Ohio History

William Howard Taft has kept book publishers rather busy over the past decade or so. The Ohio-born president has surfaced in popular histories, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin's sprawling The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). And academics have spotlighted overlooked aspects of Taft's life; a good example is Lewis L. Gould's monograph Chief Executive to Chief Justice: Taft betwixt the White House and Supreme Court (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014). Taft's time in the Philippines was the subject of Rene R. Escalante's Bearer of the Pax Americana: The Philippine Career of William H. Taft, 1900–1903 (Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 2007). Now, Adam Burns has written a thoughtful study of Taft's policies toward the Philippines across the Ohioan's entire political career.

Burns posits three theses, all more or less persuasive: Taft possessed a vision for the Philippines, he methodically pursued his ends, and he implemented what turned out to be "a failed policy" (2). Motivated by a sense of duty, Taft set aside a promising judicial career to serve on the Second Philippine Commission (1900–1904) and as governor-general of the islands (1901–1903). These assignments transformed the one-time skeptic of imperialism into an ardent champion of US control over the Philippines. Taft deemed Filipinos to be "quiet, lazy, polite, ordinarily inoffensive, rather light hearted people" who were "easily subject to immoral influences; quite superstitious, and if aroused at all exceedingly cruel" (19). Such racism led him to regard the Philippines as ill-suited to either independence or integration into the American metropole as a state. The better course was to give the islands a degree of internal self-government, or "dominion status," and an enduring relationship with the United States modeled after the one between Canada and Great Britain (47).

Taft pushed such ideas throughout his political career. As governor-general, he espoused a "policy of attraction" designed to get Filipinos to reject independence and accept supposedly benevolent US rule (19). Taft mingled with Filipinos in a genial way, softened the color line at official functions, and encouraged the construction of schools. He appointed Filipinos to the commission (the colonial legislature's upper house) and cultivated the islands' educated elite and the pro–US Federal Party. To bind the Philippines to the United States, Taft, as president (1909–1913), liberalized trade between the two countries. All the [End Page 161] while, he convinced himself that these policies were good for the Philippines. A true-believing imperialist, Taft, as secretary of war (1904–1908), pushed back when President Theodore Roosevelt broached the possibility of Philippine independence. As a former president, he continued to resist moves in that direction during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. To advocates of independence, he preached delay. Borrowing a phrase from Democrat William Jennings Bryan, Burns labeled Taft "the Great Postponer" (80).

Taft's policies proved largely unsuccessful. To be certain, he became well-liked by Filipinos during his governorship. Taft's experience in the Philippines broadened the Ohioan's horizons and padded his resume in ways that American voters found appealing. And talk of dominion status for the Philippines stretched into the 1930s, a fact Burns overlooks—along with the ways in which free trade tied the United States and the Philippines together for over a half century (and skewed the islands' economy). But, as Burns rightly notes, Filipinos found the policy of attraction to be unattractive. A sedition act, designed to quell talk of independence, had the reverse effect. Taft's decision to open the islands to greater numbers of Chinese immigrants, whom he thought worked harder than average Filipinos, spawned resentment. Furthermore, the Federal Party, which—contrary to Taft's wishes—backed statehood for the islands, never won popular support. Taft failed to convince either Filipinos or Americans to...