In the spring of 1938, Ohio Republicans were well aware of the erosion of support among the African-American population for the \u201cParty of Lincoln.\u201d Between 1932 and 1936, black voters had transferred their allegiance en masse to the Democratic Party. Although most African Americans had remained with Hoover and the Grand Old Party (GOP) in 1932, a massive electoral \u201crealignment\u201d began with the 1934 mid-term congressional races. The 2.4 million blacks who had migrated to northern cities were no longer willing to accept their lot as second-class citizens. New Deal programs politicized black voters across the nation; numerous measures that augmented black incomes, increased literacy rates and education levels, and engaged citizens in community activities also mobilized African Americans for the Democratic Party. While black political organizing became commonplace in the cities of the industrial North and Midwest, urban blacks in the Upper South likewise registered and voted in increasingly large numbers. For the first time in 1934, a majority of black Americans voted for Democratic candidates.[1. The author wishes to thank Kenneth J. Bindas for his numerous suggestions for improving the argument and Austin McCoy for his insights into American race relations provided during the Spring Semester 2009 Research Seminar at Kent State University as this work neared completion.\u00a0 Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor\u2019s extensive comments on an earlier and much longer assessment of Senator Taft\u2019s views on race were absolutely crucial to this more modest project. Mary Ann Heiss scrutinized the manuscript with her keen editorial eye, made several suggestions to strengthen the conclusion, and improved the work immeasurably. Republicans responded with a vigorous effort to win back these voters in 1936. The GOP labeled presidential candidate Alf Landon of Kansas as \u201ca spiritual descendent\u201d of John Brown. In his own efforts to convince black voters, Candidate Landon emphasized his support for civil rights legislation and his aim to reintegrate African Americans into the national economy. Despite the Republican Party\u2019s precedent-setting efforts, however, this electoral realignment could not be halted. The New Deal\u2019s work programs, administered through such popular agencies as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration, employed thousands of young blacks. As historian Paul Moreno has shown, black workers benefited significantly from the racial quotas and \u201cracial proportionalism\u201d that had governed federal employment in New Deal relief and public works agencies since the early 1930s. The Roosevelt administration also initiated numerous educational programs, employed African Americans on those federal projects, and appointed many blacks to federal positions, reversing the old Wilsonian policy of racial exclusion. This \u201cnew deal\u201d for blacks, plus the impetus of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt\u2019s civil rights activism, led to the transformative electoral victory of 1936. According to Gallup Polls, 76 percent of northern blacks voted Democratic in the second Roosevelt election. \u201cIn every Northern city but Chicago,\u201d observed Harvard Sitkoff, historian of New Deal-era race relations, \u201cblacks voted at least 60 percent for Roosevelt, and even in the Windy\u00a0Republicans responded with a vigorous effort to win back these voters in 1936. The GOP labeled presidential candidate Alf Landon of Kansas as \u201ca spiritual descendent\u201d of John Brown. In his own efforts to convince black voters, Candidate Landon emphasized his support for civil rights legislation and his aim to reintegrate African Americans into the national economy. Despite the Republican Party\u2019s precedent-setting efforts, however, this electoral realignment could not be halted. The New Deal\u2019s work programs, administered through such popular agencies as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration, employed thousands of young blacks. As historian Paul Moreno has shown, black workers benefited significantly from the racial quotas and \u201cracial proportionalism\u201d that had governed federal employment in New Deal relief and public works agencies since the early 1930s. The Roosevelt administration also initiated numerous educational programs, employed African Americans on those federal projects, and appointed many blacks to federal positions, reversing the old Wilsonian policy of racial exclusion. This \u201cnew deal\u201d for blacks, plus the impetus of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt\u2019s civil rights activism, led to the transformative electoral victory of 1936. According to Gallup Polls, 76 percent of northern blacks voted Democratic in the second Roosevelt election. \u201cIn every Northern city but Chicago,\u201d observed Harvard Sitkoff, historian of New Deal-era race relations, \u201cblacks voted at least 60 percent for Roosevelt, and even in the Windy\u00a0City the President more than doubled his support from Negroes, moving from 23 to 49 percent between 1932 and 1936. No other voting bloc shifted so perceptibly.\u201d[2. Sitkoff,\u00a0A New Deal for Blacks<\/em>, 89-95, quote from p. 95; Paul Moreno, \u201cRacial Proportionalism and the Origins of Employment Discrimination Policy, 1933-1950,\u201dJournal of Policy History<\/em>\u00a08 (1996): 410-39.]<\/p>\n In Ohio, African Americans began their \u201cinsurgency\u201d against the Republican Party in the 1920s, reflecting the increasing autonomy of the state\u2019s urban black communities and the mounting opposition to GOP conservatism on civil rights issues. According to William Giffin, the decade-long move toward independence by black voters culminated with the NAACP-led fight against Republican Roscoe C. McCulloch\u2019s 1930 election bid. The successful election of the Democrat Robert J. Bulkley to fill the vacant U.S. Senate seat marked a turning point in the black voter\u2019s relationship with the \u201cParty of Lincoln.\u201d New black leaders who rose to prominence in the Jazz Era without close ties to the prewar white Republican establishment began reassessing party allegiance after that 1930 campaign. The nation\u2019s economic collapse further undermined faith in Republican leadership. Once Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency, Ohio\u2019s elite black leadership began switching allegiance to benefit from federal patronage. In 1936, two thirds of black voters in both Cincinnati and Cleveland voted Democratic.[3. On the 1920s \u201cinsurgency\u201d and the electoral shift in Ohio\u2019s urban black communities, see William Giffin, \u201cThe Negro in Ohio, 1914-1939\u201d (Ph. D. diss., Ohio State University, 1968), 402-42; idem, \u201cBlack Insurgency in the Republican Party of Ohio, 1920-1932,\u201d\u00a0Ohio History\u00a0<\/em>82 (Winter-Spring 1973): 25-45; and chap. 11, \u201cToward the New Negro,\u201d in Kenneth J. Kusmer,\u00a0A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930<\/em>\u00a0(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 235-74.]<\/p>\n The Republican Party renewed its effort to win back black voters in 1938. Cincinnati lawyer Robert A. Taft (1889-1953), son of the twenty-seventh president, William Howard Taft, was a Republican candidate in the 1938 primary campaign for his party\u2019s nomination to challenge incumbent Senator Bulkley. Taft firmly believed that he\u00a0had to make a good impression on black voters in the populous urban centers of the state to be successful in November. When Candidate Taft received an invitation to speak at a commemoration of the life of Akron industrialist Harvey Firestone (1868-1938) sponsored by that city\u2019s black community, he knew it was an opportunity that he could not pass up.<\/p>\n Situated at the intersection of rhetoric studies and the history of political ideologies, this article will assess the future senator\u2019s effort to impress black voters with his conservative social message that blended elements of two long-standing discursive traditions in American culture with the Republican Party\u2019s partisan critique of the New Deal.