Will Taft’s most significant action as a superior court judge was a ruling in 1890 that addressed the balance of power between the burgeoning labor movement and industrial interests. The case involved a secondary boycott, a sanction intended to punish one business by wielding pressure against another business unrelated to the original cause of grievance. In this instance, the Bricklayers’ Union had declared a boycott against the contracting firm of Parker Brothers on grounds that the company had discriminated against its members. The union called on all suppliers of the firm’s building materials to honor the boycott. When the Moore Lime Company continued to supply Parker Brothers, the union declared it would no longer use lime supplied by Moore’s. Moore’s & Co. sued the Bricklayers’ Union for damages caused by the secondary boycott. Their suit was upheld by the lower court in Hamilton County, which awarded a verdict of $2,250 to the plaintiffs. When Moore’s & Co. v. Bricklayers’ Union et al. reached the superior court on appeal, Taft sustained the lower court decision, affirming that a secondary boycott against a firm with whom there was no dispute was illegal. His decision was upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court. Decades later, it remained a leading case on the law of secondary boycotts.
While his decision worked to limit the power of organized labor, Taft revealed a sympathy for the rights of workers that his more conservative colleagues did not share. He was careful to underscore the union’s prerogative in withdrawing its members from Parker Brothers; when the union turned on an unrelated company, however, it had exceeded its legal bounds. Though Taft refused to condone the union’s action in this case, he argued strongly for a laborer’s “right to work for such wages as he chooses, and to get as high a rate as he can.” He maintained that an individual “may lawfully notify his employers of his objection and refuse to work,” and concluded that “what one workman may do . . . many may combine to do.”
Taft sought to delineate union rights at a hazardous time in Cincinnati, when the memory of a violent general strike was still raw. Calling for an eight-hour day, 32,000 Cincinnati workers had joined workers in other cities in a crippling general strike commencing on May Day, 1886. Singing a version of the Marseillaise, they marched through the city, brandishing Springfield rifles and red flags. For days, “no freight moved in or out of the city; garbage went uncollected; laundresses, streetcar conductors, waitresses and machinists cooperated in shutting down the city.” The militia was called out and the workers returned to their posts, but the horror of the strikers’ “revolutionary fervor” had impressed itself upon Cincinnati’s propertied classes. It was in this context that Taft, in his judicial sphere, tried to balance the rights of labor with the rights of capital.
NELLIE’S CAREFUL ALLOCATION OF WILL’S $6,000 annual salary allowed the couple to furnish their new home and still save enough to fund a second trip to Europe the following summer. With the house fully settled, Nellie returned to work, taking a teaching position at the kindergarten recently opened by Miss Nourse to serve the children of the poor. Earlier in the decade, Louise Taft had served as the first president of the Cincinnati Free Kindergarten Association. In the 1880s, Ohio laws had forbidden public funding of education for children younger than six. Public kindergartens would eventually be established, but meanwhile Louise and a group of her friends helped raise money to open a series of charity kindergartens. “If the little ones who wander neglected in our streets are to be reached,” she proclaimed, “private benevolence must come to the rescue. We therefore appeal to the friends of education and humanity to help us in this effort.” The first kindergarten was established in 1880, followed by others, including Miss Nourse’s school. There, Nellie devoted herself to teaching, experimenting with colored balls, cylinders, cubes, and spheres to convey concepts of number, color, and geometric forms to younger children. Determined to allow her young charges every avenue she could devise to quicken their understanding and facilitate its expression, she explored all manner of mediums, hoping to engage them through music, art, and play.
