The Constitution's Bodyguard

The Constitution's Bodyguard

Some Thoughts & Memories on Constitution Week
by
Michael L. Bromley
copyright 2002

-- Draft --
Please send your comments here

The most abiding compliment that can be paid to the American people is to point to the fact that in the Constitution which they framed and have maintained they have recognized the danger of hasty action by themselves, and have, in its checks and balances, voluntarily maintained a protection against it. The trust is that in this last century we have vindicated popular government in a way that it has never been vindicated before.

- William Howard Taft ⁽¹⁾

This homage to constitutional government might be a fitting compliment to Constitution Week. But when President Taft spoke it in March of 1912, he wasn't just praising the nation's form of government, he was desperately defending it.

The nation was in uproar. Unrest was serious and zany. It was said the farm was being abandoned for Mammon and the nation would starve. The fearful decried "automaniacs" who mortgaged the house to buy motor cars. America's youth, they said, were being seduced by the vile machines that would drag them into debt and worse. That fear turned to utter dread following a highly publicized series of elopements of wives and daughters with the family chauffeur. Waiters in New York hotels staged dinner hour walkouts. The Detroit Tigers threatened a strike over Ty Cobb's suspension for beating a fan. Socialists burned American flags at Union Square in New York. Conservationists accused the President of giving away Alaska to Guggenheim and Morgan. The offices of the Los Angeles Times were dynamited, taking twenty-one innocents. Attorney Louis Brandeis blamed that and other bombings on the "great controlling trusts." Slogans abounded, from Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" to the populist alliterative mantra, "Initiative, Referendum, and Recall."

Dissent was the rule of the day. Passing through Nebraska in 1911, Woodrow Wilson met a socialist mayor and asked the man if it were true there were so many socialists. "Oh, no," replied the Mayor. "My vote was twenty percent socialist and eighty percent protest."⁽²⁾ The Republican Party was in pieces. The House of Representatives was overturned by a Democratic landslide in 1910, and along with a new Speaker of the House who threatened to ride to the Capitol on a mule came the body's first socialist who called for the abolishment of the Senate and the Supreme Court. The national hysteria culminated in the Bull Moose convention of 1912 that featured the otherwise staid -- and Jewish -- Oscar Straus joining a rowdy chorus of "Onward Christian Soldiers."

The previous President, Theodore Roosevelt, had spurred the nation to moral excitement and expectations that his legislation failed to grasp. In his final year in office, Roosevelt divorced lawmaking for moralizing. He hailed his Commissions that publicized problems and offered only words for solutions.⁽³⁾ The Bully Pulpit ended up all bugle and no charge. Americans of 1908 knew what was up. Taft followed with the explicit goal to put into law the Roosevelt moral awakening. There would be no pleasing: when Roosevelt left office, he left the cages open. Come 1910, Taft looked around and shook his head. "The present political situation is a curious one. Indeed, the condition of public opinion is curious. It seems to be feeling the effect of the flood of misrepresentation which manifests itself in a protest against everything and everybody who is not in the forefront crying 'Stop thief!'"⁽⁴⁾ A year later he chuckled, "...I find that most of the world wake up with surprise and indignation to find me attempting to keep my promises..."⁽⁵⁾

While Taft's enemies smeared him as a do-nothing reactionary, a modern James Buchanan, the Founding Fathers were cast as straw men, too.⁽⁶⁾ Prohibitionists called them drunks. A labor attorney said they burned witches.⁽⁷⁾ Academics threw muck at 1787. Charles Beard's "Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States" essentially accused the nation's Fathers of running an illegal trust. The most severe assault of the period came not upon Taft but upon the Constitution. Serious calls were made for drastic changes, from making amendment easier, to looser interpretation, to outright revocation. Taft, the Judge-President, the Constitution's bodyguard, was moved to alarm.

