William Howard Taft and the
First Motoring Presidency,1909-1913

 

The Depressed President?

Last Thursday, January 20, the night of the formal renewal of George W. Bush’s power of attorney, the History Channel ran a second night of its self-proclaimed triumph of historiography, "The Presidents," an eight-part series on each and every American president. Not a bad idea that, and nicely timed for the week of the newest president’s inauguration.

It’s just that it's not a very ambitious idea.

Of the some one hundred thirteen million minutes of American history, these eight hour-long episodes covering forty-three presidents capture an average of .0000004 real-time minutes per president. And I haven’t even deducted ad time, which cuts out some ten or fifteen minutes of history an hour. Yes, that's an absurdity, but, really, what should we hope for out of 216 years compacted into eight hours?

The immediate thought is to C-SPAN’s truly monumental American Presidents: Life Portraits, which put an hour each to Presidents 1 through 41 over as many weeks. That’s daunting stuff for television, and useful for study, not evening entertainment. With advertising to sell and ratings to keep, artistry is beyond normal commercial programming -- or, rather, without ads and without worry over ratings, only C-SPAN, a private but not a commercial enterprise, could get away with it.

No room in The Presidents for a Franklin Pierce revival, much less a good look at William Howard Taft, or whichever of the lesser-known presidents you’d love better to know. No time for nuance, and no time, especially, as it turns out, for revision of or exploration beyond what we already know. The show is the visual equivalent of a children’s encyclopedia.

But that’s the game. It was a standard review and I don’t think it pretended to be more than that. History Channel is a major market programmer, and must thereby submit to all the responsibilities of success and convention. When you line up Cadillac and Microsoft to pay for your presidential slide show, you’d do well not to offend the buying public. Believe me, in the history business, shock is not a virtue. (And I don’t care how gay was Abraham Lincoln; it ain’t gonna sell. James Buchanan can be gay, because Buchanan don’t sell, straight or jagged.)

My participation in the series came of my book on the Taft presidency, William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency, 1909-1913. The production company called me and kindly invited a word or two for the Taft segment. I was away when they filmed in Washington in December of 2003, and they either couldn’t find me or didn’t want me at that point. Sometime later I called to see what was going on, and I was told that they had already interviewed a Taft biographer in L.A., so I wouldn't be needed.

"Whom, may I ask?"
UC system professor, Judith Anderson.
"Oh."

Big "oh." Uh oh.

Anderson's book is in my bibliography, and I cited it twice in the text -- with nose held tight. I had to protest, for this woman had written a sloppy assumption-laden "psycho-biography" of the man that spoke so much more for the 1970s than anything about Taft. The book, "William Howard Taft: An Intimate History," is wrong -- and has sadly and wrongly helped set this inane notion that Taft was fat and unhappy and therefore a bad president. (The tradition continues: see this regarding an article in The Washington Post on the latest of the silliness, Taft and Sleep Apnea -- my rebuttal is in the last paragraph of the Post article). Anderson's book was based upon her Ph.D. thesis, which was more honestly -- to her thesis, not the to the truth of things, entitled, "A Mountain of Misery: An intimate history of William Howard Taft." 'Nuff said?

I told the producer that if she relied on Anderson the Taft segment would be a bore and send the audience into a depressed fit of channel surfing. For a happier, lively view, I said, this bald freak can give you a show. Believe me, I said, I will make Taft interesting, if nothing else.

Well, they agreed to it, but only because Sam Donaldson’s schedule suddenly opened up, and they threw an interview my way at the last minute. I gave them 2 hours of laughter, smiles, and a happy, constructive view of Taft -- which, if you watched last night, you will know ended up on the floor. All they put in of me was my telling a joke Taft liked, of giving up his seat on the trolley for two ladies. Ms. Anderson got all kinds of airplay, letting us know on and on how depressed, how fat, how unhappy he was, and how he was President only because his wife wanted it.

