Changes
add details
'''Robert A. Taft''' (1889-1953), son of President [[William Howard Taft]], was a leading Republican Senator, 1938-53, and was known as Known as "Mr. Republican". He was a leader of the [[Conservative Coalition]], working with southern Democrats to control Congress. Little major legislation passed the Senate against his objections. His crowning achievement was writing and passing, over President [[Harry Truman|Truman]]'s veto, the [[Taft-Hartley Act]] of 1947. It balanced the interests of unions, management and the public.
==Private life==
Taft was the scion of a powerful Republican family based in Cincinnati Ohio. His father was elected president in 1908, and in 1921 became Chief Justice of the United States. Taft's sister Helen Taft Manning was a professor, and his brother Charles taft was a leading reformer in Cincinnati.
Known throughout his life for his brilliant grasp of complexity, he was first in his class at the [[Taft School]] (run by his uncle), at [[Yale College]] (1910) and at [[Harvard Law School]] (1913). He practiced law with the firm of Maxwell and Ramsey in [[Cincinnati, Ohio]]. On Oct. 17, 1914, he married Martha Wheaton Bowers, the daughter of Lloyd Bowers, who had served as his father's solicitor general.
Taft himself appeared taciturn anc dcoldly intellectual, characteristics that were offset by his gregarious wife, who served the same role his mother had for his father, as a confident and powerful asset to her husband's political career. They had four sons. Robert Alphonso Taft, Jr., served as a senator from Ohio. Horace Dwight Taft, became a professor of physics and dean at Yale. William Howard III served as ambassador to Ireland.
==Public offices==
Rejected by the army for poor eyesight, in 1917 he joined the legal staff of the [[Food and Drug Administration]] where he met [[Herbert Hoover]] who became his idol. In 1918-19 he was in Paris as legal adviser for the [[American Relief Administration]], Hoover's agency which distributed food to war-torn Europe. He learned to distrust governmental bureaucracy as inefficient and detrimental to the rights of the individual, principles he promoted throughout his career. He distrusted the League of Nations, and European politicians generally. He strongly endorsed the idea of a powerful World Court that would enforce international law, but no such idealized court ever existed. He returned to Ohio in late 1919, promoted Hoover for president, and opened a law firm with his brother [[Charles Phelps Taft II]]. In 1920 he was elected to the [[Ohio House of Representatives]], where he served as Speaker of the House in 1926. In 1930 he was elected to the state senate, but was defeated for reelection in 1932. As an efficiency-oriented progressive, he worked to modernize the state's antiquated tax laws. He was an outspoken opponenet of the Ku Klux Klan. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he was a powerful figure in local and state political and legal circles, and was known as a loyal Republican who never threatened to bolt the party. He was a poor speaker and did not mix well, but his total grasp of the complex details of every issue impressed reporters and politicians. (Democrats joked that "Taft has the best mind in Washington, until he makes it up.")
==Senator==
Taft was elected to the first of his three terms as U.S. Senator in the Republican landslide of [[1938]]. The expansion of the New Deal had been stopped and Taft saw his mission to roll it back, bringing efficiency to government and letting business restore the economy. The New Deal was "socialistic" he proclaimed, as he attacked deficit spending, high farm subsidies, governmental bureaucracy, and the National Labor Relations Board. He did support social security and public housing, while attacking federal health insurance. Taft orchestrated the [[Conservative Coalition]], which had effective control of Congress from 1939 to the early 1960s.
Taft was re-elected again in 1944 and in 1950, after high-profile contests battling the labor unions in an industrial state.
==Labor issues==
==Foreign policy==
Taft was an isolartionist in 1939-41 and strongly opposed American entry into World War II, while supporting military mobilization and certain aid to Britain. After Pearly Harbor (Dec. 1941), he strongly supported an all-out war against Germany and Japan. Berger (1967) rejected the idea that Taft was an "isolationist." Berger says Taft was rather a "conservative nationalist at odds with the struggling attempts of liberal American policy-makers to fashion a program in the postwar years." Taft profoundly believed in the exceptionalism of America and its people, and argued the "principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people." Taft identified three fundamental requirements for the maintenance of American liberty-an economic system based on free enterprise, a political system based on democracy, and national independence and sovereignty. All three, he feared, might be destroyed in a war, or even by extensive preparations for war, so he did not see Stalin's [[Soviet Union]] as a major threat to American values. Nor did he pay much attention to internal Communism. The true danger he said was big government and runaway spending. He supported the [[Truman Doctrine]], reluctantly approved the [[Marshall Plan]], and opposed [[NATO]] as unnecessary and provocative. He consistently opposed the draft and took the lead condemning President [[Harry S. Truman]]'s handling of the [[Korean War]].<ref> See John Moser, "Principles Without Program: Senator Robert A. Taft and American Foreign Policy," ''Ohio History,'' (1999) 108#2 pp. 177-192. </ref>
==Presidency==
