Conservative Thought
A CONSERVATIVE UNAFRAID
When Democrat Franklin Roosevelt won his third election with a historic landslide, congressional Republicans were annihilated. Only 16 shell-shocked Republican senators survived, and they were deeply divided philosophically. It was then up to a few conservative Democrats to lead the first congressional resistance to the New Deal. This resistance would be bolstered by a young conservative Republican, Robert Alphonso Taft.
Bob Taft came from a long line of politicians. His grandfather, Alfonso Taft, served with distinction under Ulysses S. Grant as Secretary of War and Attorney General. His five sons all graduated from Yale, practiced law, and were all stout Republicans. His middle son, William Howard Taft, served as Secretary of War, President of the United States, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. President Taft’s eldest son, Robert, was very much the product of his family’s tradition.
He graduated first in his class from Taft School, a boarding school owned by his uncle. Later, he was to graduate first in his class from Yale and later studied law at Harvard, where he also graduated first in his class. When offered a job clerking for Supreme Court Justice Oliver W. Holmes, he declined, later admitting that he feared he would get the job because of his father and not his own worth.
The defining event that led to his development of political philosophy was the Great Depression and the resulting New Deal remedies. He believed the New Deal was an administrative mechanism to usher totalitarian or collectivist government into America. He wrote: The New Deal is absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which the country was founded, and which has actually made it the most prosperous country in the world. It is inconsistent with democratic government. Communism, fascism, and Hitlerism have destroyed a system like ours in many European countries, and substituted a form of despotic socialism. There is no man and no group of men intelligent enough to coordinate and control the infinitely numerous and complex problems involved in the production, consumption, and daily lives of 120 million individualistic and educated people.
Taft’s two recurring themes were strict constructionism, and federalism. He abhorred the experimental nature of the New Deal, the reliance on bureaucratic demands as opposed to congressional statute. He believed Roosevelt’s advisors saw the Depression as a convenient emergency by which any governmental action might be justified regardless of constitutional limits.
In 1938, Taft won election to the US Senate. He immediately became a national conservative spokesman. He extolled the importance of equality of opportunity, as distinguished from any equality of outcome. He warned of the danger of high corporate taxes, which would destroy all incentive and initiative. He stated that small business is the key to progress in the United States. To resolve the farm problem, he prescribed a complete restoration of the market, noting that limitation of production, never has been successful in permanently increasing farm prices. He advocated that all welfare programs be designed, administered and implemented on state and local effort. Most importantly, he believed in individual liberty:
Taft was quick to see the opportunity for a bipartisan alliance with conservative Democrats. In fact, Taft’s role in solidifying the conservative foundation of the Republican Party, and forming a bipartisan conservative coalition in the Senate would have lasting consequences. The coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats would effectively control the Senate for 25 years, long after Taft’s death.
“It is somewhat significant that the right endowed in the Declaration of Independence is not one of happiness, but merely of pursuit. The whole history of America reveals the system based on individual opportunity, individual initiative, individual freedom to earn one’s living and one’s own way, and to conduct manufacturing, commerce, agriculture, or other businesses; on rugged individualism, if you please, which it has become so fashionable to deride.”
There were certain issues that prevented Robert Taft from becoming President. He stood against getting involved in WWII, not because he wanted to turn a blind eye toward the problems in Europe, but because of fear that the New Deal expenditures would affect the freedom and individual rights of workers in America. As soon as the war ended, Taft demanded that the federal government dismantle wartime controls and regulations.
After the war, the Western powers wanted to try Nazis for crimes against humanity. The American public supported the Nuremberg trials, but Taft knew that the trials violated “the fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute.” Ex post facto meaning “after the fact.” Taft reasoned that after the Germans agreed to the peace treaty and its punishments, they should not be additionally punished but be shown American resolve to restore to the minds of men a devotion to equal justice under the law.
Many Americans were outraged, he was called anti-American, and many Republicans distanced themselves against him. His political aspirations were over. John F. Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage: Robert H Taft was also a man who stuck fast to the basic principles in which he believed, and when those fundamental principles were at issue, not even the lure of the White House, or the possibilities of injuring his candidacy, could deter him from speaking out. He was an able politician, but on more than one occasion, he chose to speak out and defend a position, no politician with like ambitions would have endorsed. Taft had spoken, not in defense of the Nazi murderers (as a labor leader charged), not in defense of isolationism (as most observers assumed), but in defense of what he regarded to be the traditional American concepts of law justice. Justice was at stake, and all other concerns were trivial. As the apostle of strict constitutionalism, Taft was undeterred by the possibilities of injury to his party’s precarious position or his own presidential prospects.
Taft’s final thoughts on conservative principles and traditional government: “The American people seem to be doing less and less thinking for themselves, and they seem to have less and less knowledge of the history and basic principles of the American Republic. It seems to me that the people have come to form their opinions, not from facts and their own thinking, but from the thinking and opinions of others.”
Several years after his death, a bipartisan senatorial committee announced the selection of the “Five Greatest Senators in US History,” and Taft joined John C Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Robert M Lafollette in this honorable group.
(Most information is taken from Conservative Heroes by Garland S. Tucker III)
KLN
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the
world, and not according to Christ.
Colossians 2:8 ESV