In these most agreeable settings, Taft was totally at ease, sharing stories, drinks, and conversation. While Roosevelt’s indomitable, often contentious nature stirred discord with colleagues at both the Civil Service Commission and the police board, Taft enjoyed warm professional relationships from the outset, bonding effortlessly with his fellow circuit justices, William R. Day and Horace H. Lurton, both of whom would eventually sit on the Supreme Court—the former appointed by Roosevelt, the latter by Taft himself.
No one on the circuit was more widely respected or better loved than Taft. “He is absolutely the fairest judge I have ever seen on the bench,” a fellow attorney remarked. Countless stories circulated of his kind and even-handed actions in the courtroom. When a prosecuting attorney persistently hectored a witness who had already disclosed his shame of being illiterate, Taft brought a quick end to the attorney’s line of questioning: “Stop that!” he admonished. “You have brought out that this man cannot read; that is enough. I will not have you humiliate this witness any further, because it has no relation to the case.” In another incident, an inexperienced lawyer had filed a badly drawn petition on behalf of a young girl whose foot had been severed in a railroad accident; Taft edited the document himself, knowing that otherwise the railroad attorney would easily secure a dismissal of the case.
The work itself was intellectually challenging, requiring him to reach decisions and write opinions on far-reaching issues regarding labor strikes, injunctions, workplace injuries, street railways, and monopolies. He was allowed the time necessary to study cases thoroughly, reviewing precedents and refining his positions. Most important, he was able to draft, revise, and edit his decisions “over again and again” until he had honed the language to his satisfaction. His opinions earned the admiration of lawyers across the nation, building a reputation that bolstered his dream of one day sitting on the Supreme Court.
Presiding on the bench through the turbulent 1890s, Taft was called upon to adjudicate a number of highly controversial cases that shadowed the rest of his career. The most noteworthy, In re Phelan, had boiled over from the 1894 Pullman strike. While the strike stirred turmoil in Chicago, Frank Phelan, an authorized representative of Eugene Debs, arrived in Cincinnati to organize railway employees in Ohio and Kentucky for a general boycott of all Pullman trains. With the Cincinnati Southern Railroad nearly paralyzed by the boycott, the company’s manager successfully petitioned the court for an injunction, enjoining Phelan from inciting workers—who themselves had no grievance against the Pullman Company—to join a strike preventing the flow of interstate traffic. When Phelan defied the injunction and union members continued to stop trains, Taft issued a warrant for his arrest.
Taft told Nellie, who had taken the children to Canada for that summer of 1894, that the case worried him more than any other. Each day, newspapers carried sensationalized accounts of the tumult in Chicago, claiming that mobs were “holding that city by the throat.” Like Roosevelt, Taft feared that demagogic leaders had resolved “to provoke a civil war” and that some of the agitators would have to be killed “to make an impression.” Dozens of marshals were posted throughout Cincinnati in anticipation of similar violence. When news broke of Phelan’s arrest, Taft received death threats. His decision was loudly denounced at raucous meetings held throughout the city, and his courtroom was ominously crowded with strikers. “I hate the publicity that this brings me into,” he complained to Nellie, explaining that his days were occupied “trying to say nothing to reporters.”
The mayor of Cincinnati and the chief of police tried to persuade Taft to draw out the trial until the tumult and bloodletting in Chicago had subsided, but with Phelan under arrest and his sympathizers packing the court “to suffocation,” Taft’s sense of duty obliged him to move the case forward. After hearing the arguments on both sides, he spent two long nights writing his opinion, just managing, he told Nellie, to have “the last sentence copied when twelve oclock struck, the time fixed for its announcement.” Attired in the silk judicial robe he donned for important occasions, Taft took almost an hour to read out his long opinion.
