When Outcault replaced Drew as prosecuting attorney, he offered the post of assistant prosecuting attorney to Will Taft, who had just passed his twenty-third birthday. Nellie Taft later declared that “the experience he had in the rough-and-ready practice in criminal trials, in preparing cases for trial, in examining witnesses, in making arguments to the court and in summing up to the jury, was the most valuable experience he could possibly have in fitting him for trial work at the bar.” He prepared indictments for grand juries; he took depositions, interviewed witnesses, and independently conducted a number of criminal trials, including a dramatic murder case. After only four months on the job, Will opened the prosecution’s case in the state’s second attempt to put the city auditor Cy Hoffman behind bars. Once again, the celebrated criminal defense lawyer Tom Campbell defended Hoffman; once again Campbell secured a hung jury, and suspicions of jury tampering abounded.
Considering the marked contrast of disposition between Taft and Roosevelt, Henry Pringle speculates that “a Theodore Roosevelt might have won renown, glory and headlines in this post of assistant district attorney.” He might have publicly pledged to root out the corrupt dealings between officers of the court and the city’s political machine, but Will Taft “was no showman, nor was he, to the same extent, personally or politically ambitious.” He valued the post solely as a vital contribution to his legal education. “He was on his legs day after day before judge and jury,” Horace recalled, and consequently “became so expert in regard to the laws of evidence as to surprise the older lawyers when he mounted the bench.”
Although he harbored no political ambitions for himself, Taft took an active role in local Republican politics. During his father’s race for governor, he canvassed the city in search of delegates to the state convention and remained involved from that point forward. “I attended all the primaries and all the conventions,” he later recalled, “and attempted to do what I could to secure respectable nominees for the party, especially for judicial places.” He worked in his ward to defeat disreputable machine candidates “by hustling around among good people to get them out.” He never hesitated to attack “the gang methods” whenever he witnessed corruption at the polls, but while attacking their methods, he always stayed “on good terms” with all the various factions. His amiability and reluctance to hold a grudge made him, in the estimation of Republican congressman Benjamin Butterworth, “the most popular young man in Hamilton County.”
Beneath Will’s benign nature, however, lay a sharp temper, especially where his family’s honor was concerned. A weekly tabloid published an anonymous letter ridiculing Alphonso, along with the insidious suggestion that Louise Taft herself had authored the attack. Determined to seek revenge for this slander against both his parents, Will sought out the tabloid’s editor, Lester A. Rose. Charley cautioned restraint since Rose “was known to be a bruiser of considerable physical courage and great endurance.” Undaunted, Will confronted Rose on a street corner and administered what the newspapers termed a “terrible beating.” He reportedly “lifted him up and dashed him to the pavement,” executing continuous blows and hammering the man’s head against the ground until Rose promised to leave town that very night. The story of the thrashing made news across the country. “The feeling among all classes of citizens,” observed the Bismarck Tribune, “is that Mr. Taft did a public service and ought to have a medal.”
At his father’s urging, Will began stumping for Republican candidates in his county. “I want him to accustom himself to speaking from the beginning,” Alphonso told Delia Torrey, explaining that as a lawyer, “he is to make speaking a business, & he should do it well.” Will was sick with anxiety before his maiden political speech, aghast to see his name, the Hon. William H. Taft, plastered on posters throughout the city. “Don’t allow yourself to be discouraged,” his father urged him. “It is a great undertaking, but it is the best thing that can happen to you. . . . It will be worth a fortune to you if you can conquer the difficulties & speak well in public. I know it is hard work to get adequate preparation. . . . You will find it difficult to commit literally a long speech. I do not attempt it. You will have your memory helped by notes of the points.” Will followed his father’s advice, and the speech, which he delivered three times in three different venues, went well. “He finds the farmers make attentive listeners, and he is not embarrassed,” Louise noted. “There is every prospect that he will be a first class speaker,” Alphonso wishfully predicted, “and a first class lawyer, too.”
In January 1882, Taft’s popularity with the discordant factions of the Republican Party led Congressman Butterworth to recommend him to President Chester Arthur as Collector of Internal Revenue for the Cincinnati District. The sitting collector, affiliated with a coalition considered unfriendly to the president, had been dismissed. His removal threatened to escalate political strife unless a replacement was found who could mollify all sides. “If you will appoint Will Taft to this important position, everybody will be satisfied,” Butterworth told President Arthur. Taft’s mother opposed the idea. “I did not wish Will to go into politics,” she said. “I wished him to engage in nothing not in the line of his profession.” His father, too, questioned the appointment, fearing that Taft was “too young” to lead a staff of more than a hundred employees in the task of collecting over $10 million from the sales of whiskey and tobacco.
Taft later acknowledged that he was offered the post, making him the youngest collector in the country, predominantly because he “had no political enemies.” It is likely that this decision to interrupt his emerging legal career was less a function of ambition than of desire to satisfy Congressman Butterworth and President Arthur. Indeed, this unwillingness to disappoint others would continue to shape the course of his professional life. While Taft possessed a highly developed social intelligence, he was less discerning of his own strengths and weaknesses.