The first serious breach in the close-knit Taft family occurred in early June 1889. Following a divorce from his wife Tillie, the mental condition of Peter, Will’s older brother, had seemed much improved. He resumed his law practice and appeared to be leading a quiet life, devoting his leisure time to his young son, Hulbert. His agitation and paranoia gradually returned, however, rendering him incapable of work. He complained that mysterious forces “were conspiring against him,” preventing the medicine from taking effect. Throughout his illness, his father’s support never wavered. “You may rely upon one thing,” Alphonso lovingly assured him, “and that is that my heart is always with you.” The deterioration of Peter’s mind was accompanied by a progressive wasting of his body, most likely from consumption. Though the family knew he was unwell, his death early that summer came as a shock.
The funeral was conducted at the home of Charles and Annie. One of Peter’s Yale classmates delivered the eulogy, recalling the halcyon days when Peter achieved “the highest rank in scholarship ever reached at Yale,” bringing “lasting honor on himself, his family, his class.” Annie found solace in the knowledge that young Hulbert was able to hear “what sort of a man his father was.”
“Poor Peter!” Harry Taft wrote to his father, remembering the brother who was once “the sunniest of us all.” In the end, he reflected, “his was a sad life and while I had hoped that life near the old home would add much to his comfort and perhaps to his happiness, it could never have restored him to what he was and perhaps the Lord has done wisely to remove him.” Harry had moved to Manhattan after his marriage to Julia Smith, daughter of a wealthy lawyer from Troy, New York. He had begun his legal career at Simpson, Thacher, & Barnum but had recently joined Cadwalader’s, a leading corporate law firm that would eventually bear his name. His absence from Cincinnati contributed to an increasing sense of distance at the dispersal of the Taft family.
Will worried about the impact of Peter’s death on his father, who was still suffering from the effects of typhoid pneumonia contracted in St. Petersburg. The disease had thickened Alphonso’s lungs and affected the right ventricle of the heart, making it difficult for him to breathe. In recent months, he had seemed to improve, but the trauma of Peter’s death brought on a marked deterioration in his health. “Every time the telephone rings I am fearful lest it be a sudden summons,” Will confided to Horace.
Horace, meanwhile, harbored anxiety and a measure of guilt that he had added to his father’s sadness. Disconsolate after Maria Herron refused his marriage offer, he had abandoned Cincinnati and the practice of law, which he had never enjoyed, for a teaching position in Kansas City. “My chief regret about it,” he acknowledged, “came from my father’s disappointment, for his heart was set on my going on in the law.” He had taught in Kansas City only briefly when he was offered a faculty position at Yale, where he conceived the plan of founding a boys’ school. The year after Peter’s death, he opened a private school in a redbrick house in Watertown, Connecticut, instructing ten boarders and seven day students. In those early years, Horace taught nearly all the classes himself; but in time the institution, known as the Taft School, would become a prestigious preparatory school, boasting a distinguished faculty and more than five hundred students.
On September 10, 1889, Nellie gave birth to an eight-pound son christened Robert Alphonso to carry the patriarch’s name into the next generation. “Nellie took the pain bravely,” Will reported to his father. “It is a treat to see how happy she is.” Will was ecstatic at the arrival of his first son. “On the whole, sitting as I do judicially in this case, I am obliged to give judgment for those who contend that the boy is one of the most remarkable products of this century,” he jauntily pronounced. “I have been accused of the unjudicial conduct of rushing out into the street after the boy came and yelling, ‘Hurrah!’ For a man is born unto me.” As Will only presided in court on Tuesdays and Saturdays, he was able to spend prolonged stretches at home, surrounded by the books
of his own library, writing opinions. Horace heckled him over this arrangement with a friendly jibe: “I suppose you wish me to deny the report that you adjourn Court whenever Robert Alphonso has the colic. I am trying to keep it out of the papers.”
These were happy days for Taft. A New York Times correspondent, analyzing his work on the bench, noted: “He breathes good will and suggests mental, moral, and physical wholesomeness. Yet, with all his pleasant informality and his frequent laughter, he has a dignity of manner and carriage that commands respect and attention.” In his opinions, he presented the facts and his well-reasoned conclusions in a cogent, if sometimes verbose style. Ohio court records reveal that his thorough, thoughtful decisions were “upheld by the State Supreme Court to a gratifying extent.”