Roosevelt's nature rebelled against legal authority. He had no patience for lawyers. He wasn't one himself. As President he expressed frustration with legal interpretations that limited his action. Yet his few constitutional end-runs sallow when compared to his submissions to it. Of his time in the Roosevelt Cabinet, Taft recalled that when Roosevelt "would get into hot water, he would send for the conservative members of the Cabinet and depend on us to get him out of it." Roosevelt, he said, "had a good deal of contempt for the judiciary. He did not like the delay of the law when he felt the public weal was to be served..."⁽⁸⁾ Nevertheless, Roosevelt's legislation routinely limped out of Congress with head bowed to the Commerce Clause. Out of office, Roosevelt's feelings were free to roam. He railed that "corporation attorneys" would corrupt State constitutions.⁽⁹⁾ He called lawyers "counsel against the people."⁽¹⁰⁾ His Bull Moose backer, industrialist George Perkins, said, "Have you noticed that the worst howl against progressiveness comes from lawyers?"⁽¹¹⁾

At its core, the Bull Moose was the "initiative, referendum and recall" set to a national movement.

Representative democracy was a failure. Money bags ran City Hall and the Court House. Only a good blow of clean air by the people could clear the smokey back rooms. Behind Roosevelt's criticism of court decisions was an aspersion of judicial review itself. In the closing days of the 1912 campaign Roosevelt spoke out against "the cruel injustices done again and again to workingmen and workingwomen by certain decisions of the Court of Appeals."⁽¹²⁾ Roosevelt's old friend, Senator Elihu Root, found Roosevelt's portrayal of the Court decisions so deceptive that he was aroused to a public reply. In a letter he signed with three other attorneys, he clarified those decisions and rebutted Roosevelt's criticism.⁽¹³⁾ Roosevelt scoffed at the "four eminent corporation lawyers" and said they were perverting not defending the law. He called it a "substitution of legalism for justice..."⁽¹⁴⁾

With Root's superb leadership in the Senate, Taft signed bills for labor reform in the Federal workforce and railroad industry -- which he understood to be within proper Constitutional boundaries and court rulings. He passed a corporation income tax that was specifically designed to pass a court challenge. (It did.) He declared Federal funding of road building within the Constitution's powers to regulate interstate commerce. Taft would go no further than the courts allowed. He was alarmed that Congress might pass a law that overturned a court decision, even if that decision was misguided. In the face of an income tax, he demanded the Constitution be changed to accommodate it first, as the Court had earlier ruled it unconstitutional. Taft had no love for that ruling or for the income tax. His concern was with respect for the courts. Thus the 16th Amendment. Taft had no beef with reform; it was its methods that disturbed him.

The split in the Republican party might have been foreseen in Taft's statements during and shortly after the 1908 election. Roosevelt's heated calls for reform had infected, especially, mid-West Republicans, and their expectations outran his deeds. Taft came in with cries for action that had no place with his promises or his disposition. In early 1909, President-elect Taft declared, "I know that sometimes the Constitution seems to be in the way of direct operation... [and] seems to work against the rapid carrying out of some of the reforms..."⁽¹⁵⁾ To a Governor he wrote, "We must work along with our Constitution as it is. It is a most wonderful instrument, most elastic for accomplishing purposes that were only dimly in the minds of its framers, and I think after you contemplate the history of the country one of the wisest features of the instrument is the difficulty with which it can be amended."⁽¹⁶⁾

Four years later Taft stood before this very issue. The Bull Moose platform declared,

The Progressive Party, believing that a free people should have the power from time to time to amend their fundamental law so as to adapt it progressively to the changing needs of the people, pledges itself to provide a more easy and expeditious method of amending the Federal Constitution.

While more coy than the Socialist platform's demands to abolish judicial review and for an immediate Constitutional Convention to overturn it, the Progressives' intent was clear: the Constitution was to be subject to national referendums.