[4. Some definitions are necessary to clarify the argument of this paper. \u201cPolitical ideologies\u201d are systems of ideas and concepts that are employed to legitimize political views, positions, or policies. Distinct from the more reflective and evaluative field of political philosophy which concerns itself with both \u201cproduction\u201d of thought and the \u201cevaluation\u201d of thought, those who engage in ideological discourse use ideas and concepts to legitimize, to justify, and to encourage belief in certain viewpoints.\u00a0 In contrast, Michael Freeden, professor of politics at Oxford University, has theorized that \u201crhetoric\u201d is the language used in \u201cthe weaving of a narrative tale deliberately employed as a persuasive device.\u201d According to Freeden, rhetoric may be utilized to simplify complex ideologies or their constituent parts for public consumption. Freeden,\u00a0Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13-23, 35-36, quote at p. 35. This paper contends that Taft\u2019s oration was his conservative rhetorical message within which were imbedded, in accessible, simplified form, elements (the core concepts of liberty, equal opportunity, social mobility, etc.) of the interwar G.O.P. party ideology. On party ideology, see note 10 below. Cleveland attorney Paul W. Walter served as Taft\u2019s principal adviser from Northeast Ohio and the organizer of his campaign in the northern half of the state; he also arranged for press coverage of Taft\u2019s speech and counseled him on the themes to address at the memorial service.[5. Paul W. Walter to Robert A. Taft, April 2, 1938, P.W. Walter Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society Library (hereafter Walter Papers, WRHS).] A graduate of Western Reserve University (1928) and its Law School (1932), Walter volunteered during his school years at Hiram House Social Settlement on Orange Avenue and worked among that neighborhood\u2019s expanding African-American population. After law school, he teamed with D. Rusk Haverfield to establish the law firm of Walter, Haverfield & Poe. By the late 1930s, Walter exhibited a social activist bent, organizing the Municipal Light Plant Association, a citizens\u2019 group, in 1937 and assisting the Friends of the Car Riders lobby for public bus transportation to supplement Cleveland\u2019s streetcars.[6. Encyclopedia of Cleveland History,<\/em>\u00a0s.v. \u201cWalter, Paul William.\u201d\u00a0(http:\/\/ech.case.edu\/ech-cgi\/article.pl?id=WPW<\/a>)]<\/p>\n In a letter to Taft, Walter outlined five points that should be emphasized in his oration. First, the candidate should stress the need for greater political rights and\u00a0protections for minorities, especially passage of federal anti-lynching legislation that would stand the test of constitutionality (even suggesting that Taft, a graduate of Harvard Law School, offer to draft such legislation). Second, Taft should emphasize the belief that economic recovery and sustainable economic growth was the best answer to job discrimination (prosperity and full employment would undercut racism). Third, he should assert the belief that, although African Americans had made considerable progress in the seventy-five years since the Emancipation Proclamation, it was up to the black community\u2019s leaders to continue that progress. Fourth, Taft should praise Dr. George Washington Carver, director of Agricultural Research at Tuskegee Institute, as the best role model of decisive, innovative leadership in the black community. Walter proceeded to argue that by pioneering in the search for industrial uses for agricultural products, Carver had \u201cdevelop[ed] thousands of jobs for both races.\u201d Finally, candidate Taft should link Carver to Firestone, emphasizing that Firestone \u201cthrough individual initiative and peculiar abilities was able to develop a new industry which created employment for thousands of people and his entire attitude toward race relationships was one extremely favorable to the colored people.\u201d[7. Walter to Taft, April 2, 1938, Walter Papers, WRHS.]<\/p>\n Indeed, the Firestone Tire Company was one of the largest employers of African-American workers in the United States and the first Akron tire maker to make it a policy to hire blacks. In addition, Firestone\u2019s relatively new rubber plantation complex in Liberia employed a large number of African workers by the late 1930s.[8. On the man and his company, see Alfred Lief,\u00a0Harvey Firestone: Free Man of Enterprise<\/em>\u00a0(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951) and idem,\u00a0The Firestone Story: A History of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company<\/em>\u00a0(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951). Walter strongly suggested that Taft use the Firestone speech to establish the connection between the foundation stones of the interwar Republican Party\u2019s ideology\u2014the concepts of liberty and equal opportunity\u2014and the nation\u2019s economic prosperity during the interwar years.[10. For a path-breaking study that identifies the ideas imbedded in campaign addresses in order to reconstruct the core concepts of the GOP\u2019s interwar ideology, see John Gerring,\u00a0Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 4.] \u201cThe only method by which absolute freedom and equality may be secured,\u201d Walter wrote his candidate, \u201cis through economic security.\u201d Walter then put a Republican spin on the much-debated concept of \u201ceconomic security\u201d: it could only be achieved through private sector economic development and \u201cthe resultant creation of millions of new jobs.\u201d Although government regulation can and should eliminate the abuses and excesses in the American business system, as it had done for decades, Walter contended that public policy \u201cshould be so framed that new industries are created and not stifled.\u201d[11. Walter to Taft, April 2, 1938, Walter Papers, WRHS.]<\/p>\n Taft, Walter, and other interwar Republicans had risen to prominence within a partisan political culture shaped by firmly held notions of civilization, race, and progress. Ideas about empire and the \u201ccivilizing mission\u201d of industrial nations were\u00a0central themes of America\u2019s political discourse at the start of the last century. Most Progressive Era political elites embraced the dominant conception of evolution, which emphasized \u201crace development\u201d and the progress of a racial hierarchy as measured on a rough scale determined by the attributes of Western Civilization. For such Republican leaders as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, that meant the post-Enlightenment \u201cmarch of progress\u201d was a continuous journey all peoples were making from savagery through barbarism to civilization. Many American imperialists, especially William Howard Taft, appointed civil governor of the Philippines in 1900, perceived themselves as civilizing agents for both the uncivilized races of the world and the disadvantaged majority of African Americans living in the American South. As the historian Kevin Gaines has shown, even many prominent black Americans embraced a similar view, saw themselves as \u201cprivileged agents of progress and civilization,\u201d and employed the language of \u201cracial uplift.\u201d In Gaines\u2019 words, this \u201cethos of racial uplift was generally assimilationist in character, reiterating the so-called progressive era\u2019s stock assumptions of racial Darwinism and of \u2018civilization\u2019 as the scale upon which individuals, races, and nations, as contemporaries routinely put it, were ranked.\u201d Because racial uplift shared assumptions with evangelical Protestantism\u2019s global crusade, many thinkers labeled it a \u201ccivilizing mission.