Still, it did not take him long to realize that the work was decidedly ill-suited to his temperament. He detested the prominence of the position and could not bear the criticism that inevitably came with the job, acknowledging years later that he was too “thin-skinned” for “public life.” Moreover, his moderate reformist tendencies were at odds with the prevailing customs of the day. At a time when civil service reform was still in its infancy, when political patronage, rather than merit, filled the majority of positions, government employees were expected to contribute part of their salaries to the party in power. Horace recalled that when the local Republican Party circulated a subscription list demanding money from each of the department employees, Taft made a contribution in his own name “but announced that he would not look at the subscriptions made by any of his employees.” Ruffled party members charged that “he was wrecking the party by the course he followed.”
Taft’s troubles multiplied during a bitter contest for the congressional nomination in the Second District between Governor Tom Young and Amor Smith. Young sent a letter to Taft demanding the removal of a number of men in the Revenue Department who he claimed were allied with his opponent. Taft refused, resenting the “bulldozer” tone of the letter. The half-dozen men whose removal the governor demanded, he countered, “are among the best men in this District in the energy, skill and faithfulness with which they discharge their duties. If removed they must be simply and solely removed because they would prefer Amor Smith’s nomination to yours.” As for Young’s implied threat to involve President Arthur in the situation, Taft argued that “the popularity of the present Administration in this county has been strengthened by the fidelity with which we have tried to follow the President’s moderate course in National Affairs in regard to Civil Service.”
In a letter to his father, Taft defiantly declared: “I would much rather resign and let some one else do Tom Young’s service and dirty work.” In an effort to avoid public dissension, he decided to write to the president directly. “The men whose removal he seeks,” Taft told the president, “are such men as practical and c
onscientious politicians delight to find, men of political power and of ability to discharge their official duties.” He promised President Arthur that these employees supported the administration; they simply preferred Smith to Young. Although Governor Young eventually backed down, the disagreeable conflict intensified Taft’s desire to resume the practice of law. “I long to get out of politics,” he told his father in October 1882, “and get down to business.” A month later, after less than a year on the job, he journeyed to Washington and asked the president to accept his resignation. “I am mighty glad he is going to resign,” Horace told his mother. With clear admiration for his older brother, he added: “I’ll bet one thing & that is they won’t get a man in that place very soon who knows more about the law & business of the office than he does or who abstains more carefully from the dirty parts of politics. Will makes fun of me for being so radical theoretical & impractical in my opinions but when it comes to the point I think he is a thorough Civil Service Reformer in practice.”
Palpably relieved to be free of political discord, Taft penned a long letter to his father, who was then enjoying a pleasant stint in Vienna as the American foreign minister to Austria-Hungary at the behest of President Arthur. Will happily reported his intent to go into partnership with his father’s former law partner, Major Harlan Page Lloyd, a widely respected figure in Cincinnati. “It is the opening of what I hope will be my life’s work,” he said. “Of course I shall have to work hard but that will agree with me and I shall have that sweetest of all pleasures the feeling of something accomplished, something done in the life that I have marked out for myself.” It was a rare moment of insight into his own feelings and desires. Alphonso was gratified to hear that his son was leaving politics “to work at the law, with all his might,” he told Charley. “That is his destiny.”
By early 1883, Taft was settled in his new job. Charley’s wife Annie believed that since leaving the politically embroiled revenue department Will looked “younger by several years.” In January, Taft wrote his sister Fanny with evident satisfaction: “I wish you could look in on me now, seated in my cozy library with a cheerful soft coal fire and lots of easy chairs with the familiar old pictures looking down on me from every wall.” That summer, he planned to take his first trip abroad to visit his parents. “I hope you will make yourselves comfortable and elegant even if it is a little expensive,” he teased them. “You’re off on a lark and we are willing to extend your allowance a little to insure your having a good time.” But after three months in Europe he was “glad to get home” and resume his law practice. “Will is working well & seems very happy,” Major Lloyd reported to Alphonso.
Will and Horace roomed together on the west side of Broadway when Horace, after graduating from Yale, also returned to Cincinnati to study law. Tall, spare, with a refreshing sense of humor, Horace relished politics more than his brother did and would become a fervent advocate for reform. Horace “makes friends wherever he goes,” Will reported to his sister, “because his honest good nature and straight forward character shines out of him.”
Will also confided in Fanny his hope that his own law practice would “grow large enough in some years to warrant my making an ass of myself in regard to some girl.” By his twenty-fifth birthday, however, he confessed that he was “no nearer matrimony than I was when I first went into society. In the loneliness that I sometimes feel stealing over me, the temptation in that direction is strong but with no object to satisfy the feeling, the thought passes like many other castles in the air.”
If Will felt he lacked the proper foundation to marry, he was certainly entertaining eligible candidates. When the Opera Festival came to Cincinnati during the first week in February, Taft reported to his mother and sister that he was planning to take a different girl each evening: Nellie Herron on Monday night, Edith Harrison on Tuesday, Miss Lawson on Wednesday, Miss Tomlin on Thursday, Alice Keys on Saturday afternoon, and Agnes Davis on Saturday night. “I see Father shake his head when he reads this list and hear him say that a thorough knowledge of the law is not obtained in that way.”