Roosevelt's February, 1912, "Charter of Democracy" speech to the Ohio constitutional convention marked the challenge to Taft. The speech followed his usual two-way indulgence to both the log cabin and the white wig, with such statements such as, "We stand for the rights of property, but we stand even more for the rights of man."⁽¹⁷⁾ This time, though, Roosevelt let his populism fly: "But when a judge decides a constitutional question, when he decides what the people as a whole can or cannot do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think it wrong." To the outcry that followed, Roosevelt replied, "If recall of Judicial decisions be revolution, make the most of it."⁽¹⁸⁾

Taft took him to war. He fired back in Toledo with a speech entitled, "The Judiciary and Progress." He took direct democracy to its logical conclusion and declared it null and void:

It was long ago recognized that direct action of a temporary majority of the existing electorate must be limited by fundamental law; that is by a Constitution intended to protect the individual and the minority of the electorate and the non-voting majority of the people against the unjust or the arbitrary action of the majority of the electorate.⁽¹⁹⁾

As for recall of judicial decisions, Taft put it as politely as possible:

This is a remarkable suggestion, and one which is so contrary to anything in government heretofore proposed that it is hard to give it the serious consideration which it deserves... What the court decides is that the enacted law violates the fundamental law and is beyond the power of the Legislature to enact... What this recall of decisions will then amount to, if applied to constitutional questions, is that there will be a suspension of the Constitution...⁽²⁰⁾

"I am the last one to withhold criticism from Supreme Court decisions," Taft had written to Root following Roosevelt's 1910 "New Nationalism" speech.⁽²¹⁾ Two years later at Toledo, Taft said, "I ask what is the necessity for such a crude, revolutionary, fiftful and unstable way of reversing judicial constructions of the Constitution? Why, if the construction is wrong, can it not be righted by Constitutional amendment?"⁽²²⁾ He told another audience, "Great reforms are achieved by thoughtful consideration and not by momentary impulses."⁽²³⁾

It was often difficult to discern Roosevelt the philosophy from Roosevelt the political posture. Taft's 1910 letter to Root lamented that Roosevelt was stirring up "a bitterness of feeling against the Federal Courts..." What startled was, "Indeed, my fear is that in this regard he simply spoke the truth as to his own views."⁽²⁴⁾ When in 1912 a western Governor declared, "Whatever is right is constitutional," there was no longer any difference between the Roosevelt rhetoric and his politics. Taft had seen where it could go. To the Governor, he replied in public, "This is a government of law, not of changing economic and political theories of judicial or executive officers, when those theories are in conflict with the express letter of the law. Suggestions of that sort are dangerous because they put the ship of state on a sea of troubles, without a rudder."⁽²⁵⁾

Taft understood that the hysteria would pass, but that to find "calmer consideration" a good shove was needed. It might be said that his defense of the Constitution was no more hyperbolic than Roosevelt's appeals to Lincoln and John Brown. It doesn't matter. Because Roosevelt spoke it Taft was forced to reply. Taft fought fire with fire. By the end of the Republican primary, Taft had boxed Roosevelt into a philosophical corner, forcing him to justify and explain, and, Roosevelt, seeing that his rhetoric had alienated many Republicans, diluted his radicalism with exception and condition.⁽²⁶⁾ When he unveiled the Progressive Party platform, all that was left were generalities and mood. The platform spoke wildly for change, such as its vague call for "easy and expeditious" amendment, but it lacked the fine print to define or make it. Moreover, it declared itself for "fundamental law." With that, Taft won. Just as importantly, as when Roosevelt unloaded on Root a few days before the election, Roosevelt ended the campaign arguing legal interpretations, not the powers of the judiciary itself.

History has looked upon 1912 as a brief eruption, a passing convulsion in which the "progressive" Roosevelt challenged the "conservative" Taft, and which resulted in the "progressive" Wilson presidency.⁽²⁷⁾ Taft is said to have fumbled the Roosevelt mantel by aligning himself with "conservatives" which upset Roosevelt and produced his rebellion. Taft's presidency is a footnote in studies of the progressive movement. With such a small historical marker, did Taft's stand for the Constitution make any difference? Did it really matter? Did it change anything? Was it a crisis that Taft attended, or was it, like the dominant emotion of the age, just hysteria?