\u201d[12. On the late nineteenth-century discourse on civilization and racial uplift, see especially Gail Bederman,\u00a0Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995) and Kevin Gaines, \u201cBlack Americans\u2019 Racial Uplift Ideology as \u2018Civilizing Mission\u2019: Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism,\u201d in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds.,\u00a0Cultures of United States Imperialism<\/em>\u00a0(Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1993), esp. 435-37. On the changing conceptions of empire and nationhood in the thinking of American elites, see Mary Ann Heiss, \u201cThe Evolution of the Imperial Idea and U.S. National Identity,\u201d\u00a0Diplomatic History<\/em>\u00a026 (Fall 2002): 511-40.]<\/p>\n Unlike Democrats with their solid southern leadership bloc of white paternalists, Republicans believed in the potential for progress of the world\u2019s \u201clower races.\u201d\u00a0Governor Taft labored vigorously to lift up those Filipinos in his charge through the creation of a responsive government, a dynamic, modernizing economy, and an effective educational system. Subsequently serving as the Republican Roosevelt\u2019s secretary of war, William Howard Taft lectured white southern leaders that the same colonial policy should be followed to elevate the status of African Americans in the southern states. Emphasizing education, the secretary urged southern whites to provide a wide variety of educational opportunities for African Americans so that the entire race could be elevated.[13. On southern Democrats and the ideology of white supremacy, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore,\u00a0Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920\u00a0<\/em>(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), especially chap. 3. Gilmore wrote that the Progressive Era \u201cNew White Man\u201d of the South rejected the optimistic view that there existed a potential for equality among the races, especially opposing the provision of a full range of educational opportunities to blacks. During the campaign to disfranchise blacks across the South, these \u201cliberal paternalists\u201d asserted that blacks were too barbaric to take advantage of higher educational opportunities, that \u201cindustrial education\u201d both prepared them for work and disciplined them as a race, and that talented individuals could seek opportunities in the North.\u00a0 (64-67, 134-40)] Taft proposed a broad-based educational pyramid for the tutelage of southern blacks. Influenced by Booker T. Washington\u2019s \u201cTuskegee\u201d model, Secretary Taft advocated \u201cindustrial education\u201d in a variety of manual trades for the bulk of the black working class in the South. \u201cAcademic\u201d and \u201cprofessional\u201d training was essential, however, for the education of the most important members of the black community. A new generation of ministers, teachers, lawyers, and doctors, according to the former judge, would provide both the elite leadership and the professional services for the entire black community.[14. The fullest statement of Secretary of War Taft\u2019s views on African-American \u201cracial uplift\u201d through education is \u201cThe Future of the Negro,\u201d in\u00a0Political Issues and Outlooks,<\/em>\u00a0a volume in\u00a0The Collected Works of William Howard Taft,<\/em>\u00a0ed. David H. Burton, 8 vols. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 2: 52-57; also see President-elect Taft\u2019s address delivered at the Haines Normal and Industrial\u00a0School, Augusta, Georgia, January 19, 1909, \u201cThe Outlook of Negro Education,\u201d\u00a0Collected Works,<\/em>\u00a02: 194-98. The following paragraph illustrates President-elect Taft\u2019s view of the colonial project of \u201cracial uplift\u201d: \u201cI suppose that comes to me more strongly because of the responsibilities that I had in the Philippine Islands for the four years that I was there, and the four years that I subsequently exercised some authority over those Islands, in aiding another race in the far-distant Philippines to lift themselves to a higher standard than that which they had then attained, and to make themselves ultimately worthy of complete self-government.\u201d (2: 195.)]<\/p>\n Implicit in the elder Taft\u2019s advocacy was a racial separatist viewpoint that supported self-sufficiency among the segregated, but increasingly more \u201ccivilized,\u201d African-American race. In his 1908 presidential campaign, Taft refused to challenge \u201cJim Crow\u201d segregation and white paternalist rule, or even criticize the outbreak of lynchings across the region. Indeed, the acceptance of paternalism was a distinctive theme in Taft\u2019s political rhetoric regarding southern race relations. \u201cThe greatest hope that the Negro has, because he lives chiefly in the South,\u201d Taft claimed, \u201cis the friendship and the sympathy of the white man with whom he lives in that neighborhood.\u201d Although he appointed African Americans to posts outside the region, President Taft admitted that \u201cwhat I have not done is to force them upon unwilling communities in the South itself.\u201d Thus, \u201cthe future is in the hands of the race itself,\u201d he declared, for only a commitment to making the most in a segregated, paternalist system would allow African Americans to develop themselves as a race.[15. Quoted material from Paolo E. Coletta,\u00a0The Presidency of William Howard Taft<\/em>(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973); see also the discussion of race and the 1908 campaign (where \u201cgreatest hope\u201d quote also appears) in Michael Kazin,\u00a0A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Knopf, 2006), 160. For W.H. Taft\u2019s view of his predecessor\u2019s controversial appointments of black officials to federal jobs in the South, see Henry F. Pringle,\u00a0The Life and Times of William Howard Taft: A Biography,\u00a0<\/em>2 vols. (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), 1: 390. In early 1909, President-elect Taft justified his more restrained approach to the appointment of African Americans to federal positions in the South: \u201cI am not going to put into places of such prominence in the South, where the race feeling is strong, Negroes whose appointment will only tend to increase that race feeling; but I shall look about and make appointments in the North and recognize the Negro as often as I can. . . . There is no constitutional right in anyone to hold office. The question is one of fitness. A one-legged man could hardly be selected for a mail carrier, and although we would deplore his misfortune, nevertheless we would not seek to neutralize it by giving him a place he could not fill.\u201d (Quoted from Pringle, 1: 390.)]<\/p>\n Intimately related to post-Enlightenment conceptions of race and civilization was the discourse on the \u201cidea of progress.\u201d Over the previous twenty-five centuries, progress has meant steady improvement in a variety of human endeavors: advancement in the social, spiritual, and philosophical realms for some, or development in the sciences, technology, and material productivity for others. During the nineteenth century, the industrializing nations on both sides of the Atlantic adopted an ideology of progress that posited a direct relationship between increases in scientific knowledge and innovations in technology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the satisfaction of human wants and improved living conditions.[16. My thinking on the Enlightenment \u201cidea of progress\u201d has been shaped by a reading of Gabriel A. Almond, Marvin Chodorow, and Roy Harvey Pearce, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d and Georg G. Iggers, \u201cThe Idea of Progress in Historiography and Social Thought Since the Enlightenment,\u201d in Almond, Chodorow, and Pearce, eds.,Progress and Its Discontents\u00a0<\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 1-8, 41-66; Georg G. Iggers, \u201cThe Idea of Progress: A Critical Reassessment,\u201d\u00a0American Historical Review\u00a0<\/em>71 (Oct. 1965): 1-17; and Robert Nisbet, \u201cIdea of Progress: A Bibliographical Essay,\u201d\u00a0Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought<\/em>\u00a02 (Jan.