Changes
tweaks
'''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 Taft was a leading reformer in Cincinnati. As a boy he spent three years in the Philippines, where his father was governor.
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), where he edited the ''Harvard Law Review''. 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.
==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 lawsand supported mildly progressive legislation, such as limitations on child labor. He was an outspoken opponenet opponent 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 Cartoonists loved his rimless spectacles and moonlike face, portraying him something like a grapefruit with eyeglasses. Taft was a boring 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.") His fans were strongly dedicated to him, while his enemies feared him as the strongest force in Congress. In the 1930s he practiced law, giving speeches critical of [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]'s [[New Deal]]. However he supported such New Deal policies as collective bargaining, stock exchange regulation, minimum wages, old-age pensions, and unemployment insurance.
==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 set forth a conservative program oriented toward economic growth, individual economic opportunity, adequate social welfare, strong national defense, and non-involvement in European wars.
Taft was re-elected again in 1944 and in 1950, after high-profile contests battling the labor unions in an industrial state. He was Senate Majority Leader after the GOP swept the elections of 1946, though he left foreign policy to his colleague Sen. [[Arthur Vandenberg]].
Moving a bit to the left in the late 1940s, he supported federal aid to education (which did not pass). He cosponsored the Taft-Wagner-Ellender Housing Act to subsidize public housing in inner cities. Government, he argued in 1946, should "give to all a minimum standard of living," including sufficient education to give "to all children a fair opportunity to get a start in life."<ref> Taft, ''Papers'' 3:111</ref>
==Labor issues==
The [[Taft-Hartley Act]] single-handedly ended a growing problem of strikes after [[World War II]], and preserved [[capitalism]] in the United States. Ever since, [[Democrats]] have sought unsuccessfully for its repeal. It bans "unfair" union practices, outlaws [[closed shops]], and authorizes the President to seek federal court injunctions to impose an eighty-day cooling-off period if a strike threatened the national interest.
==Foreign policy==
Taft was an isolartionist isolationist in 1939-41 and strongly opposed American entry into World War II, while supporting military mobilization and certain limited aid to Britain. He strongly endorsed the [[America First]] Committee, arguing in January 1941 that "Hitler's defeat is not vital to us."<ref> Taft, ''Papers'' 2:218</ref> After Pearly Pearl Harbor (Dec. 1941), he strongly supported an all-out war against Germany and Japan. The war itself, Taft always argued, was being fought to "make clear that national aggression cannot succeed in this world"<ref> Taft, ''Papers'' 2:443</ref>, and not as liberals said to advance the Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, or publisher Henry Luce's "American Century." In 1945 Taft found the new United Nations Charter sacrificed "law and justice" to "force and expediency." he lost some popularity when he stated that the Nuremberg trials were based on faulty ex post facto statutes; that position earned him a chapter in Senator John F. Kennedy's famous book, ''Profiles in Courage'' (1958).
In the late 1940s he was isolationist and did not see Stalin's [[Soviet Union]] as a major threat. 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]]but tried to cut its budget, and opposed [[NATO]] as unnecessary and provocative. In 1950-52 he took the lead condemning President [[Harry S. Truman]]'s handling of the [[Korean War]]. Taft tolerated Senator [[Joseph McCarthy]]'s attacks on Democrats, claimed President Truman was fostering a "police state," and blamed General [[George C. Marshall]] for the loss of China and the subsequent Korean War.
