Taft presidency, especially, has been drawn and quartered into the tariff, foreign affairs (which this work leaves to others), the Ballinger-Pinchot lunacy, the 1912 election, etc. With apologies to the Big Guy, now we have a chapter on automobiles. This is not a book about automobiles. They are the way we get to Taft. They are a story unto themselves, but no more so than foreign policy or the election of 1912 is important to the Taft presidency. The author’s view of Taft differs from others because the author came to Taft differently from the others. The automobile made the introduction. On preparing a chapter on presidential automobiles for a book on the limousine, it occurred to the author that their must be something more to Taft’s launching of the presidential garage than a mere change from saddle to gasoline. Further investigation quickly dispelled many of the assumptions of Taft. Suddenly, he was dynamic not fat, fun not dull, proactive not reactionary. It was all very shocking, and the author had to reassess everything he ever learned about the era.

The selections below are the principle sources for this work. Pringle is the most important, but please do enjoy Archie, Alice, and Mrs. Taft. The Butt letters have been mercilessly poked and picked at over the years (including here); nevertheless, a full look at his correspondence will be fresh to even the most learned reader. If you venture to his unpublished papers, the fun truly begins. The reader must beware of two prejudices. First is Butt’s loyalty to Roosevelt. Butt resented anything unkind towards the former President, particularly as was heard around Taft during the summer of 1910 when Roosevelt returned to politics. Butt came to understand that Taft’s differences with Roosevelt, though mired in emotion, were of politics and philosophy, not personalities. The lesson was fundamental to Butt’s final choice of loyalties. Next, there was substantial editing of the published Butt papers. Segments and entire letters were left out not just for space but for political sensitivity. The author’s excursion into the unpublished papers, instigated by curiosity about the automobiles, was most revealing.

Your author has spent time with older manuscripts because it is his conclusion that these still influence the Taft history and popular history in general. La Follette’s autobiography is full of rancor. Hoover was simply bitter against Taft. The slant of Roosevelt’s autobiography ought be self-evident. Amos Pinchot’s "History of the Progressive Party" has been looked upon as a lasting statement on the era. It is incomplete and one-sided, and a fine source of Taft-busting. The author avoided both Pinchot and his literati nemesis, Mark Sullivan, whose work prompted Pinchot’s entry into history re-writing. The pair are left here to punch it out on their own. Bull Mooser William Allen White is similarly abandoned here to his Taftian despair. Bowers’ work on Beveridge is ridiculously lost in his subject’s ego, proof of life-after-death. These works are useful illustrations of the hysterical attitudes of the period. The student must visit the histories by Champ Clark and Joe Cannon, men who actually wielded power rather than wishing it. Like Roosevelt’s, Cannon’s is an apologia, and only useful as such. Clark’s is fascinating commentary.

The author challenges the history of Taft by Mowry, and beyond the specific instances cited in footnotes, here is why: in the introduction to "The Era of Theodore Roosevelt," his editors call "judicious" his treatment of Taft and conclude, "Taft, for all his good qualities and good intentions, was out of touch with the great movements of his own day and that for the good of his country he had to be repudiated." Come, come, now. Let’s start with automobiles, a "great movement" of the day. See how it works?

A must-read is Kolko. With Taft, Kolko almost got it. Almost. Unfortunately he makes the usual mistakes, such as to blame Taft’s presidency on his wife, and otherwise to view everything through his thesis on the alliance of government and business. See the first paragraph of Chapter Eight, where he echoes Mowry’s editors, as quoted above. The difference is that Kolko almost finds this a good thing, if only because to Kolko it meant that Taft didn’t advance the interests of U.S. Steel. Again, the assumption that Taft "blundered tactlessly" caused a severe underestimation of Taft. Kolko ignores Taft’s hugely successful philosophic stand against managed competition, what Taft called "State socialism" and the goal of the progressives in regard to the trusts. Nevertheless, the book is always intriguing and must be included for an understanding of the Taft period. Go back to Kolko -- with care. Kolko at least understood the ambiguous legacy bequeathed to Taft by his predecessor.

Of the Roosevelt record, the author chose Pringle’s as the official account. The choice was deliberate and not meant to ignore subsequent and important other works, such as that by Brands and the on-going project by Morris. In that Pringle’s biography of Roosevelt is historically valid and comprehensive, it serves as an interesting contrast to his work on Taft.