Constitutional scholar Keith Whittington describes a constitutional crisis as the result of "the failure, or strong risk of failure, of a constitution to perform its central functions."⁽²⁸⁾ Roosevelt in early 1912 declared that the Constitution was incapable of meeting present needs. He demanded that the Courts accommodate popular concerns. "All constitutions, those of the States no less than that of the nation, are designed, and must be interpreted and administered so as to fit human rights," he said to the Ohio convention. And,

The object of every American constitution worth calling such must be what it is set forth to be in the preamble to the National Constitution, "to establish justice," that is, to secure justice as between man and man by means of genuine popular self-government. If the constitution is successfully invoked to nullify the effort to remedy injustice, it is proof positive either that the constitution needs immediate amendment or else that it is being wrongfully and improperly construed.⁽²⁹⁾

Roosevelt preached what Whittington calls the "Crisis of Constitutional Fidelity," situations and attitudes "which undermine a constitution's ability to achieve its substantive goals of specifying and advancing a specific set of political values."⁽³⁰⁾ Roosevelt decried "a false constitutionalism, a false statesmanship... [that] seem to give the people full power and at the same time to trick them out of it." He concluded the Ohio speech with, "Our aim must be the moralization of the individual, of the government, of the people as a whole." To him, constitutions can only function according to good purposes, ensured by no mechanism other than direct control over it by the people. This logic and rhetoric led to the belief that "Whatever is right is constitutional."

Whittington notes that in the "constitutional culture" of America, "Disagreements emerge over the meaning and requirements of constitutionalism, not over the appropriateness of constitutionalism itself." This was not the case in February of 1912. Roosevelt's attack upon judicial review challenged the very "appropriateness of constitutionalism itself." As Taft noted, if the courts were stripped of their power, or if they were subjected to popular review, the Constitution would lose meaning and thereby cease to function. While Roosevelt later tempered his challenge to judicial review and assaulted judicial interpretation instead, his only solution, moral governance, nevertheless challenged the essence of American jurisprudence and American constitutionalism. His vision was that the people must assert themselves over the courts, the logical conclusion to which is the recall of judicial decisions. Judicial review was Roosevelt's target, even if he ceased calling it by its name after Taft's rebuttal.⁽³¹⁾

Whittington writes, "If the constitution cannot be readily modified within the bounds of its own procedures to reflect the new political consensus, it may instead suffer a crisis of fidelity as political actors challenge its legitimacy and authority."⁽³²⁾ Additionally, "...a rhetoric of constitutional crisis can itself lead to a constitutional crisis."⁽³³⁾ Roosevelt practiced such rhetoric deliberately in 1912. To get there, he appealed to the Civil War, equating the evils of judicial review to the crisis of secession, and otherwise blaming judicial review for the day's evils. "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord," he said.⁽³⁴⁾ In the end, and although after securing the Republican nomination Taft was assured of Roosevelt's defeat, Roosevelt garnered 88 electoral votes and over four million popular votes through the "rhetoric of crisis."

"Challenges and amendments are not constitutional crises," writes Whittington.⁽³⁵⁾ By this definition, and from a century afar, there was no constitutional crisis in 1912. Whittington understands that "The idea of popular sovereignty is profoundly disruptive of the constitutional order..."⁽³⁶⁾ That was just the challenge Taft faced, just the constitutional crisis he averted. Taft's supporters at the convention, and the subsequent riders of his electoral Titanic, pulled down with them the threat of Roosevelt's "popular sovereignty." Afterwards, Taft told of his "3,500,000 voters, an irreducible minimum of the Republican Party, who were determined to remain a force in the community to prevent any constitutional amendment and legislation of a revolutionary programme announced by the so-called Progressive Party."⁽³⁷⁾ It could have been different, vastly different.