-Mar. 1979): 7-37 (accessed through Online Library of Liberty,www.oll.libertyfund.org<\/a>).] Americans wholeheartedly embraced a \u201cproducerist\u201d interpretation of progress, conceiving it not only in \u201cmaterial\u201d terms but\u00a0placing responsibility for it squarely on the shoulders of those who created value. To antebellum Whigs and later Republicans, economic progress provided the basis for all other categories of progress. Writing at the start of America\u2019s industrial transformation, Whig thinkers believed that the idea of progress meant the interaction of two distinct processes: the exploitation of natural resources across the nation and the simultaneous improvement of both the mind and the spirit of the nation\u2019s citizenry. As the historian Daniel Walker Howe has written, \u201cTo make use of the material for ideal or spiritual ends was the doctrine of Whig moral philosophers, and it was a doctrine broadly congruent with the avowed purpose of Whig politicians and businessmen.\u201d The notion that \u201ccommerce could nourish virtue,\u201d so abhorrent to the classical-Renaissance-commonwealth tradition in republican political thought and to their opponents in the Jacksonian party, shaped Republican Party thought for the remainder of the nineteenth century.[17. The most significant recent work on the \u201cproducerist worldview\u201d and the evolution of consumerism in American social thought is Kathleen G. Donohue,Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer\u00a0<\/em>(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For an assessment of labor\u2019s efforts to define a \u201cmoral economy\u201d and shape the transition to a consumer-oriented society, see Lawrence B. Glickman,\u00a0A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society\u00a0<\/em>(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997) and Lizabeth Cohen,\u00a0Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). To achieve material progress, Whigs and Republicans asserted that it was necessary for government to create the conditions within which each individual could develop his or her fullest potential.[18. The best treatment of the concept of \u201cself-culture\u201d embraced by key nineteenth-century Whig-Republicans is the late J. David Greenstone\u2019s\u00a0The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism<\/em>\u00a0(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Greenstone argued that nineteenth-century \u201creform liberalism\u201d focused on the development of the individual citizen, emphasized the need for the individual to practice self-development by acquiring education and skills according to one\u2019s own pre-determined personal growth plan, and rejected all forms of domination or subjugation of one individual by another. (Pp. 61-62.) Part of the New England heritage of \u201creform liberalism,\u201d according to Greenstone\u2019s interpretative schema, was the social obligation of citizens not only to practice self-development but to assist others in their efforts to develop themselves.] A political system that secured such positive liberty for individuals, a constitution that protected the fruits of their labor by codifying property rights, and policies that facilitated the growth of enterprise were essential for the encouragement of pioneering men who sought to use the nation\u2019s wealth as capital. In the last half of the nineteenth century, while Democrats extolled labor on the farm\u00a0and in the factory, Republican orators celebrated all creative work. In the words of political scientist John Gerring: \u201cRepublican laborism . . . included all types of labor and valorized the essential role of entrepreneurial and financial \u2018labor\u2019 in the functioning of the economy. The National Republican version of the work ethic held that great property, far from being proof of idleness, was proof of industriousness.\u201d Therefore, in GOP rhetoric, architects of the great Gilded Age business empires were dynamic men who mastered their respective industries, accumulating capital and employing hundreds, even thousands, of working men and women in the process. Only through their accomplishments, Republicans asserted by century\u2019s end, could the nation develop as an economic entity\u2014a process that provided the sole means to satisfy the material wants of all citizens and secure the advancement of American civilization to ever higher levels.[19. Gerring,\u00a0Party Ideologies,<\/em>\u00a059. Republican neomercantilists received support on this point from nineteenth-century classical liberal theorists. In her sweeping interpretation of producer and consumer ideologies, Kathleen Donohue argues the classical liberals \u201cglorified society\u2019s producers, especially the capitalists, whose efforts, they insisted, were primarily responsible for the phenomenal productivity of the nineteenth-century economy.\u201d Donohue,\u00a0Freedom from Want,<\/em>\u00a04.]<\/p>\n Born into this partisan political culture, Robert Taft (Yale, 1910; Harvard Law, 1913) was the second generation of Taft men to hear a vigorous, natural-law defense of the masters of corporate enterprise from the professors at Yale College. William Howard Taft (Yale, 1878) listened to William Graham Sumner during the years in which the professor was composing the classic Social Darwinist text What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. According to Sumner, the \u201cstruggle for existence\u201d cultivated in early humans those \u201cindustrial virtues\u201d necessary for survival. In modern society, the competitive struggle for success demanded the same virtues of self-restraint,\u00a0industriousness, temperance, and initiative.[20. For Sumner\u2019s understanding of human virtues, the formation of capital, and the progress of civilization, see\u00a0What Social Classes Owe to Each Other\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883),<\/em>\u00a063-70; Lance Robinson, \u201cPricking the Bubble of Utopian Sentiment: The Political Thought of William Graham Sumner,\u201d in Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga, eds.,\u00a0History of American Political Thought\u00a0<\/em>(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003), 451-63; Robert Green McCloskey,\u00a0American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise, 1865-1910<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 22-71.] In the first decade of the twentieth century, the elder Taft lauded those men with great initiative, relentless industry, imaginative genius, and uninhibited daring who led the great manufacturing concerns that made the United States the most advanced nation on earth. According to Will Taft, secretary of war during his son\u2019s formative years, the vast majority of the great corporation leaders were agents of progress; only the minority that sought to undermine competition, monopolize their industries, and restrict opportunity in their markets deserved prosecution under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.[21. William H. Taft, \u201cLabor and Capital,\u201d in\u00a0Present Day Problems: A Collection of Addresses Delivered on Various Occasions<\/em>\u00a0(1908; reprint ed.: Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1967), 245-46.] From Arthur T. Hadley, Professor of Economics and President of Yale University, Bob Taft heard a similar appraisal, cast in evolutionary terms, of the Gilded Age industrial elite that became known as the \u201cRobber Barons.\u201d Drawing on Darwinian language, Hadley asserted that a complex process of natural selection chose men with the ability to manage great concentrations of capital. The Yale president was careful to note, however, that the process was not merely a simple selection of those men possessing strength of character, industry, intelligence, and prudence, but a choice of men who effectively blended bad qualities with the good: \u201cThe control [of business corporations] is often placed in the hands of men who are enterprising and efficient, but often narrow and unscrupulous.\u201d[22. A.T. Hadley,\u00a0Economics: An Account of the Relations Between Private Property and Public Welfare<\/em> (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 117.]