Pringle set the Taft presidential record, and he did little to defend it. The condemnations ring louder than the praise and often exceed the facts. It must be said: it is a great book. Burton’s overview of Taft’s "public" career is an excellent next start for its compactness and thematic unity. It’s like Pringle on Prozac, and a great way to overcome Pringle’s depressiveness. Donald Anderson has taken a few hits here, as well, and there is no real reason for choosing him over other modern biographers, such as Coletta, who studied the Taft presidency, other than his book is probably the most accessible of more recent works on Taft. Anderson’s assumptions were those of Pringle twisted around a 1970s academic view of a "conservative," which is his thesis and title for Taft. The formulated bias has stuck. The exception is Solvick, who refused the old assumptions of Pringle and, especially, Mowry. Solvick’s papers from the 1960s gave a new, direly needed perspective on Taft that subsequent biographers have largely failed to appreciate.

Taft has only himself to blame. As pointed out by Stephen Ponder, Taft was the "nonpublicity" President, and he stayed that way afterwards. Taft’s book on the presidency put his own presidency into a cage, which is likely where he preferred it to be. Professor Taft wrote the book not for himself, not for history; he wrote it for good government. Had he published his letters instead, as Pringle points out, he would have provided a far different conception of himself. It’s unfair to ask anything else of Taft. As his contemporaries said the thing that made him so great was that he was so good. His critics have gotten away with bashing him because they are louder than he and because he sometimes agreed with them. That’s only half the story. Taft was judicial not regal, ponderous not brash, certainly. He was not not aggressive, not not strong. After his death, his brother and his friend Jack Hammond tried to explain it, and history would do well to listen. No more apologies.

To that end, David Burton has now done more for the Taft history than any biography ever could. His multi-volume "Collected Works of William Howard Taft," arriving as this book is written, lets Taft speak, finally, for himself. Burton’s project is a tremendous service to history. Another work pending completion is a biography of Mrs. Taft by Carl Sferrazza Anthony. The Taft’s had a beautiful relationship that has been left untouched by histories that are more concerned with Mrs. Taft’s upturned chin than with her heart. Anthony has a remarkable ability to see through personalities and situations, and Mrs. Taft, the first modern First Lady, is to get her monument at last.

Now, what do automobiles have to do with it all? The dominant thesis on the progressive era, Richard Hofstadter’s "Age of Reform," mentions automobiles in passing, one among other technologies of the era. It cannot be dismissed. The automobile transcends technology. It was a social and political innovation of definition. The author makes no apologies for the automobile. Yet, just as political history has ignored the automobile, automotive history has ignored politics. The automobile as politics? How could we forget?

Tom McCarthy bravely attempted to accommodate Woodrow Wilson’s 1906 remark that "Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the automobile." He found reason in the statement, although he was glad that Wilson had come around to motors by the time he took office, just in time for the Model T. Excusing Wilson, McCarthy swung low, and completely missed Taft.

The automobile -- and politics -- now have a new hero. Welcome and go forth!

Books

Adams, Henry, Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters, compiled by Harold Cater, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1947

Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, reprinted by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1974

Anderson Judith Icke, William Howard Taft: An Intimate History, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1981

Anderson, Donald F., William Howard Taft: A Conservative’s Conception of the Presidency, Cornell University Press, Ithica and London, 1973

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza, First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power, VOLUME 1, 1789-1990, William Morrow, New York, 1990

Bailey, L.S., editor, The American Car Since 1775: The Most Complete Survey of the American Automobile Ever Published, by the Editors of Automobile Quarterly, Automobile Quarterly, New York, 1971

Blackburn, Marc K., The United States Army and the Motor Truck, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1996

Bowers, Claude, Beveridge and The Progressive Era, The Literary Guild, New York, 1932

Boykin, Edward, editor, The Wit and Wisdom of Congress, Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1961

Brands, H. W., T.R.: The Last Romantic, Basic Books, New York, 1997

Brayman, Harold, The President Speaks Off-the-Record, Dow Jones Books, Princeton, New Jersey, 1976

Brendon, Piers, Eminent Edwardians, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1980

Bromley, Michael L. and Mazza, Tom, Stretching It: The Story of the Limousine, Society of Automotive Engineers, Warrendale, PA, 2002

Brough, James, Princess Alice: A Biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Little, Brown & Company, Boston - Toronto, 1975

Burton, David H., William Howard Taft: In the Public Service, Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, Malabar, Florida, 1986

Busch, Noel F., T.R. -- The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and His Influence on Our Times, by Reynal & Company, New York, 1963

Butt, Archie, The Letters of Archie Butt: Personal Aide to President Roosevelt, Edited by Lawrence F. Abbott, Doubleday, Page & Company, New York, 1924