The Constitution as it was was worth saving. As Taft explained,

A popular government is a government by the people -- that is, by a majority of the people, who under the law are given the right to exercise the electoral franchise, and constitutional limitations are imposed to prevent the misuse of the power of the majority, so that the individual or the minority may not suffer injustice through the action of the majority... Thus it is easily seen that under the Progressive programme the whole machinery that has been so carefully built up by the old statesmen of this country and England, to save to the individual and to the minority freedom, equality before the law, the right of property and the right to pursue happiness, is to be taken apart and thrown into a junk heap.⁽³⁸⁾

The "Battle for the Lord" ended abruptly on November 5, 1912. The Bull Moosers walked away, most to rejoin the Republicans at Taft's call. Had Roosevelt won, Taft would have accepted the results, however difficult.⁽³⁹⁾ Asked his feelings had he to ride to the Capitol with Roosevelt at the next inauguration, Taft told a reporter, "It wouldn't have been so easy if things had been different... but I would have taken the ride just the same."⁽⁴⁰⁾

Taft's dear friend, Mabel Boardman wrote him,

An election means no triumph... Your own record is so firm, so unselfish, so thoroughly for the good of the country that we who know now -- as others will know in the future -- realize that yours is the true triumph. Unyielding to any misguided popular clamor, you have stood firm in the Constitution with all it means to us and the country. For this and many other things you have an heartfelt gratitude.⁽⁴¹⁾

Taft wrote another friend, "We accomplished [Roosevelt's] defeat, and you and I, with our ideas of constitutional government and of what is valuable in our country's constitution, must hold that to be worthy of any effort."⁽⁴²⁾

The election didn't end Taft's fight. "I am thinking of organizing a constitutional club which shall by lectures and the like arouse the voters to a realization of the danger there is in any impairment of our form of government." he wrote soon after.⁽⁴³⁾ The place and time came the following Spring at Yale. As he traded the Oval Office for the classroom, Taft told an audience, "In my small way, I want to contribute to the upbringing of undergraduates of one institution to the realization of the benefits of being Americans."⁽⁴⁴⁾ The New York Times understood what this meant. "Professor Taft begins by planting his feet upon the Constitution," wrote the editors.⁽⁴⁵⁾ He'd do far more than that.

Judicial reform to Taft meant strengthening the courts, the very opposite of progressive intent. Coordinate to his defense of the Constitution came concrete steps to bring forth its protections more equally:

Government is framed for the greatest good of the greatest number and also for the greatest good of the individual, and the problem presented is the balancing of these two objects in such a way as that both may proceed side by side. While we would not part with the right of property, and while possibly in certain directions we might be willing to modify the character of its use where it has turned out to be an abuse, as in the case of the anti-trust law, what we are all struggling for, what we all recognize as the highest ideal in society, is equality of opportunity for every member born into it.⁽⁴⁶⁾

While "equality of opportunity" was one of the corners of the Square Deal, Roosevelt offered no cement for equality before the law.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Taft spoke it, and he fought for it. Throughout his presidency, he lobbied in public, in Congress, and in his Courts for reform of the judicial process.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Taft's Court appointments, including the new Chief Justice of 1912, Edward Douglass White, were made with this program in mind -- a program that he himself would fully implement as Chief Justice a decade later. At the end of his presidency, and so far from his dream job on the Court, he said,

I have succeeded in securing the adoption of a new set of rules for equity proceedings in the United States courts. I hope to be able to secure new rules to govern proceedings at common law and if I succeed in my efforts in that direction I shall have accomplished more for so-called social justice than all the hollering and hysteria of the professional reformers could achieve in a thousand years.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Not to mention his Supreme Court appointments. "Six of the nine Justices, including the Chief Justice, to-day bear my commission," Taft said on his last day in Office. "And I have said to them, Damn you, if any of you die, I'll disown you."⁽⁵⁰⁾