<\/p>\n By the 1920s, Republican rhetoricians were exalting America as an \u201cequal opportunity society.\u201d The new postwar GOP aimed its political arguments at the\u00a0prosperous and growing American middle class. No longer were business titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller lauded by party leaders; now small businessmen and entrepreneurs emerging from that middle class became the principal heroes of the party\u2019s rhetoric. Herbert Hoover, chief theoretician of an American \u201cnew individualism\u201d in the 1920s, proclaimed that it was government\u2019s purpose to secure equal opportunity for all citizens in society, with the purpose of opportunity being \u201cthe emancipation of the individual.\u201d In a major departure from nineteenth-century laissez-faire ideas, however, Hoover advocated associational activities by groups of producers and government\u2019s facilitation of those efforts in order to augment individualism. Progress was certain to follow the encouragement of a nation of entrepreneurs who were able to develop their abilities to the fullest extent of their potential.[23. On the Republican Party\u2019s \u201cequal opportunity society\u201d rhetoric, see Gerring,Party Ideologies,<\/em>\u00a0129-31; for Hoover\u2019s philosophy, see Herbert C. Hoover,American Individualism<\/em>\u00a0(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1922); for Hoover\u2019s associational views, the place to start is Ellis W. Hawley\u2019s classic study, \u201cHerbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an \u2018Associative State,\u2019 1921-1928,\u201d\u00a0Journal of American History<\/em>\u00a061 (June 1974): 116-40.]<\/p>\n It was within this interwar context and its glorification of social mobility that Robert Taft began his political career. In his stinging critiques of the New Deal in the mid- and late 1930s, the younger Taft put a new spin on the Yale virtue model: it was new men of initiative, industriousness, genius, and daring\u2014the creators of new enterprise emerging from the nation\u2019s small business community, not the executives of entrenched corporations\u2014who were most responsible for the nation\u2019s economic and technological development and, thus, its material progress. For that reason, the federal government should facilitate new enterprise, not bury it under the weight of excessive regulations and burdensome taxation. If freed from government interference, markets\u00a0would provide incentives for entrepreneurship and economic growth would proceed naturally. Addressing the persistence of high unemployment in the nation, Taft asserted it was new enterprise, not large corporations dedicated to the status quo, that would energize the economy and lead the nation out of depression.[24. For Taft\u2019s early views on the immutable natural laws that governed the economy, the crucial role of the entrepreneur in the \u201csuccess of the American business system,\u201d and his version of the Yale \u201cindustrial virtue\u201d model, see \u201cNotes on the Great Depression,\u201d Aug. 25, 1933; \u201cSpeech to the Chamber of Commerce,\u201d Warren, Ohio, Apr. 9, 1935; and \u201cSpeech to the Women\u2019s Republican Club of New Hampshire,\u201d Apr. 30, 1936, in\u00a0Papers of Robert A. Taft,<\/em>\u00a0ed. by C. E. Wunderlin, Jr., et al., 4 vols. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997-2005), 1: 447-53; 480-90, 505-15. On entrepreneurship as the key to cyclical economic recovery, see especially 1: 487. A more detailed assessment of Taft\u2019s construction of the entrepreneur as a gendered cultural symbol embodying American industrial success is in Wunderlin, \u201cThe Image of the Entrepreneur and the Language of the Market: Senator Robert A. Taft\u2019s Economic Thought, 1935-1944,\u201d unpublished paper in author\u2019s possession.]<\/p>\n Taft\u2019s mid-1930s brief against the New Deal was yet another conservative voice contributing to the political discourse on the failures of the New Deal. Beginning in 1934 with such publications as Hoover\u2019s The Challenge to Liberty, conservatives launched an all-out assault on the bureaucratic statism of the New Deal. As the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed, conservative rhetoricians targeted two groups of New Dealers in Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s \u201crevolution\u201d: the \u201cstarry-eyed academic\u201d and \u201chis more sinister partner,\u201d the \u201cpower-hungry bureaucrat.\u201d Assessing the impact of these radicals on America, conservatives emphasized the political, economic, and moral consequences of the New Deal. In the political realm, the Right charged that the New Dealers had replaced a government by laws with a government by men, ushering in an arbitrary, personal mode of governance. The New Deal had destroyed individual liberty, and established a \u201ctotalitarian tyranny\u201d that was extending bureaucratic control over every aspect of American life. In the economic sphere, they charged the administration with hindering recovery by undermining \u201cbusiness confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n Uncertainty over the value of the dollar, over the escalating size of the national debt, over the degree of taxation, and over competition from private enterprise combined to stem any upward movement in employment, production, or investment. Finally, the destruction of such historic patterns of American life as individual responsibility and local initiative, the decline of the states as governing bodies, and the general \u201cdecay of self-reliance\u201d constituted the moral consequences of this statist revolution.[25. On \u201cthe rise of conservative opposition,\u201d see chap. 30 of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,\u00a0The Coming of the New Deal<\/em>\u00a0(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 471-88, quoted material from pp. 474-77. For the former president\u2019s critique, see Herbert Hoover,The Challenge to Liberty\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons, 1934), especially chap. 6, \u201cNational Regimentation,\u201d pp. 76-103.]<\/p>\n While the 1937 \u201cConservative Manifesto\u201d expressed their unity in opposition to New Deal economic policies,[26. For an assessment of the bipartisan revolt against the New Deal during Roosevelt\u2019s second term, see John Robert Moore, \u201cSenator Josiah W. Bailey and the \u2018Conservative Manifesto\u2019 of 1937,\u201d\u00a0Journal of Southern History<\/em>\u00a031 (1965): 21-39. On conservatism in the Legislative Branch, see James T. Patterson,\u00a0Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933-1939<\/em>\u00a0(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967).] conservatives split along party lines over race relations. Republicans did not hesitate to point to the Democratic majority\u2019s failure to enact civil rights legislation during the 1930s. In the 1936 campaign, Landon urged passage of a federal anti-lynching law, boasted of his role in the elimination of the poll tax in Kansas, and continually reminded black voters that their race would secure few rights from a majority party dominated by white southern conservatives. These Republican political arguments, however, gained little traction, overwhelmed by the black community\u2019s sense of concrete material gains that did accrue to their race through the policies of the Roosevelt administration [27. On the black community’s material gains, see note 2 above.]<\/p>\n Aside from not offering to draft specific civil rights legislation himself, Candidate Taft otherwise followed Paul Walter\u2019s advice faithfully. He began with a celebration of Harvey Firestone\u2019s accomplishments. The Cincinnati lawyer explained to his audience that the tire maker possessed all those personal attributes, the industrial virtues that marked the successful entrepreneur in the nation\u2019s business history. Taft asserted Firestone\u2019s central place as \u201cone of the pioneers\u201d of modern America\u2019s continuing industrial development in the twentieth century, \u201cwhose ability, genius and industry was instrumental in making Akron the rubber center of the world.