Butt, Archie, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1930 (reprinted by Kennikat Press, Port Washington, N.Y., 1971)

Caldwell, Henry, Hoo’s Hoo and Wat’s Wat in Gasolene, Eaton & Gettinger Press, New York City, 1913

Cannon, Joseph Gurney, The Memoirs of Joseph "Uncle Joe" Cannon, Transcribed by Helen Leseure Abdill, Vermilion County Museum Society, Danville, IL, 1996

Clark, Champ, My Quarter Century of American Politics, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1920

Coletta, Paolo E., The Presidency of William Howard Taft, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1973

Collins, Herbert Ridgeway, Presidents on Wheels, Acropolis Books, Washington, D.C., 1971

Crissey, Forrest, Theodore E. Burton: American Statesman, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, 1956

Duffy, Herbert S., William Howard Taft, Minton, Balch & Company, New York 1930

Flink, James J., America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1970

Furman, Bess, White House Profile, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., Indianapolis - New York, 1951

Georgano, G.N., editor, The Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars: 1885 to the Present, E.P. Dutton and Company, New York, 1968

Hammond, John Hays, The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond, Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1935

Hatch, Carl E., The Big Stick and the Congressional Gavel: A Study of Theodore Roosevelt’s Relations with his Last Congress, 1907-1909, Pageant Press, New York, 1967

Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform, Vintage Books, New York, 1955

Hoover, Irwin Hood, Forty-Two Years in the White House, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 1934

Jaffray, Elizabeth, Secrets of the White House, Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York, 1926

Jessup, Philip C., Elihu Root, Dodd, Meade & Co., New York, 1938

Kay, Jane Holtz, Asphalt Nation, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997

Kohlsaat, H.H., From McKinley to Harding, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1923

Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, The Free Press, New York, 1963

La Follette, Robert M., La Follette’s Autobiography, Robert M. La Follette, Madison, 1913

Leech, Margaret, In the Days of McKinley, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1959

Lindsay, Rae, The Presidents’ First Ladies, Franklin Watts, New York, 1989

Link, Arthur S., Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era: 1910-1917, Harper & Row, New York and Evanston, 1954

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, Crowded Hours, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1933

Manners, William, TR and Will: A Friendship That Split the Republican Party, Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc., New York, 1969

Mowry, George E., The Era of Theodore Roosevelt: And the Birth of Modern America, 1900-1912, Harper & Row, New York and Evanston, 1958

Nevins, Allan, Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1954

Pringle, Henry F., The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1939 (reprinted by Archon Books, Cambden, Connecticut, 1964)

Pringle, Henry F., Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931

Rae, John B., The American Automobile, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965

Roosevelt, Theodore, The New Nationalism, edited by William E. Leuchtenburg, Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., 1971, ppg. 36-37 (reprinted from Prentice-Hall, 1961, and The Outlook Company, 1910)

Schlesinger, Arthur M., jr., editor, History of American Presidential Elections: 1789-1968, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1985

Seale, William, The President’s House: A History, White House Historical Association, Washington, D.C., 1986

Strouse, Jean, Morgan: American Financier, Random House, New York, 1999

Sullivan, Mark, Our Times: 1900-1925, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936

Sward, Keith, The Legend of Henry Ford, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1948

Taft, Horace Dutton, Memories and Opinions, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1942

Taft, Mrs. William Howard, Recollections of Full Years, Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1914

Taft, William Howard, Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers, Columbia University Press, New York, 1916 (reprinted as The President and His Powers, Columbia University Press, New York and London, 1967)

Teague, Michael, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, 1981

Werner, M.R., Bryan, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1929

White, William Allen, The Autobiography of William Allen White, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1946

Wik, Reynold M., Henry Ford and Grass-roots America, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1982

Articles

Allison, Hildreth, Dublin Greets a President, Historical New Hampshire, Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer, 1980

Anderson, Donald F., The Legacy of William Howard Taft, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. XII, No. 1, Winter, 1982

Anderson, Oscar E., Jr., The Pure-Food Issue: A Republican Dilemma, 1906-1912, The American Historical Review, Vol. LXI, No. 3, April 1956

Buenker, John D., The Progressive Era: A Search for a Synthesis, Mid America, Vol. 51, No. 3, July 1969

Carson, Gerald, Goggles & Side Curtains, American Heritage, April, 1967

Cary, Norman Miller, Jr., The Use of the Motor Vehicle ni the United States Army, 1899-1939, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1980

Coulter, Merton E., William Howard Taft’s Visit to Athens, The Georgia Historical Society, Vol. LII, No. 4, December, 1968