Taft's successful defense of the Constitution and the courts held through the New Deal, even after FDR exercised his demands over it. FDR's legacy is a judiciary that is more adaptable to political pressures, and, of course, to the final snapping of the ever-elastic Commerce Clause. For both Theodore Roosevelt and FDR, the rationale for radical change was that economic and social conditions demanded it. Their realities, economic and political, were vastly different. Had Theodore Roosevelt prevailed, either by his nephew's court packing scheme, or through outright defiance, it would have constituted true revolution. But he couldn't, not in 1904, not in 1912, and he didn't. In fact, by the end of the 1912 national campaign, Roosevelt demanded national enactment of his platform's labor reforms only in the Federal workplace and among businesses traditionally understood as conducting interstate commerce. FDR only got away with his changes under the escort of extreme crisis. In the end, Theodore Roosevelt's statement was personality, not argument, hysteria, not crisis. Taft won that argument, and he showed, as he had said in early 1909, that the Constitution which "has in the past been capable... to meet... emergencies" would so again.⁽⁵¹⁾ Notably, FDR rejected the solution of the impatient of his time and of Taft's to make the Constitution more easily amended. Thanks to Taft, the argument remains what the Constitution means, not what the next election will tell it to do.

I believe in popular Government but I believe in popular Government ordered by Constitution and by law.⁽⁵²⁾

- William Howard Taft

Notes

1. "Taft for Popular Rule with Reason," New York Times (NYT), 3/10/12 (back)

2. "Rush to See Wilson on Washington Visit," NYT, 6/5/11 (back)

3. He was unable to get Congressional funding for many of the Commissions. He spent his final year in office feuding with Congress, culminating with a Congressional censorship in December, 1908, and January, 1909. It got so bad, the House rejected a request from Roosevelt to keep his wife's favorite sofa (Taft later personally commissioned a copy of it and sent it as a gift). Roosevelt had lost control. He resented the House leadership thereafter, a leading cause of his mutiny from Taft, whom he convinced, in early 1909, to work with and not against that leadership. (back)

4. WHT to WD Evans, 9/12/10, The Papers of William Howard Taft, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (back)

5. Taft to Otto Bannard, 9/10/11 (back)

6. Taft's 1910 legislative session was one of the most successful of any President in history. His aggressive agenda suffered almost no losses. (back)

7. "Constitution Out of Date," NYT, 12/27/11 (back)

8. Butt, Archie, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1930; letter of 5/5/10, ppg. 345-346. (back)

9. "Roosevelt Against Rigid Constitutions," NYT, 8/31/10 (back)

10. "Colonel's Last Word an Attack on Root," NYT, 11/5/12 (back)

11. "George W. Perkins Tells 'Why I Am A Bull Mooser," NYT, 8/25/12 (back)

12. "Colonel's Last Word an Attack on Root," NYT, 11/5/12 (back)

13. See "Root and Others Assail Roosevelt," NYT, 11/5/12 (back)

14. "Colonel's Last Word an Attack on Root," NYT, 11/5/12 (back)

15. "Taft Stands by Constitution," Evening Star, 1/15/09 (back)

16. Taft to WR Stubbs, 1/4/09 (back)

17. "Roosevelt Indorses Recall of Judges," NYT, 2/22/12 (back)

18. "Roosevelt Answers Cry of Revolution," NYT, 2/27/12 (back)

19. "Taft Shows Peril in Roosevelt Policy," NYT 3/9/12 (back)

20. "Taft Shows Peril in Roosevelt Policy," NYT 3/9/12 (back)

21. Taft to Root, 10/15/10 (back)

22. "Taft Shows Peril in Roosevelt Policy," NYT 3/9/12 (back)

23. "Taft for Popular Rule with Reason," NYT, 3/10/12 (back)

24. Taft to Root, 10/15/10 (back)

25. "Taft for Primary with Safeguards," NYT, 3/19/12 (back)

26. Roosevelt won the primaries. Taft, however, won the philosophical battle. Roosevelt's vote tallies were political gains. These primaries were the first ever, and were highly problematic and susceptible to minority enthusiasms, which Roosevelt was an expert at provoking. Generally, one-half to two-thirds of the Republican voters from 1908 participated in the primaries. (back)

27. Many of Wilson's greatest achievements were formulated during the Taft presidency (interstate commerce reform, the income tax, tariff reform, and the Federal Reserve). Wilson applied Democratic and progressive principles to what Taft already defined.(back)