\u201d Through his far-flung business efforts, Taft observed, Firestone had created good, high-paying jobs \u201cfor thousands of men and women.\u201d[28. RT, Firestone Memorial Oration, Apr. 3, 1938, draft in Box 31, Walter Papers, WRHS.]<\/p>\n \u201cBut, tonight,\u201d Taft declared, \u201cwe honor even more his work in behalf of the colored people.\u201d Although he acknowledged that Firestone gave generously to the black community\u2019s charitable causes, Taft celebrated the tire maker\u2019s belief in and practice of equal opportunity in hiring and promotion at his various businesses. Firestone \u201ctook an active interest\u201d in providing opportunities for Akron\u2019s black workers. He continued those progressive hiring practices in the Liberian rubber plantations, \u201cgiving work to many thousands of colored people.\u201d Taft informed his audience that the League of Nations report on social conditions in Liberia had praised Firestone\u2019s \u201chumane and progressive policies.\u201d According to the speaker, the tire maker \u201ctook active measures to assure the health of his workers and develop measures which\u00a0were a strong contrast to the conditions of near slavery which preceded him.\u201d By these practices, Firestone had set \u201can example for every man who truly desires to help colored people.\u201d Firestone\u2019s course of action, Taft declared, \u201cset an example for true progress.\u201d[29. Ibid. Regarding Firestone\u2019s Liberian plantation, Taft was referring to the Report of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Existence of Slavery and Forced Labor in the Republic of Liberia (Geneva, 1930).]<\/p>\n After sufficiently praising the Akron tire maker, candidate Taft turned to the real target of his rhetoric that evening, the African-American community. Heeding Walter\u2019s advice, he praised racial uplift since emancipation. Taft declared that \u201cno race, probably, has ever made such progress in 75 years.\u201d He claimed that black Americans had made dramatic advancements in \u201ceducation, medicine, law, art, music, athletics, industry,\u201d had \u201cproven their ability,\u201d and had developed the \u201cassets and attributes\u201d of their race.[30. RT, Firestone Memorial Oration, Apr. 3, 1938, draft in Box 31, Walter Papers, WRHS.]<\/p>\n Sympathetic, as was his father a half-century earlier, to the Tuskegee Institute\u2019s approach, Robert Taft emphasized the need for racial self-help.[31. On William H. Taft\u2019s support for the \u201cTuskegee Experiment,\u201d and the crucial importance of schools for the young African-American population, see \u201cThe Outlook of Negro Education,\u201d\u00a0Collected Works,\u00a0<\/em>2: 197.] Uplifting the status of African Americans, he declared, can only result from the actions and initiatives of their own race. Indeed, asserting the self-improvement message at the memorial services for Firestone, he argued that blacks should take advantage of job opportunities granted by such liberal white employers as Harvey Firestone, but not depend either on them or on the benevolence of government.[32. RT, Firestone Memorial Oration, Apr. 3, 1938, draft in Box 31, Walter Papers, WRHS.]<\/p>\n On the subject of governmental assistance, the candidate offered a scathing critique of Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal. Shifting in tone from celebration to caution, Taft warned African Americans not to depend on those popular New Deal economic policies for material progress. The Cincinnati Republican was especially critical of the administration\u2019s WPA-brand of public employment. He exclaimed that \u201cit has become fashionable to look to government to solve our problems,\u201d and for whites and blacks to \u201crely on government action and laws to advance the welfare\u201d of both races. But, he cautioned, \u201cthat government assistance is a broken reed.\u201d It was clear to Taft that \u201cyou cannot create prosperity by passing laws.\u201d Material progress only resulted from the efforts of dynamic individuals possessing those virtues required for success in the competitive marketplace. Furthermore, he charged, \u201cyou cannot raise the standard of living of any one by pouring out government money.\u201d As a Republican, he admonished black Ohioans not to trade economic opportunity for the Democrats\u2019 offers of economic security. Speaking specifically of the plight of unemployed African Americans, Taft asserted that the Works Progress Administration was actually \u201ca direct threat to the colored race.\u201d Its living-wage public jobs programs \u201cmay reduce them all to a wage basis providing little more than a bare existence.\u201d Dependence on WPA employment and relief \u201cwill leave them ultimately in a kind of economic servitude akin to serfdom.\u201d True to Republican ideals, Taft thundered: \u201cThe man on WPA has no opportunity to go\u00a0forward.\u201d[33. Ibid.]<\/p>\n Taft charged that \u201cthe whole movement toward government regulation and regimentation\u201d was a greater threat to \u201cthe colored race than it is even to the rest of the nation.\u201d As a minority group with little political influence, they would be at the mercy of the majority in a democracy. Then he linked democracy\u2019s retreat globally to the New Deal\u2019s administrative authority in America: \u201cWe have seen democracies turned into dictatorships over night,\u201d he reminded his audience. \u201cUnder any dictatorship, minorities get the worst of it, as witness\u2014Germany and Italy.\u201d Returning his focus to America, Taft explicitly criticized FDR\u2019s second term legislative agenda: \u201cIf an all powerful Government is going to assign jobs and fix wages, I am afraid the colored people would get the worst jobs and the lowest wages.\u201d Public employment provided no opening for an enterprising young man who possessed those virtues essential for success.[34. Ibid. Taft elaborated on his assessment of the Roosevelt administration\u2019s second term legislative agenda: \u201cIf we adopt the Wage Hour Bill permitting a government commission to regulate all wages and hours,–if we put into effect the Farm Bill giving Government commissions the right to tell every farmer what to produce, if we adopt a re-organization bill centering all the power in one man, it is very hard to stop short of a complete regulation of everything and everybody by the government.\u201d]<\/p>\n What should African Americans expect from their government in 1938? Here Taft merged a healthy respect for \u201cconstitutionalism\u201d with his individualist economic philosophy. He declared that the federal government must enforce those rights granted all citizens by the Constitution: the right to life, liberty, and property, the right to vote, and the right to a fair trial and \u201call the other rights which are guaranteed to every citizen by the Bill of Rights and by the 14th and 15th amendments.\u201d Distancing himself from southern conservatives in the opposition party, he asserted that blacks were \u201centitled to an Anti-lynching Bill\u201d to secure those rights they possessed only in theory.\u00a0Implicitly criticizing the white, Democrat-dominated southern courts, Taft claimed that African Americans had a special interest in the fairness of the judicial system so that, regardless of majority opinion, a man from the minority population might receive \u201ca fair trial in the protection of his constitutional rights.\u201d[35. Ibid.]<\/p>\n While not admitting that passage of civil rights legislation was politically impossible in the 1930s, Taft did acknowledge the ideological limits of his vision. To his Akron audience, the candidate confessed that his view of the federal government\u2019s role was \u201clargely negative and defensive.