So much to get into there, and it’s pathetic that we must. It’s so stupid, so simple, and it makes for such poor history: If Taft was unhappy, does that make him a bad President? If his wife wanted him to be President, and he preferred to be Chief Justice, was his presidency a failure because of it? It’s back-ass thinking, and scary when you think of the incredible decisions and issues of the Taft presidency, the short list of which includes: the meaning of judicial review and constitutionalism, the 16th and 17th amendments, the automobile, the Republican party itself and its enduring form, the Panama Canal, world peace and a coming world war, and revolution in Mexico.

Sadly, History Channel chose to repeat the foolishness that because Taft supposedly didn't want to be president, and got all fat and moody over it, nobody in history has assumed any worth in his presidency, and it didn't really matter.

I stumbled into Taft when I was writing about presidential automobiles, and I got to wondering why this dumb guy Taft had cars and the great, the modern, the fabulous and interesting and exciting and happy, and self- ambitious Theodore Roosevelt did not. As I figured out why, suddenly Taft opened up. Until then my views on Taft and TR were everything you saw in the History Channel. Suddenly, Taft  became alive. He actually had blood. He was resourceful, and forward thinking. He was ambitious and purposeful. He deliberately used the presidency to provoke an enormous and hugely important change in America. From there I got to looking at him free of the baggage of Judith Anderson and all the rest of the bored and humiliated Taft biographers (Really, why’d they bother?) So, to get to the happy Taft, to find the successful Taft, one has to let go what one is normally told about the Supposedly Self-Loathing President.

(I had to waste stupid time and words in my book on dispelling these idiocies. For a quick view of the struggle, here for a couple page images from my book, p. 34 and pp. 37-38.)

I almost feel bad for the producers of this show for having wasted time and money on me. Perhaps they found me to be a crank. Maybe. Mostly, though, it was either me and nobody else, or everyone else and no me. They were well into the production, and there was much already invested in the other interviews, so to dump it all and put in Michael L. Bromley and his wacky idea that there was far more to Taft’s presidency than his weight and supposed depression and... well, it was safer to stay away from Bromley. As a friend wrote,

Alas, looks like you landed on the cutting room floor. It happens. That was probably because you were positive about Taft. I thought the presentation was too harsh by a long shot.

Yes it was.

It was the easy thing, and, above all, the thing that convention demands. Nevertheless, I most appreciate that the producers were willing to give me and my ideas a try. Too bad I didn't win them over.

If you did watch you might have noticed two things: Firstly, Bromley’s face was the only one with a smile. Okay, I was telling a joke that Taft liked to tell, but I spoke of Taft throughout the interview without dark clouds overhead. More importantly, they slipped into the end of the Taft segment a caveat, an editorial backtrack that Taft really wasn't all that bad a president, it's just that his predecessor was the larger personality. There's a small victory in that, and I'll take it.

- Michael L. Bromley, January, 2005

---

General Notes On What I Saw:

The show excelled when it came to graphics, although there is complaint in that, too. All too frequently moving images of later periods were placed in discussion of an earlier time. Sure, visual effect and all that, but it's dishonest to show movies during a discussion of Grover Cleveland.

The producers and their research team uncovered some marvelous Taft footage, including a color film, making it the first such ever of a President.

Overall, the show was strictly conventional, and maddening to me for it. The segment on William McKinley was almost heartless, and worse, McKinley's presidency was stupidly given over to Theodore Roosevelt, who until McKinley was shot was just another Vice President, a former Governor, and one of many -- and hardly the most famous -- Spanish American War hero. We know Roosevelt for what happened after McKinley's death, not before it.

Along with McKinley, Grover Cleveland deserves far more credit  than was given him, especially in handling the tariff and the Panic of 1894.

I only had time last week to see the Cleveland to Taft segment, so I cannot yet speak for the rest of the programming. It seems, though, that some people are not happy about it: see the History Channel "Discussions" forum.

Back:
To Taft
Bromleyisms