At the core of his argument lay the same distinction he had drawn in Moore’s & Co. v. Bricklayers’ Union between a legal strike and an illegal secondary boycott. He began by emphasizing that the employees of the railroad “had the right to organize into or to join a labor union which should take joint action as to their terms of employment.” With strong language, he clearly delineated the vital role of unions in industrial society: “It is of benefit to them and to the public that laborers should unite in their common interest and for lawful purposes,” Taft began, further explaining that “if they stand together, they are often able, all of them, to command better prices for their labor than when dealing singly with rich employers. . . . The accumulation of a fund for the support of those who feel that the wages offered are below market prices is one of the legitimate objects of such an organization.” Furthermore, Taft recognized the legitimacy of union leadership and their right to maintain solidarity. He explained that officers of a union might order members “on pain of expulsion from their union, peaceably to leave the employ of their employer because any of the terms of their employment are unsatisfactory.”
Had Phelan arrived in Cincinnati to protest a wage cut by the Cincinnati Southern and “urged a peaceable strike,” Taft maintained, “the loss to the [railroad] would not be ground for recovering damages, and Phelan would not have been liable to contempt even if the strike much impeded the operation of the road.” In this case, however, “the employees of the railway companies had no grievance against their employers.” Nor did they have cause to obstruct the Pullman Company, which had nothing to do with their compensation or working conditions. Phelan, therefore, had conspired to bring about an illegal boycott. Taft found him guilty and sentenced him to six months in jail.
Lost in the ensuing uproar, Taft’s clear and forceful defense of labor’s right to strike was perhaps the most definitive pronouncement on the subject to that date. Nine years later, when the Wabash Railroad issued an injunction against the striking Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and Firemen, the labor union relied on Taft’s statement on labor rights to dissolve the injunction and win their case.
Yet Taft’s failure to explicate his decision more fully to reporters and his refusal to court public opinion left him vulnerable to charges of an anti-union bias. As police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt had faced similar accusations from labor leaders following repeated arrests of union picketers involved in violent scuffles with employers and scabs. Unlike Taft, however, Roosevelt had responded with aplomb, realizing that such charges must not go unanswered. At the suggestion of Jacob Riis, Roosevelt had invited union leaders to meet at a beer hall and speak to him, not “as Police Commissioner, but just as plain ‘me.’ ” During a three-hour exchange of views, Roosevelt had insisted that no genuine friend of labor could condone violence. When the marathon session came to a close, the union audience “applauded him to the echo.”
While Taft lacked Roosevelt’s political savvy and press connections, his advocacy for the workingman and desire for an even-handed policy in a rapidly industrializing nation made his nascent progressivism increasingly evident. Following the Phelan controversy, two additional railroad cases demonstrated Taft’s support for the cause of labor. The swift expansion of railroads in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had generated a shocking increase in accidents causing death or severe physical harm to industrial workers. Statistics revealed that annually “one railroad worker in every three hundred was killed on the job,” while one out of fifty American laborers sustained an injury. In an era when courts consistently favored property rights over individual rights, railroad employees found it nearly impossible to recover damages. Under the doctrine of assumed risk, railroad attorneys successfully argued that employees assumed all risk of injury, even if railroad negligence was involved. In some cases, railroads demanded that employees sign formal con
tracts releasing the company from liability in the event of injury or death.
In the case of Voight v. Baltimore, Taft held the Baltimore Railroad liable for permanent injuries to a worker. Although the man had signed a contract agreeing to hold the railroad harmless, Taft held that this document did not divest the company of responsibility to employees in the case of negligence. The conservative Supreme Court reversed Taft’s ruling, citing the sanctity of contract, but he would later be vindicated when in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt signed a law specifically outlawing such oppressive contracts.
Taft further challenged the doctrine of assumed risk in the Narramore case. A recently passed Ohio law required railroads to install safety devices that would protect workers from getting caught in guard rails and frogs—switch mechanisms that allowed a train to cross from one track to another. One brakeman was working on the tracks when his foot became stuck in an unsecured frog. Unable to escape as the train approached, he suffered horrific injuries, including the loss of one leg. The federal district court heard his case, but refused damages on grounds that Narramore had assumed the risk when he continued to work despite his knowledge that the frogs lacked safety devices. Taft reversed the lower court decision, arguing that any safety law would be “a dead letter” if companies were permitted to defend themselves in this way. In the years ahead, injured employees successfully cited Taft’s ruling, allowing them to receive damages when the hazards of their employment resulted from a corporation’s failure to meet safety regulations.