\u201d He recognized that constitutional protections owed all citizens amounted to a profoundly negative construction of freedom, that laws secured a minimum area for the exercise of personal freedom. For Taft, however, such freedom also necessitated certain limits on public authority. The federal government, he informed his audience, should not interfere with those in the private sector seeking opportunity for that \u201cpersonal advancement\u201d on which material progress depended.[36. Ibid.]<\/p>\n Yet, there did exist, in Taft\u2019s mind, a constructive course to freedom. Material advancement for any group, he asserted, derived primarily from the achievements of its exemplary individuals in civil society. Thus, the social and economic progress of African Americans depended on their leaders\u2019 efforts \u201cto develop the assets and attributes of the race.\u201d Driving home another of Paul Walter\u2019s points, Taft alleged that George Washington Carver furnished black Americans with their most outstanding\u00a0model of leadership. Carver\u2019s research, especially on the industrial uses of such crops as cotton and peanuts, led to the development of numerous new industries. Once again, as with Harvey Firestone, \u201cprogress has been due to individual enterprise and leadership.\u201d African Americans needed jobs, Taft charged, and \u201cthe development of private industry\u201d by men such as Carver was the \u201conly solution to their economic difficulties.\u201d[37. Ibid.]<\/p>\n Was there a positive role for government in economic development? \u201cGovernmental policies should be so framed,\u201d he claimed, repeating Walter\u2019s suggested language, \u201cthat new industries are created and not stifled.\u201d Avoiding the thorny question of enforcing equal opportunity in Depression-era America, Taft simply observed that \u201ccolored people must be given an equal proportionate part as they were given in the Firestone companies.\u201d \u201cAmerica cannot overlook the rich tradition developed by the colored race,\u201d he intoned, concluding his address, \u201cin the development of the American culture.\u201d<\/p>\n Prompted by Paul Walter\u2019s April 2 talking points, candidate Taft wove together the discourses on civilization and material prosperity to craft a conservative,\u00a0hierarchical (elite-led) model of progress not only for the African-American community but for the entire American nation. Conservative Republicans of the \u201cOld Right\u201d sought to preserve an American business system that they believed had flourished under the natural laws of the market. If not hindered by government interference, markets governed by the laws of competition naturally expanded as a result of technological innovation that generated growth.[38. Michael Freeden has argued that a belief in organic, accumulative development coupled with the notion of the extra-human direction of that progress is central to conservative thought in the modern era. Freeden,\u00a0Ideologies and Political Theory,<\/em>332-35.] Conservatives prized a social system that freed individuals who possessed the requisite virtues to create and innovate within the private sector. According to Taft, only these private-sector enterprisers could advance the nation technologically, establish new industries, and employ hundreds, if not thousands, of American workers. Firestone, the man, exemplified that \u201cpioneer\u201d social type among whites; Carver, the same, among blacks. And for Taft, \u201ctrue progress\u201d derived only from the rising levels of permanent private-sector employment and material prosperity for the entire society that these pioneers could achieve in America. Drawing on the partisan critique of the New Deal, Taft assured his audience that public sector employment, the hallmark of Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cSecond New Deal\u201d of the late 1930s, had failed to create permanent employment and expanding private-sector opportunities. Furthermore, equating economic security with economic dependency, he charged that public employment reduced citizens to a new form of serfdom.<\/p>\n A great gulf existed between conservative freedom rhetoric and the reality of economic life for African Americans. In his 1938 campaign, candidate Taft asserted a dual meaning for \u201cliberty\u201d: one \u201clargely negative and defensive,\u201d the other positive and constructive.[39. Regarding the distinction between \u201cnegative\u201d and \u201cpositive\u201d liberty, see Isaiah Berlin, \u201cTwo Concepts of Liberty,\u201d in Anthony Quinton, ed.,\u00a0Political Philosophy<\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 141-52.]\u00a0First and foremost, he avowed an abiding regard for the constitutional rights of all Americans, including African Americans. Although Taft asserted that black Americans should be safe in their persons and entitled to all the rights granted by the constitution, he remained silent on the federal government\u2019s failure to protect the property rights of southern blacks guaranteed, in theory, by the Fourteenth Amendment. In addition, he refrained from drafting federal anti-lynching legislation once he arrived in Washington, D.C., a commitment Paul Walter had urged him to make to his Akron audience.<\/p>\n Second, he maintained that government had a constructive responsibility to promote freedom by facilitating (to create not stifle) enterprise and entrepreneurship; the nation\u2019s progress depended on economic opportunity and the initiative to seize it.[40. It seems obvious from this study that Republican conservatives were in direct opposition\u00a0conceptually<\/em>\u00a0to New Deal Liberalism. In 1938, most liberals believed that there was no freedom without economic security. To achieve that secure livelihood, the New Deal injected mainstream liberalism with a new dose of communitarian and social democratic ideas. In contrast, for Taft and the Republicans, liberty meant much more than merely rights established by fundamental law or statute: liberty without opportunity was no freedom at all. On the conceptual center of New Deal Liberalism (and the continuity in Democratic Party ideology connecting\u00a0 Bryan\u2019s \u201cChristian Liberalism\u201d and Wilson\u2019s \u201cNew Freedom\u201d to the New Deal), see Gerring,Party Ideologies,<\/em>\u00a0chap. 6, especially the section \u201cThe Party of Humanity,\u201d 213-21; for an assessment of\u00a0 \u201ccooperative\u201d or communitarian thought in New Deal political rhetoric, see Alan Lawson,\u00a0A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis\u00a0<\/em>(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).] In privileging \u201copportunity\u201d over \u201csecurity,\u201d however, Taft largely dismissed both the economic realities of depression and the crushing burden of culture. With regard to the latter, he slighted the significant impact of barriers to equal opportunity erected by the dominant white race and underpinned by its racism during the seventy-five years following emancipation on African Americans\u2019 ability to advance. While Taft urged the passage of civil rights laws in the late 1930s, he was not willing to use the federal\u00a0government to legislate \u201can equal proportionate\u201d share of job opportunities for blacks in the American workforce. Indeed, throughout the Second World War and during the early postwar years, the senator opposed any effort to vest the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee, established by a Roosevelt executive order, with enforcement powers under federal statute law, or, following the war, to create a permanent commission with such powers.[41. On Taft\u2019s opposition to an FEPC \u201cwith teeth\u201d (enforcement powers), see James Patterson,\u00a0Mr. Republican,<\/em>\u00a0304-5,\u00a0 and Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr., \u201c\u2019Be Satisfied with Their Progress thus Far\u2019: Senator Robert A. Taft\u2019s Opposition to a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, 1938-1950,\u201d unpublished paper in author\u2019s possession.] Although he clearly disagreed with southern white supremacists of the Democratic Party over the potential of African Americans to \u201cuplift\u201d themselves if given educational and economic opportunities, he steadfastly refused to fight for federal guarantees of those opportunities.