"Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout" - RIFFING ON WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

Last week a post by the Rev. Dan Harper posted the “attack ad” video above on his Yet Another Unitarian Universalist.  Brilliant.  I want to share it with you, along with my usual unfocused and long winded thoughts.

The video got my attention because it is like a jack knifed semi in the middle of the five way intersection of many of this blog’s main interests—politics, Unitarian Universalism, American history, tolerance, and media.

On the political level it is a brilliant parody of the attacks on Barack Obama and his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  Every time that brouhaha seems to die down it gets resurrected again.  Members of the bloviator’s union are arguing this very morning whether the re-emergence of the Wright controversy during the smarmy ABC Debate contributed to Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in the Pennsylvania Primary.  Obama had been dramatically closing on Clintons one time nearly 24 point lead in the polls and many observers thought—or hoped—he could eke out a slender victory or at least hold Clinton to a meaningless 2-4 point victory.  In the end Clinton won by about 9 points—not enough for her to blow Obama out of the water, but enough to keep her plausibly (if you don’t parse the delegate numbers very carefully) in the race.

Just this past Sunday, as part of a service on race in America, members of my congregation, the Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock, got to view long-form excerpts from two of Rev. Wright’s most controversial sermons—“God Damn America” and “America’s Chickens have Come Home to Roost.”  Viewed in context the widely publicized snippets repeated in heavy rotation at Fox News and elsewhere, most of us found ourselves not only understanding the remarks, but agreeing with them.  I noted that the Rev. Dan Larsen’s first post 9/11 sermon made most of the same points as Wright’s, although in the measured and hyper-rational style of the Unitarian pulpit.  Yet had snippets of that sermon been linked to Obama, it would not have damaged him as badly—a lot of white Americans still soil their underwear when they see a shouting, angry black man in African style robes and ardent choruses of hallelujahs  from the pews.  Call it a cultural thing.

The case of William Howard Taft, the last Unitarian President of the United States, is an interesting one.  By general consensus Taft ranks somewhere smack dab in the middle of rankings of presidents on the worst-to-greatest continuum.  Following the dazzling Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and doomed to only one term when T.R. decided America could not do without him and split the Republican Party, it is perhaps the best that could be expected. 

Taft was a solid, if unflashy, progressive.  His Unitarianism not only informed his religious liberalism, but his political liberalism as well.  Back home in Cincinnati he had been president of the local Unity Club, Jenkin Lloyd Jones’s breeding ground for social gospel liberalism in the Western Unitarian Conference.  If the restless Roosevelt hadn’t gotten the presidential itch again, Taft would have undoubtedly handily won re-election with support of many Northern workers and urban Catholics who had been repelled by the Evangelical anti-Catholicism that many of William Jennings Bryan’s followers brought to the Democrats in 1908.

It is one of the great “what ifs” in American history.  With Taft leading a united Republican Party with a dominant progressive wing, the GOP could easily have become the liberal party of the 20^th Century and Democrats would have continued to stagnate as a regional party hopelessly divided between Southern reactionaries and Western Populists.

But, of course it was not to be.  The shattered Republican Party reverted to the hands of Robber Baron big business types in coalition with Mid-Western rural conservatives and Evangelical prohibitionists.  Progressives mostly shifted to the Democrats.  Urban Catholics returned to the fold.  And when under another Roosevelt, the party adopted much of the platform of the old Debsian Socialist Party, Democrats emerged as the party of modern liberalism.

Meanwhile Taft’s reputation among Unitarian Universalists has suffered despite his long and faithful service to congregations in Cincinnati and Washington, DC, his near miss at bringing the Philippine Catholic Church into the Unitarian fold en masse, and his denominational leadership.  Instead we tend to remember his virtual expulsion of John Haynes Holmes and other pacifists ministers when he was President of the old National Conference of Unitarian Churches during the First World War.  Holmes has become an icon for those who treasure and activist “prophetic” ministry and who yearn for the UUA to become an explicitly “Peace Church.”  By default that has transmuted Taft into a war mongering ogre in the eyes of some. 

There can be no denying that Taft—and the leadership of the American Unitarian Association (AUA)—were caught up in the war hysteria of 1917 and ran roughshod over the dissenters.  I have been among those UU history geeks who have written critically of Taft’s position.  But it is unfair to judge the whole long and productive life of William Howard Taft on the basis of its ugliest moment.

Come to think of it, our eagerness to do just that shows that we are as apt to make a snap judgment on a sliver of a man’s life as any Ditto Heads swallowing the Wright/Obama poison pill.