Robert A. Taft: “Equal Justice under Law”

About the Author

Robert A. Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on September 8, 1889, the eldest child of the future U.S. president William Howard Taft. Educated at Yale College and Harvard Law School, the younger Taft practiced law in Cincinnati for several years, but with his father's substantial political career—as secretary of war, then president, then chief justice—forming the backdrop for his early life, it was perhaps natural that he would also choose politics as a career. Taft served several terms in both houses of the Ohio state legislature in the 1920s and early 1930s. His election to the U.S. Senate in 1938 provided him with the opportunity to become one of the era's most influential spokespersons for the Republican Party and for American conservatism.

Taft's election to the Senate came at a critical time for the Grand Old Party. By the late 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal New Deal policies for combating the Great Depression and his efforts to confront the rise of Fascism had centralized power in the national government and especially in the executive branch. Because his policies eased the pains of the hard times, Roosevelt and his Democratic Party were enormously popular with American voters despite the substantial redistribution of government power that his policies promoted. Following Roosevelt's landslide reelection in 1936, the Republicans were left with only sixteen of ninety-eight seats in the Senate, the party's lowest ebb in the modern era, and the voices of most conservatives were effectively silenced. Upon becoming a senator, Taft quickly emerged as one of the most forceful voices of conservative opposition to the liberal Democratic majority. He championed individual liberty, fiscal restraint, and local self-government, the traditional values of American conservatism and the modern Republican Party. After World War II, Taft continued to challenge the expansion of executive authority occasioned by President Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal and the containment policies he employed to counteract the Soviet threat.

As a prominent voice for conservative principles, Taft remained one of the leaders of the Republican Party through the 1940s. He ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 1940, 1948, and 1952. When his party gained control of the Eighty-third Congress in the 1952 election, Taft became the Senate majority leader, a position he held until his untimely death of a brain hemorrhage on July 31, 1953. Although he failed to become president as his father had before him, Robert Taft exerted substantial influence on mid-twentieth-century American politics. Taft was a penetrating critic of the positive state, the belief that the federal government had a responsibility to actively promote the general welfare by managing the economy. His criticism of that idea and of American globalism helped shape the modern welfare system and the uses of American military power. He also was essential to the revival of the modern Republican Party. First elected to the Senate only two years after the party's devastating 1936 defeats, Taft lived to see the election in 1952 of a Republican president and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.