[42. In the South, the rise of a new conservatism, led by advocates of Anglo-Saxonism and critics of harmonious race relations, challenged dominant \u201cliberal paternalists\u201d in the 1930s and 1940s. Their defense of segregation, disfranchisement, and racial purity solidified white supremacist conservatism in the years after the Second World War. On this shift from \u201cliberal paternalism\u201d to white supremacist conservatism, see Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, \u201cTo Save a Home: Nell Battle Lewis and the Rise of Southern Conservatism, 1941-1956,\u201d\u00a0North Carolina Historical Review\u00a0<\/em>81 (2004): 261-87; my thinking about the challenge to white supremacy has been shaped by Nan Woodruff\u2019s review essay of J. Douglas Smith,Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0in\u00a0Georgia Historical Quarterly\u00a0<\/em>88 (2004): 292-95. See also the fascinating account of the white supremacist Colonel E. S. Cox by Jason Ward, \u201c\u2019A Richmond Institution\u2019: Earnest Sevier Cox, Racial Propaganda, and White Resistance to the Civil Rights Movement,\u201d\u00a0Virginia Magazine of History & Biography\u00a0<\/em>116 (2008): 262-93.]<\/p>\n Finally, for three quarters of a century, the Republican Party has struggled to win back African-American voters. If Alf Landon, the GOP\u2019s 1936 presidential candidate, made the first (obviously unsuccessful) appeal to them, Taft was not far behind. His effort to reach black voters in northeast Ohio during the 1938 campaign also failed. Indeed, his worst electoral performances statewide came in Summit and Cuyahoga counties, regional centers of African-American population and trade union membership.[43. Voting results for all counties in the state can be found in the\u00a0Cleveland Plain Dealer,\u00a0<\/em>Nov. 9 and 10, 1938. In Summit County, Taft received 47,531 to his opponent Robert Bulkley\u2019s 55,453; in Cuyahoga County, 151,173 to Bulkley\u2019s 204,368. (Plain Dealer,\u00a0<\/em>Nov. 10, 1938, p. 3.)]\u00a0Regardless of the impact of the memorial oration on black Ohioans, however, his 1938 electoral victory sent Taft to the U.S. Senate, providing him with a nationwide audience for his powerful conservative social message.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By: Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr. In the spring of 1938, Ohio Republicans were well aware of the erosion of support among the African-American population for the \u201cParty of Lincoln.\u201d Between 1932 and 1936, black voters had transferred their allegiance en masse to the Democratic Party. Although most African Americans had remained with Hoover and the … Continue reading Text and Context in Ohio\u2019s 1938 Senate Campaign: Race, Republican Party Ideology, and Robert A. Taft\u2019s Firestone Memorial Oration<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1622,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39898],"tags":[41906,41842,41910,14226,41914],"class_list":["post-806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-volume-6-issue-1-spring-2010","tag-6-1","tag-article","tag-clarence-wunderlin-jr","tag-race","tag-robert-a-taft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1622"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":838,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions\/838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHarvard Sitkoff,\u00a0A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 84-89.]<\/p>\n
\nThe structure of this study\u2019s argument owes much to the interdisciplinary study of political rhetoric by Martin J. Medhurst, especially his \u201cText and Context in the 1952 Presidential Campaign: Eisenhower\u2019s \u2018I Shall Go to Korea\u2019 Speech,\u201dPresidential Studies Quarterly<\/em>\u00a030 (Sept. 2000): 464-84, which served as a model for the presentation of this evidence.] Thus, Taft\u2019s Firestone Memorial Oration can best be comprehended by placing it within three interlocking contexts of discourse: 1) the discourse on race and civilization as it had been articulated since the late nineteenth century; 2) the discourse on the \u201cidea of progress,\u201d especially as it concerned \u201cmaterial progress,\u201d the centrality of \u201cproducerism\u201d to those notions of material betterment, and the particular role of the business entrepreneur as an agent of change; and 3) the partisan political discourse on the New Deal, focused by 1938 on its failure both to generate economic recovery and to improve dramatically the lives of the nation\u2019s African-American citizens. In particular, this article will demonstrate the ideological connections between text (Taft\u2019s rhetoric employed in the memorial address) and context (the discursive traditions in culture and\u00a0politics) and show that Taft selected key elements of those discourses and forged them into a powerful conservative message.<\/p>\nI. Political Advice<\/h4>\n
\nIn response to Britain\u2019s 1922 Stevenson Rubber Restriction Act to control the international market for raw rubber and raise prices ten-fold, Firestone led the \u201cAmericans Should Produce Their Own Rubber\u201d movement by U.S. tire makers. A Firestone financial stabilization loan of $2.5 million to the Republic of Liberia accompanied the 1926 Firestone-Liberia Planting Agreement that paved the way for the eventual cultivation of approximately 90,000 acres by a workforce of 30,000 (1959 stats.) A model of American \u201cinformal empire,\u201d the Firestone Liberia enterprise also invested more than $1.5 million in public health programs, constructing 2 hospitals and 39 dispensaries, spent $700,000 annually on health benefits for its workforce, and donated $325,000 to the American Foundation for Tropical Medicine for construction of a medical research institute in Liberia. The company also took credit for being a stimulus to Liberia\u2019s long-term economic development, asserting that the firm \u201cplayed a singularly important role\u201d in the creation of Liberia\u2019s \u201crobust economy\u201d in the post-World War II era. The Firestone Plantations Company,\u00a0Liberia and Firestone: The Development of a Rubber Industry, a Story of Friendship and Progress<\/em>\u00a0(Harbel, Liberia: The Firestone Plantations Co., 1959(?)), 4-13; on the establishment of the plantations, see also Lief,\u00a0Firestone Story,<\/em>\u00a0151-54. A detailed 1956 assessment of Firestone operations in Liberia by the National Planning Association is Wayne Chatfield Taylor,\u00a0The Firestone Operations in Liberia,<\/em>\u00a05th case study in NPA series,\u00a0United States Business Performance Abroad\u00a0<\/em>(New York: National Planning Association, 1956).] It was not\u00a0surprising, then, that the Association for Colored Community Work, a local social service and welfare organization that Firestone helped found, was eager to demonstrate its gratitude to the Firestone family by commemorating the man\u2019s life and work.[9. Regarding the specifics of the memorial events: \u201cMore than 1,400 attended a service held in the Second Baptist Church and hundreds later attended the presentation of a beautiful silver plaque to the Firestone family at the annual meeting of the Association for Colored Community Work, local Negro service and welfare organization, of which Mr. Firestone was a founder.\u201d\u00a0Dayton Forum,\u00a0<\/em>July 1, 1938, p. 1.]<\/p>\nII. The Context<\/h4>\n
\nOn the American Whig idea of progress, see Daniel Walker Howe,\u00a0The Political Culture of the American Whigs<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), 73-75, 101, quoted material on p. 101. American Whigs saw progress as a \u201cpattern of ordered change in which order and change were equally important.\u201d Howe, 74. Antebellum Whigs and later Republicans were influenced by thinkers from Great Britain who cast the idea of progress largely in economic terms, in contrast to French theorists who saw progress in technological terms.]<\/p>\nIII. The Text<\/h4>\n
IV. Conclusion<\/h4>\n