Of William Taft’s hundreds of rulings in the 1890s, the most consequential involved an anti-trust suit against the Addyston Steel and Pipe Company, which had joined with five other cast-iron pipe manufacturers to fix prices under a contract of association. Since the 1890 passage of the Sherman AntiTrust Act, corporations had openly defied the law’s restrictions against combinations in restraint of trade. Anti-trust suits brought in pro-business state courts were invariably lost, and monopolies continued to grow. In the 1895 Knight case, the Supreme Court delivered what seemed a death knell to the Sherman Act, refusing to break up a sugar company that controlled 98 percent of the country’s sugar refineries.
When Taft received the government’s case against the Addyston Company combination on appeal in 1898, it was widely assumed that he would follow the lower court’s ruling and dismiss the suit. Instead, he held that the association was indeed an attempted monopoly designed “to give the defendants power to charge unreasonable prices.” Taft’s order for the association’s dissolution made national news, emboldening those who fought to stay the growth of colossal combinations. The New York Times headlined the importance of the decision: “Iron Pipe Trust Illegal: The First Case in Which Manufacturing Combination Had Been Found Guilty.” Enumerating the facts of the pipe case, the New York World suggested that “precisely the same things are true of hundreds of other trusts, and they can be smashed if the people’s attorneys and the courts will do their duty.” Still, there was little concerted action against monopolies until 1902, when President Roosevelt brought suit against the Northern Securities Company, a giant holding company combining three railroads in an attempt to control rail prices throughout the Northwest. Roosevelt’s suit relied, in part, on Taft’s opinion in the Addyston Pipe case.
These were productive, invigorating years for William Taft, who also agreed to serve as dean of the new Cincinnati Law School, where he was teaching two courses. “The deanship is going to involve considerable work,” he told Nellie, “but I think I can systematize it.” He was elected president of the Cincinnati Civil Service Reform Association and was overjoyed to be made a trustee of Yale College, where he regularly presided over reunions with his fellow Bonesmen. Indeed, the only drawback of his burgeoning reputation was the increasing number of invitations to deliver speeches at banquets and meetings.
“I wish I could make a good speech,” he confided to Nellie before a banquet in Memphis, “but I fear it must be desultory and haphazard.” Another disappointing performance in Grand Rapids, he confessed with chagrin, had left “a bad taste in my mouth but I am used to that.” Nellie tried to buoy his confidence, reminding him that whenever he spent time in preparation, he invariably found “something to say that is worthwhile.” When he agreed to address the annual meeting of the American Bar Association in Detroit at the end of August 1895, he promised Nellie that he would work on the speech for an hour every day and would submit drafts to her throughout the summer. “I shall use you as my merciless but loving critic,” he assured her. Still, when he saw “the prominent names” of the other speakers, including Supreme Court justice David Brewer and Harvard professor James Thayer, it made him “tremble lest I shall make a fizzle of mine.”
That same summer, Horace spent a month with his brother at Murray Bay in Canada, where Will and Nellie had expanded a small cottage into “a happy summer home.” The little resort village of Murray Bay, situated on the St. Lawrence River one hundred miles north of Quebec, had become a gathering place for the entire Taft clan. In the early days, Charles Taft recalled, the “whole cargo of Tafts,” twenty-one in all, shared a six-room house, with thin partitions dividing the rooms. Eventually each of the brothers had purchased or rented cottages of their own, all within easy walking distance of one another, the golf course, the tennis courts, the river, the hills, and the small village.