THE REVIVAL OF TAFT’S LEGAL career reignited a clash with his old nemesis: Tom Campbell. A wave of ghastly murders in 1883, including a husband and wife killed for the $30 their bodies would be worth to a dissection class at the medical school, had created panic throughout Cincinnati. And amid this widespread anxiety, a particularly vicious killing of a liveryman on Christmas Eve of 1883 set in motion “a series of events that shook the foundation of Cincinnati.”
The prosecution charged that seventeen-year-old William Berner and an accomplice had robbed and killed their employer, William Kirk, by beating him savagely on the head with a blacksmith’s hammer and club. They hid the body in a covered wagon, fled with $345, and enjoyed a night of revelry in numerous saloons. When the victim’s body was discovered, the pockets of his jacket “were filled with Christmas presents he was taking home to his family.” Evidence implicated Berner, who confessed six times to six different people, detailing the planning and execution of the “cold-blooded butchery.” Before the trial commenced, Berner, in order to avoid hanging, agreed “to plead guilty to murder in the second degree.” The prosecution refused, certain that the evidence for first-degree murder “was absolute and unquestioned,” and that the heinous nature of the crime deserved punishment by death.
Tom Campbell was enticed to defend Berner with the hefty fee of $5,000, offered by the father of the accused young man. It proved a sage investment; with the powerfully connected Campbell leading the defense, the jury delivered a shocking verdict. After deliberating but twenty-four hours, they rejected both the first- and second-degree murder charges, finding Berner guilty only of murder in the third degree. Cincinnati residents were stunned and outraged, convinced that the father of the murderer had purchased the verdict through a cunning lawyer who had corrupted the jury. While not the first miscarriage of justice that Cincinnati had witnessed, it was certainly the most infamous.
“The people of Cincinnati are abundantly warned that the law furnishes no protection to life,” declared the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. “Justice,” the New York Times reported, “was poisoned at its source. The peace and safety of society were betrayed by the agency chosen to defend them. It is a terrible fact . . . that money outweighs human life and that the land of the law is palsied by bribes.” A number of papers grimly noted that the lower courts in too many cities across the country had “become the mere agents of unscrupulous attorneys, who dictate acquittals or convictions at will. So scandalous and notorious has it become that lawyers now openly boast that they own this or that court.”
A mass meeting was held at the Music Hall on March 29, 1884, to protest both the verdict and the corrupting influence of the Campbell organization. Speakers addressed the crowd, and a committee was formed to revise the rules governing the selection of juries. The proceedings were repeatedly interrupted by outbursts of “Hang the jury!,” “Hang Tom Campbell!,” “Hang Berner!,” and a large “boisterous element remained” after the meeting adjourned.
After some excited deliberation, they thronged to the jail, determined to find Berner and deliver by lynching the justice denied by the court. Gathering strength on every corner, the crowd grew to nearly 1,000 by the time it reached the jail. There the mob divided into three groups. The first division stormed the courthouse, ran through the tunnel leading to the jail, and managed to break through the heavy iron doors at the end of the tunnel. The second group shattered the south windows and demolished the chapel on the way to the rotunda. With a heavy ram, the third group battered down the iron entrance to the jail and raced up a winding stairway to reach the cells. But Berner was nowhere to be found; for his safety, he had already been transferred to another jail. In their fury, the mob set the courthouse ablaze.
Order was finally restored with the arrival of the police and the state militia, but in the course of the struggle, forty-five men were killed and more than a hundred injured. Many tho
usands of dollars of property was lost. The New York Times declared it “the bloodiest affair that ever occurred in Cincinnati.”
A few weeks later, a grand jury brought an indictment against Tom Campbell for bribing several of the jurors. Taft rightly surmised that it would be impossible “to obtain testimony because the only witnesses of Campbell’s rascalities are men who were as deeply implicated in them as he was.” Campbell chose for his counsel Joseph Foraker, a rising political ally, and was acquitted by a jury unable to reach a verdict. Taft complained to his father that Foraker had “conducted the defense in a most shystering and ungentlemanly way.” In the future, he pledged, “I shall do everything I can against Foraker in every political fight.”
The Cincinnati Bar Association, meanwhile, decided to create a committee to prepare sufficient evidence for a disbarment suit against Campbell in the district court. Taft was chosen by the senior members of the bar to serve as junior counsel for the nine-person committee. This appointment, Horace noted years later, “was an extraordinary honor, considering his youth, and was not to be accounted for by smiling good nature.” Alphonso worried about the consequences of a direct collision with Campbell and the insidious forces behind him, fearing even for his son’s physical safety. Will, however, relished the chance to confront the man who had “thrown the bar of Hamilton County into disrepute.” He stridently announced to his father that it was time “for men to have backbone and drive away the scourge that has been such an infliction on this community for so many years. Those who tamely cower in the face of attack I have no use for. I have gone into this thing fully realizing the dangerous enemy we have to encounter.”