Fuller, Wayne E., The Ohio Road Experiment, Ohio History, Vol. 74, No. 1, Winter, 1965

Gatewood, Willard B., editor, The President and the "Deacon", Ohio History, Vol. 74

Gores, Stanley, Fond du Lac Snubs a President, Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 47, No. 2, Winter, 1963-1964

Gould, Lewis L., Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Disputed Delegates in 1912: Texas as a Test Case, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. LXXX, No. 1, July, 1976

Hendry, Maurice, Pierce-Arrow: La Premiere Voiture Americaine, Car Collector, March, 1980

Hess, Stephen, Big Bill Taft, American Heritage, October, 1966

Kimes, Beverly Rae, Willie K.: The Saga of a Racing Vanderbilt, by Beverly Rae Kimes, Automotive Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3

McCarthy, Tom, The Arrogance of Wealth: Woodrow Wilson and Early Mass Automobility in America, Woodrow Wilson National Symposium, www.woodrowwilson.org, 2000

Ostromecki, Walter, Jr., Helen Herron Taft: Influence and Automobiles, Manuscripts, Summer, 1991

Parker, James R., Beveridge and the Election of 1912: Progressive Idealist or Political Realist, Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. LXIII, No. 2, June, 1967

Penick, James Lal, Jr., Louis Russell Glavis, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, April, 1964

Ponder, Stephen,"Nonpublicity" and the Unmaking of a President, Journalism History, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter, 1994

Saunders, Steven R., Charles H. Lee, oral history, Sagamore Hill National Historical Site, National Park Service, Oyster Bay, New York, 1975

Solvick, Stanley D., William Howard Taft and Cannonism, Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 48, 1964-1965 and The Conservative as Progressive: William Howard Taft and the Politics of the Square Deal, Northwest Ohio Quarterly, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, Summer, 1967

Taft, Charles P., My Father the Chief Justice, Supreme Court Historical Society, Yearbook 1977, Washington, D.C., 1976

Taft, Robert, Jr., Will and Mabel, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. XV, No. 3, Summer, 1985

Thompson., Jack M., James R. Garfield: The Making of a Progressive, Ohio History, Vol. 74, No. 2, 1965

Wiebe, Robert H., The House of Morgan and the Executive, 1905-1913, American Historical Review, Vol. LXV, 1960

Wyman, Roger E., Insurgency in Minnesota: The Defeat of James A. Tawney in 1910, Minnesota History, Vol. 40, No. 7, Fall, 1967

Periodicals

American Motorist, American Automobile Association Publishing Co., Stanford, Conn. & New York, 1909-1916

Automobile, Class Journal Co., New York, 1903-1915. Recommended major articles include: The Growing Utility of the Automobile, Sep. 12, 1907; Experiments of the Office of Public Roads, May 14, 1908; What the Wright Brothers are Accomplishing, Sep. 10, 1908; Long Island Motor Parkway Has Its Racing Initiation, Oct. 15, 1908; What Brains of the Industry Say About Finances, Jun. 23, 1910; Selden Patent Not Infringed, Jan. 12, 1911; Good Roads, Keynote of Prosperity: Automobile has Forced Issue of Improved Highways," Sep. 28, 1911; Resume of the Year’s Work, Jan. 26, 1911; Uniform Automobile Laws in All States a Vital Necessity, May 9, 1912, Wonderful Growth of the Industry, Jul. 25, 1912

Club Journal, Automobile Club of America, New York, 1909-1913

Evening Star, Washington, W.D. Wallach & Hope, Washington, D.C., 1900-1914

Horseless Age, The Horseless Age Co., New York, 1898-1914

Motor Age, The Horseless Age Co., Chicago, 1909-1910

New York Times, H.J. Raymond & Co., 1899-1914

Vehicle Dealer, Ware Brothers, Philadelphia, 1908-1913

Other Sources

Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Clerk, website, <bioguide.congress.gov>, 2001

Congressional Record: The Proceedings and Debates of the Sixty-First Congress, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1909

Butt, Archibald W., Papers, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta, Georgia

Papers of William Howard Taft, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Pierce-Arrow Society website, www.pierce-arrow.org, 2001

Sagamore Hill National Historical Site, National Park Service, Oyster Bay, New York

Taft Summer White House, Beverly Historical Society website, www.members.tripod.com/BevHist/Soc/auto.htm, 2001

James A. Tawney Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota

White House Dispersing Officers Accounts, 1894-1924, RG130-50-39-02, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC

William Howard Taft National Historic Site, National Park Service, Cincinnati, Ohio

 

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