Taft’s equanimity and penchant for research deeply impressed his two older colleagues, Judges Hiram Peck and Frederick E. Moore. When the death of Stanley Matthews left a vacancy on the Ohio Supreme Court in 1889, they joined other Ohioans in recommending their thirty-two-year-old colleague Taft to President Benjamin Harrison, despite his youth and mere two years on the bench. Governor Foraker concurred, assuring Harrison that Taft’s appointment “would be satisfactory to an unusually high degree to the Republicans of this state and no Democrat could justly criticize it.” From New Haven, Horace reported a conversation with Will’s classmate John Porter, now editor of the Hartford Post. His well-connected friends in Washington called Taft’s prospects “pretty hopeful.” Porter had recently spoken with Congressman Butterworth, who suggested that Will, if passed over for the supreme court, should run for governor. Horace was less enthusiastic about that possibility, much preferring that his brother become “a fine old Justice.”
When President Harrison visited Cincinnati that August, Taft joined the welcoming party at the train. Asked later if he had noticed Taft, Harrison replied: “O Yes, what a fine looking man he is. What a fine physique he has.” Although Taft dined with the presidential party that night at the city’s leading hotel, the Burnet House, he had no opportunity to speak with the president again. He reported to his father that his “chances of going to the Moon and of donning a silk gown at the hands of President Harrison are about equal. I am quite sure if I were he, I would not appoint a man of my age and position to that Bench.” Taft felt some disappointment yet small surprise when, in December 1889, Harrison nominated circuit court judge David Brewer, a twenty-eight-year veteran on the bench.
Harrison had not forgotten the imposing young man. A month later, when U.S. Solicitor General Orlon Chapman suddenly died from pneumonia, Harrison nominated William Howard Taft for the prestigious post of chief barrister for the government. “It is a great event in your career, & you should accept without hesitation,” Alphonso counseled from San Diego, where he and Louise were spending the winter. Louise was also enthusiastic. Alphonso had been certain the news would leave him sleepless, she wrote, “but it was I who lay awake . . . it is so hard not to be with you in this excitement.” She too emphasized the importance of the appointment—not just for Will but for Alphonso as well, whom the news had imbued with “a new interest in life.”
For Nellie, the appointment offered a chance to realize her goals both for herself and her husband. “I was very glad,” she later wrote, for it offered Will “an opportunity for exactly the kind of work I wished him to do; work in which his own initiative and originality would be exercised and developed.” They would escape the confining world of the Cincinnati Superior Court, where Will fraternized with much older men and dinner conversations too often focused on tedious legal questions. Moreover, she fondly anticipated life in the capital, where her husband’s eminence would gain admission to an exciting world of cabinet officials, congressmen, and senators, and where she would attend White House receptions, observe legislative debates, and discuss the vital topics of the day. She was immediately willing to find and furnish a new house, leave behind supportive parents and relatives, and uproot their small son from his routine—all in search of a more fulfilling and exciting existence.
Only Will was reluctant. As solicitor general, he would argue cases as an advocate, standing to present “one side of a case” rather than weighing evidence and rendering judgment, temperamentally a far more congenial role. In his early days as a lawyer, arguing before the court had quickly become his least favorite aspect of the job; his affinity was for administering justice with fairness and integrity. Moreover, he was “entirely unfamiliar with the rules of practice” before the federal court, and had “very little familiarity” with federal statutes. And he knew he would have little time to orient himself. Straightaway upon his arrival, a backlog of cases to be argued would greet him. Furthermore, he took no pleasure in the prospect of leaving behind the close friendships and comfortable life he had built in Cincinnati.