Horace recalled that although Taft’s weight had ballooned by 1895 to 280 pounds, he maintained a preposterous schedule with unflagging vitality: “He played eighteen holes on a very hilly golf course in the morning, came home, ate his lunch, read his mail, and then went down to a tennis court, where he played a rather elephantine game,” after which he went rowing on the river until it was time for a picnic supper. One night, Horace found Howard Hollister, Will’s old friend, stretched out on the sofa. Asked about plans for the next day, Hollister laughingly replied, “The Lord knows. I doubt whether I shall live till tomorrow. I have been following Bill around today.” Provided his weight did not become so onerous as to impede his activities, Taft was able to jest about it. Horace remembered sitting with Harry and Will in an overcrowded theatre with narrow seats. “Horace,” Will said, “if this theater burns, it has got to burn around me.”
During these years, Nellie Taft, originally reluctant to leave Washington, had immersed herself in the civic life of Cincinnati. She instituted a current events salon where she and her friends studied the administration’s Hawaiian policy and the Chinese exclusion question, reading congressional debates and legal briefs. She attended the theatre regularly, took music lessons, and published an essay on Schumann. She also resumed her leadership role in promoting access to early education for the city’s children, an advocacy that resulted in the kindergarten movement.
Despite her eclectic pastimes, Nellie found time to undertake the enormous project of founding the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which gave its first concert series in 1895, with nationally recognized Frank Van der Stucken conducting. Previous orchestral associations had failed, but with the permanent dedication of a new Music Hall, Nellie was determined to create a symphony orchestra to rival those in Boston and New York. As president of the Orchestral Association, she raised funds, organized committees to sell subscriptions and advertising space, and negotiated contracts for the conductor and musicians, working with their labor union to protect local musicians against foreign imports. She even managed to persuade the major railroads to offer reduced rates for out-of-town passengers attending concert performances and inaugurated a series of free summer concerts.
Taft was immensely proud of Nellie’s work with the orchestra. He kept up with every detail, encouraging her through difficult days and exulting at her great success. “My love for you, Dear, grows each year,” he remarked. “This is not the enthusiasm of the wedding journey but it is the truth deliberately arrived at after full opportunity for me to know.” He ardently defended Nellie when her mother charged that she fancied herself “the new woman,” citi
ng her unseemly public pursuits and the fact that she had borne but two children (though a third, named after Taft’s brother Charley, would be born in 1897). Yet, in some ways, Nellie Taft did represent the new woman. She continued to frequent German beer halls, enjoyed smoking, played cards for money, followed the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, and was among the first in her hometown to wear a short skirt. “It is so delightful that I shall live in it,” she told Will. “It makes me feel very young and frisky to be so unencumbered.” Her manner may have seemed unorthodox to some, but the mutual affection and admiration she shared with her husband allowed her to pursue diverse interests even as she raised healthy, intelligent, confident children.
During his fruitful years on the bench, Taft’s friendship with Roosevelt continued to grow. While still civil service commissioner, Roosevelt visited Cincinnati to deliver a lecture and attend a dinner at the St. Nicholas Hotel in honor of their mutual friend Bellamy Storer. During his stay, Roosevelt collaborated with Taft to create the Civil Service Reform Club in Cincinnati, to which Taft was elected president. In the years that followed, Taft worked hard to nominate and elect candidates committed to reform. The two men also met in Washington and New York for lunches, dinners, and long conversations about advancing their reform cause. On one trip to New York, Taft was disappointed when a previous engagement prevented him from dining with Roosevelt. “I should have much preferred to go to the R’s,” he wrote to Nellie, “because I wanted to have a full political talk with R.”
The vision of reform shared by Roosevelt and Taft was still far removed from the Populists’ call for fundamental economic change. Yet their experiences as police commissioner and circuit judge had awakened both to the harsh circumstances confronting the nation’s working poor and sensitized them to the avarice and power of industrial interests. As social and economic issues increasingly consumed each man’s attention, both were beginning to question the laissez-faire doctrine that had guided them since their days in college.