28. "Yet Another Constitutional Crisis," Keith E. Whittington, Princeton University, draft, 3/2/01; pg. 4 (back)

29. "Roosevelt Indorses Recall of Judges," NYT, 2/22/12 (back)

30. Whittington, pg. 12. Whittington elaborates that "Whereas an operational crisis calls into question a constitution's ability to establish political order, a crisis of fidelity calls into question the constitution's ability to establish a particular political order" (pg. 13). (back)

31. The progressives who demanded flexibility in the courts screamed bloody murder over Justice White's 1911 "Rule of Reason" in the Standard Oil decision. Roosevelt damned the court for having committed exactly the kind of elasticity he would preach for it the following year. (back)

32. Whittington, pg. 14 (back)

33. Whittington, pg. 37. The larger quotation is, "Indeed, political actors may think it necessary to claim new powers and go outside their usual constitutional authority in order to respond adequately to the extraordinary events when the constitutional mechanisms are not properly functioning. A constitutional crisis justifies extraconstitutional, and perhaps even unconstitutional, actions, and a rhetoric of constitutional crisis can itself lead to a constitutional crisis." Taft argued this very thing when he attacked Roosevelt directly during the primary. He argued caustically, that if Roosevelt was vital to the salvation of the Republic, then the Republic thereby depended on Roosevelt. "When the time comes that one man's life is essential to this government as a republic, then it ought to go out of business," he said. "Theodore Roosevelt is a dangerous man, and when he asks for a third term I consider it my highest duty, higher than the Presidency of the United States, to come out and utter a solemn warning to the people" ("Wild Auto Ride for Taft," NYT, 5/26/12) (back)

34. "Roosevelt Speaks to a Great Throng," NYT, 6/18/12. We can only assume that he meant it. Otherwise it is a grotesque and vile political maneuver. (back)

35. Whittington, pg. 18 (back)

36. Whittington, pg. 21 (back)

37. "Taft Invites All Bolters to Return," NYT, 1/5/13 (back)

38. "Taft Invites All Bolters to Return," NYT, 1/5/13 (back)

39. And what of our constitutional crisis had Roosevelt won? Unless he convinced progressives of both parties to join him, he would have had no congressional majority by which to work his reforms. Were he able, he might use the existing Constitutional structures to amend the document to fit his vision; were he unable, he might have simply ignored them. Either way, were he elected on his platform of contempt for existing order, he would have done what he could to challenge it, with or without authority. (back)

40. "Taft Plans to Keep the Old Party Alive," 11/7/12 (back)

41. M Boardman to WHT, 11/6/12 (back)

42. WHT to GR Sheldon 11/10/12 (back)

43. WHT to W Edwards, 11/19/12 (back)

44. "Keep Your Feet on the Ground," NYT editorial, 2/1/13 (back)

45. "Light Day for Prof. Taft," NYT, 4/3/13 (back)

46. "Taft For Popular Rule With Reason," NYT, 3/10/12 (back)

47. The "New Nationalism" speech was peppered with the phrase, but it regarded economic not legal conditions, which Roosevelt failed to comprehend as the same. In 1911, he spoke of unfairness in the courts -- because of legal technicalities used on behalf of criminals (see "Justice Too Slow, Says Roosevelt," NYT, 11/24/11; he was upset that a judge let a man out on bail). His idea of reform of the Courts was sand not concrete. (back)

48. See "Our Criminal Trials Disgrace, Says Taft," NYT, 9/17/09 (back)

49. "What the President Sees in the Future," NYT, 11/19/12 (back)

50. "Taft in Cheery Vein Reviews His Record," NYT, 3/4/13 (back)

51. "Taft Stands by Constitution," Washington Evening Star, 1/15/09. Had Roosevelt succeeded to change the constitutional order, Taft and his kind would have fought for a counter-revolution. (back)

52. "All Taft Wants Is a Square Deal," NYT, 3/20/12 (back)