“Go ahead, & fear not,” his father advised. “You will have a full library at your service, in your own room, with messengers to get the books, besides Assistant Atty Generals to examine law points & make briefs for you; and you will have a short hand reporter take down & write out with type writing what you wish to have written.” He continued to encourage and prod his reluctant son in a string of letters. “To a large extent the legal field of inquiry will be new,” Alphonso wrote, “but you can master it, as you have mastered other things.” His mother agreed: “You have learned the duties of a Judge so soon you can certainly hope to acquire those of an advocate.” Alphonso was intent on stamping out any doubt his son might experience, faced by a change of such magnitude. “I believe you are equal to it,” the father proclaimed with confidence, “although I do not believe the experiment has ever before been tried with so young a man. I receive more compliments than I know what to do with for having such a son. I try to behave with becoming modesty. . . . We are intensely proud of you.”
The formidable combination of his father’s high expectations and his wife’s desires proved irresistible for Taft. He wrote to President Harrison, accepting the position. His confirmation was celebrated with a “brilliant reception” at the Lincoln Club. Four days later, Taft set out alone on a sleeper train for Washington, determined to find proper lodging before Nellie and the baby joined him.
Nellie’s depiction of Will’s anxiety upon reaching the nation’s capital evinces a novelist’s empathy: “He arrived at six o’clock on a cold, gloomy February morning at the old dirty Pennsylvania station. He wandered out on the street with a heavy bag in his hand looking for a porter, but there were no porters. Then he stood for a few moments looking up at the Capitol and feeling dismally unimportant in the midst of what seemed to him to be very formidable surroundings. . . . He was sure he had made a fatal mistake in exchanging a good position and a pleasant circle at home, where everybody knew him, for a place in a strange and forbidding city where he knew practically nobody.” Nellie’s account clearly reveals, beneath her insistence that he establish himself in Washington, a compassionate knowledge of her husband’s nature. She relates that he dropped his bag off at the Old Ebbit House and walked to the Department of Justice for his swearing-in. Then he went to examine his office, where he “met the most dismal sight of the whole dismal day. His ‘quarters’ consisted of a single room, three flights up.” Nor was the busy hive of assistants his father had forecast waiting to greet him. The sole shorthand reporter on the premises did not work for Taft. He was a telegrapher in the chief clerk’s office and could only take Taft’s dictation when not engaged in his primary duties. “Altogether it must have been a very disheartening outlook,” Nellie wrote. “He wondered to himself why on earth he had come.”
Taft’s mood brightened considerably once Nellie arrived with Robert. They happily settled into a rented three-story town house at 5 Dupont Circle, which was easily affordable on his yearly salary of $7,000. “It is not a large house, but it is very pleasantly situated,” Taft told Judge Peck, “with an outlook on a delightful little park, and is very convenient to the street cars, which are constantly passing to
and fro in front of the house.” His satisfaction with both their temporary home and the neighborhood, “one of the nicest and most convenient in the City,” is evident in a letter to his father: “Our house is what is called a swell front, so that we are able from the front windows to look up and down the street and get such a view and so much light as to make the three front rooms of the house charming. The front room on the first floor is a reception room; the front room on the second floor is a library and sitting-room and the guest room is on the third floor immediately back of the nursery.” The dining room was completed with a new table and eight new mahogany chairs, a Chippendale sideboard, and a new rug. For Will, the most important feature of the house was the sanctuary of a large library, lined with shelves sufficient to accommodate his treasured law books. “I find that without a place to work, it is difficult to work. I look forward with the greatest pleasure to the use of my books at night at home.”
The most fortuitous and enduring aspect of the new Taft residency, however, lay neither in cheerful accommodations nor access to the city center. Rather, 5 Dupont Circle stood only 1,000 feet away from the modest house at 1820 Jefferson Place which Theodore Roosevelt, newly appointed member of the Civil Service Commission, and his second wife, Edith Carow, had rented, and where they had come to live just two months earlier. The proximity of those two addresses in northwest Washington, both within walking distance of the White House, would give rise to the legendary friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.