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  • The Papers of Robert A. Taft
  • Justus D. Doenecke
The Papers of Robert A. Taft . Vol. 1, 1889–1938; Vol. 2, 1939–1934; Vol. 3, 1945–1948; Vol. 4, 1949–1953. Edited by Clarence E. Wunderlin Jr. et al.(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997–2006. Cloth, $65,00. each: Vol. 1, ISBN 0-87338-572-1; Vol. 2, ISBN 0-87338-679-5; Vol. 3, ISBN 0-87338-764-3; Vol. 4, ISBN 0-87338-851-8.)

If any politician was ever subject to stereotype, it was Senator Robert Alfonso Taft, whose rimless spectacles, moonlike face, and metallic voice permitted pundits to call him "a grapefruit with eyeglasses." To his critics, he was an arch-reactionary, a man totally out of touch with his own nation. Many of his followers, however, literally worshipped him, pointing continually to his intelligence, courage, and integrity.

Whatever one's opinion, there was no question that Taft was one of the major figures of post–World War II America, part of a circle that dominated the Senate during the Truman and early Eisenhower years. Thanks to Clarence E. Wunderlin Jr. and his staff of editors, we now have the chance to allow the senator, in a sense, to speak for himself. The Taft papers, given to the Library of Congress at his death in 1953, comprise some 520,000 items deposited in 1,449 containers. Of necessity, the published volumes are selective, with the first volume, for example, reproducing about 25 percent of what the editors perceived to be the most historically significant material. The volumes not only contain significant correspondence but also major speeches and position papers.

Volume 1 concentrates on his labors with the Herbert Hoover's Food Administration during World War I and with the postwar American Relief Administration and then turns to his postwar law practice in Cincinnati as well as to his stint in the Ohio House (where he served as speaker in 1926) and Senate. One sees Taft in 1919 showing his contempt for President Wilson ("a hypocrite and opportunist" [1:104]) and in 1919 revealing his anxiety that an economically crippled Europe would turn Communist. As a state legislator Taft manifested mildly progressive sympathies, backing, for example, limitations on child labor, while always remaining a party regular.

Defeated for reelection in the Democratic landslide of 1932, Taft returned to his firm of Taft, Stettinius and Hollister, his base for attacking much New Deal legislation. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, was no less than as "a step in the direction of Revolution" (1:483). Yet Taft was no dogmatist, for he supported collective bargaining, stock exchange regulation, minimum wages, old-age pensions, and unemployment insurance.

The second volume begins with Taft's election to the U.S. Senate in 1938 and ends with the 1944 presidential election. The senator bitterly fought Roosevelt's interventionist policies and strongly endorsed the America First Committee, claiming in January 1941 [End Page 161]that "Hitler's defeat is not vital to us" (2:218). In 1940 he made his first bid for the presidency, in the course of which he found GOP nominee Wendell Willkie "a demagogue" (2:158) who was undercutting everything he, Taft, believed in. Even during America's full-time participation in World War II, Taft maintained that FDR had gotten the nation into war, though his attention was far more focused on fighting government spending and price controls. The war itself, Taft always argued, was being fought to "make clear that national aggression cannot succeed in this world" (2:443), not to advance the Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, or publisher Henry Luce's "American Century." Always fearful of a resurgent left-wing movement, he went so far in 1944 as to find Communist leader Earl Browder one of the two major figures "providing the real energy behind the Democratic campaign" (2:589).

In his third volume, Wunderlin reveals Taft's activities from 1945, the year World War II ended, through 1948, when Taft lost his second major bid for the presidency. Particularly crucial are Taft's activities from March 1947 through March 1949, when he held the post of Senate majority leader. In...

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