The Republican road not taken: the foreign-policy vision of Robert A. Taft.

• Author: Hayes, Michael T.

First elected to the Senate in 1938, Robert A. Taft represented Ohio from 1939 until his death in 1953. Although Taft was defeated for the Republican presidential nomination three times, in 1940, 1948, and 1952, he was universally acknowledged as the leader of the Republican Party's congressional wing. Taft offered both a positive vision of international organization following World War II and a prescient critique of the internationalist policies developed by Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Dwight Eisenhower embraced and continued these internationalist Democratic policies during his two terms in office (1953-61), so his victory over Taft at the Republican convention in 1952 represented a decisive rejection of the alternative foreign policy advocated by Taft and other isolationist Republicans of that period. The significance of Taft's defeat--and the thesis of this article--was well articulated by journalist Nicholas von Hoffman, writing in the midst of the Vietnam War almost two decades later. Observing that Taft's critique of internationalism had been vindicated subsequently on almost every point, von Hoffman characterized Taft's foreign-policy vision as "a way to defend the country without destroying it, a way to be part of the world without running it" (qtd. in Radosh 1975, 147).

Many of Taft's contemporaries dismissed him as an "isolationist" in foreign policy (for good examples, see Schlesinger 1952 and Van Dyke and Davis 1952). Although subsequent scholarship has suggested that this characterization was highly misleading (Berger 1967, 1971, 1975; West 1952), Taft was isolationist if isolationism is defined, following careful scholarship, as "an attitude of opposition to binding commitments by the United States government that would create new, or expand existing, obligations to foreign nations" (Rieselbach 1966, 7). Like many Americans of his era, Taft did not welcome the intrusion of foreign policy and gladly would have "let the rest of the world go its own way if it would only go without bothering the United States" (Osgood 1953, 433). For much of his career, Taft advocated what he called "the policy of the free hand," whereby the United States would avoid entangling alliances and interference in foreign disputes. This policy permitted government leaders the freedom of action to decide in particular cases whether a sufficiently vital U.S. interest warranted involvement (Taft 1951, 12). (1)

The real problem with the term isolationism is not that it misrepresented Taft's general orientation, but rather that it permitted defenders of various Roosevelt and Truman policies to discredit Taft without having to engage his arguments seriously. Labeling opponents of administration policies as "isolationists" implied that they were naive, like ostriches with their heads buried in the sand, nostalgic for an earlier era in which the United States could hide behind the safety of two oceans and avoid involvement in international affairs (Doenecke 1979, 11-12; Graebner 1968). (2) In reality, however, none of the members of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party ever believed it possible for the United States to isolate itself from the rest of the world, and so all of them accordingly rejected that label.

Taft's foreign-policy views were neither naive nor nostalgic. To the contrary, his critique of internationalism deserved to be taken seriously and was vindicated subsequently on many points. Taft criticized the Roosevelt/Truman approach to postwar international organization, correctly pointing to features of the United Nations that would prevent its serving as a real force for peace and equality under the law. He also challenged the Truman administration's assessment of the Soviet military threat against western Europe, a threat that now appears to have been overstated consciously and deliberately to secure congressional support for the Marshall Plan, universal military training, and an expanded air force (Berger 1967; Kofsky 1993). He anticipated correctly that a steady rise in defense outlays could lead to a "garrison state" and the erosion of civil liberties (Higgs 1987). Finally, Taft was prescient in warning that even well-meaning internationalism would necessarily degenerate over time into a form of imperialism that would breed resentment against the United States around the globe, eventually endangering U.S. national security.

Taft was no backward-looking conservative, (3) On domestic issues, he sought to maximize individual liberty while minimizing relationships based on power and control. In the terminology of political philosophers, he saw the United States as a civil association operating under the rule of law. Although he recognized the need to accommodate change in order to preserve the institutions and practices he valued as truly precious, he regarded many New Deal measures as radical rather than reformist and fought against the New Deal wherever he found it to be a threat to the basic form of the American polity as a civil association operating under the rule of law. His foreign-policy views were an extension of this same political philosophy to international affairs; he proposed that postwar international organization be centered around an international tribunal founded on the rule of law, establishing within international affairs the same regime he espoused in the domestic realm.

In this article, I lay out Taft's political philosophy, then show how Taft's foreign-policy vision grew out of this same libertarian vision and contrast that vision with Eisenhower's to make clear just what was lost when the Republicans nominated Eisenhower instead of Taft in 1952. Finally, drawing on the work of A. James Reichley (2000), I distinguish between altruistic and national-interest isolationism with respect to Taft specifically. Although Taft exhibited both types of isolationism at different times, he was consistently isolationist throughout his career, and his underlying libertarian philosophy gave an overall coherence to his foreign policy even as he moved from one type to the other.

Taft's Political Philosophy

Throughout his political career, Taft sought to preserve what he regarded as an "American way of life" in which the liberty of individual Americans would be circumscribed only by the rule of law. (For an especially clear and concise statement of this philosophy, see Taft 1949.) Although he recognized the need to reform institutions and practices in order to preserve the core elements of the system he cherished, he consistently fought against New Deal policies that he believed would change the fundamental character of the system. (For the best statement of Taft's distinction between necessary reforms and radical New Deal innovations, see Taft [1935] 1997). (4)

Taft viewed the United States as a civil association, not a purposive association (Oakeshott 1991, 438-61). Within a purposive association, citizens are related to one another by virtue of their pursuit of some shared purpose, and they derive their identity as citizens from this common enterprise. The first purposive associations were religious, with the state assuming the role of guardian and promoter of orthodox beliefs; some nostalgic conservatives still view the state in this way (Hayes 2002). Religion is not the only basis for purposive associations, however; a society becomes a purposive association any time it defines itself in terms of some common enterprise, whether that enterprise be the promotion of economic efficiency, the spread of democracy throughout the world, or the pursuit of some vision of social justice (Oakeshott 1991, 450-53). Taft rejected all such visions because individuals can never really be free within a purposive system inasmuch as their actions must always be instrumental to the achievement of the common purpose.

By contrast, within civil associations no common purpose unites people into a shared enterprise. Rather, people are free to pursue their own individual purposes as long as they do not interfere with the rights of others to do likewise. The social order is spontaneous rather than planned or directed (Hayek 1973; Horwitz 2001). The bases for association here are territorial boundaries and a commonly accepted set of rules governing people as they pursue happiness in their own individual ways (Oakeshott 1991,454-57). By this reasoning, we are Americans not because we have particular values or common goals, but rather because we live within the territorial boundaries of the United States and pursue our own individual strategies for attaining happiness subject to the Constitution and laws of the United States. Taft certainly viewed the United States as a civil association rather than a purposive association.

To Taft, a free economy was the natural corollary of a free society, and his desire to preserve economic freedom led him to oppose a variety of domestic and foreign policies promulgated by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, including the steady growth of federal spending, increased power to federal agencies, and increased defense outlays that might lead to what he called a "garrison state." A free economy, however, was desirable primarily because it was founded on liberty. The normative case for the free market ultimately rests less on its potential efficiency in allocating resources than on the way it orders relationships among citizens. Within a free-market economy, transactions are purely voluntary, and relationships among individuals are based on mutual consent rather than on power (Knight 1982). That free economies outperform socialist economies was important to Taft, but it was nonetheless a subsidiary benefit. Taft saw that increases in the general standard of living empowered individual Americans in a variety of ways, thus adding to their effective liberty (Kirk and McClellan 1967, 132-39; Smith and Taft 1939, 13-21).

The role of government within a civil association is...