William Howard Taft speech to the Automobile Club of America, 1911
William Howard Taft's speech to the Automobile Club of America, December 20, 1911
The President & The Motor Age: William Howard Taft’s speech to the Automobile Club of America, December 20, 1911
Of all the reasons presidential scholars have dismissed Taft's White House perhaps that most difficult to unwind is the complaint that he failed to use the office as an effective rhetorical instrument. The problem wasn't that Americans didn't listen in Taft's day. It wasn't that he didn't use the office to make his case. He did, and forcibly. The problem is that historians today refuse to hear. The best I can think is it is because they just don't like what he had to say. Dismissing him as they have they entirely miss him, and doing it they miss so much so crucial to the meaning and history of America.
Taft gave numerous important and vital speeches, many of which you will find in the hugely important five volume set, The Collected Works of William Howard Taft (this link to Vol III), newly issued by Ohio University Press and edited by David Burton. Dr. Burton has done history a huge service in bringing Taft to modern print.
But there's one speech that you will not find in Collected Works that is among Taft's --and the country's -- most important. In this speech Taft declared the triumph of the automobile, an outcome to which he contributed so much. More importantly, in this speech Taft very deliberately defined the meaning of the Motor Age in government and law, and settled and set the issues of federalism that have defined road building and road law ever since. This is no small matter.
Typically, Taft did it in style and humor. It's a fun speech, and an important one. So go with it, and enjoy it as did his audience. To help understand it all, I have also reprinted the introductory comments to the speech as appearing in my book, William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency.
New York Times cartoon of Taft's Momentous Pronouncement of the Triumph of the Automobile
"Mr. Taft, the Guest of the Evening"
Notes on Taft's speech to the Automobile Club of America
[Reprinted from William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency,
pp. 371-376, by Michael L. Bromley; Copyright 2003]
On December 20, President Taft addressed Twelfth Annual Banquet of the Automobile Club of America at the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. Started in 1899, the ACA was the most important motoring club in the nation. The ACA’s membership was privilege itself. The Governor of New York answered its mail. The State legislature enacted its laws. The Club sponsored races, assisted tours and touring, lobbied governments, and generally promoting automobiling, motor boating, and aeroplaning. It was one of early motoring’s most important assets.
In 1911 the Club’s agitation forced the city of New York to rebuild its worst roads. That same year it successfully lobbied Albany for laws against outdoor advertisements (early billboards) and sent out parties of "sign smashers" in trucks to remove unsightly advertisements. The ACA was especially successful in its work with overseas clubs to promote automobile-friendly laws for tourists to bring in-transit automobiles across borders duty-free. The Club also sponsored technological development with a world-class "automobile laboratory" to test motors. The Club owned two Manhattan buildings, one twelve stories high, with social, meeting and hotel rooms, a chauffeur’s club, fuel storage, mechanical supplies department, administrative facilities, and a 130,000 square foot garage. There were almost 3,000 members. Taft held an honorary membership.
After a year’s campaign, in September of 1911, Taft accepted the invitation from ACA president Henry Anderson to speak at the annual banquet. "We wish to make this dinner an occasion of international importance," Anderson wrote. "We urge you to give by your presence the support to the automobile industry which it deserves, an industry in which hundred of millions of dollars are invested and hundreds of thousands of men are working."1
At the banquet Anderson introduced Taft. Bragging of the ACA’s "passport," which allowed entry through customs of personal automobiles for tourism in many countries, Anderson joked that it was as great a power as the American passport itself. The Club "can give… a slip of paper that, in a practical sense, throws down almost every customs barrier in the civilized world, and permits him to pass from one country to another, unmolested by the customs regulations of boundaries and frontiers." It was a lead to Anderson’s real point. He continued, "I wish I could announce to you that we had been as successful in our own country, in obliterating State lines (laughter), and annoying, conflicting and oppressive State regulations, and license requirements. I hope the day is not far off when the policy of our States will be governed rather by considerations of hospitality and courtesy than by considerations of tribute."
Taft knew the complaint. He had suffered its consequences. In his speech he marvelously answered the usual solution, Federal licensing, with a joke. He also knew the sensitivities of the ACA members towards Federal Aid in road building. This he answered with a clever, mocking, anecdote (which the ACA magazine omitted in its reprint of the speech), and settled it with an almost judicial ruling. The speech settled the most important legal issues of the Motor Age: licensing, which Taft declared would remain with the States, and road building, which he said was within the powers of the Federal government. The speech was otherwise peppered with bright references to the political issues of the day, Reciprocity, anti-trust, and the high cost of living. Taft made fun of himself and his audience, sometimes with brutal sarcasm. It was a model speech, not just of Taft, but for any President.
1 H Sanderson to Taft, telegram, 9/29/11. Sanderson had been bugging Harry Taft to get his brother to the annual banquet since at least that January. Harry forwarded one letter, saying, "Here is another gentleman who thinks that by making me a conduit force will be added to the consideration which he thinks should lead the President to attend the annual banquet of the Automobile Club of America. I have said that I would see that the letter got to the President"(Henry Taft to CD Norton, 1/20/11).
Taft's speech to the Automobile Club of America
Speech by William Howard Taft, December 20, 1911, New York City at New York City. [Images added]
To "prolonged cheers and applause," President Taft rose to speak:
Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Automobile Club, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I have never quite understood the kindly persistence that your president and his associates showed in inviting me to this festal occasion. I never belonged to what I always used to call "carriage class" (laughter). I walked, or rode in street cars. When the automobile took the place of that more dignified procedure, I am sure Judge Moore will agree with me -- I transferred the carriage class to the automobile class, and considered myself still excluded.
It is true that the accident of office and the generosity of a Republican Congress (laughter) gave me for a time (laughter) the privilege of understanding the fascination of traveling by this new method, but it is only a loan. There is no permanency of tenure in the machine or in the office (laughter), and, therefore, I beg of you to understand that I appear here only in a temporarily representative capacity (laughter).
I am told that automobile clubs in Europe are headed by the Dukes and the Grand Dukes, and those who occupy places of near royalty, and that by way of a somewhat forced analogy it was deemed wise to have the temporary Executive of this government present at one automobile dinner in order to show that there was some "pull" at Washington.*
Enthusiastic crowd at Taft's speech to the Automobile Club of America at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York City, on December 20, 1911
I am glad to be here in any capacity; glad to learn of how much the automobile and its uses have contributed to international friendship among those who can afford to carry automobiles through a custom house (laughter). Reference has been made to the limitation on my power. The truth is that in the performance of my official duties, I don’t meet anything but limitation (great laughter and applause). Your presiding officer has said to you that his power, in certain regards, was much longer than mine. I have no doubt of it, and if he can get, as he says, by issuing a mere yellow ticket, so much of value through Loeb and the custom house here, he can exceed any power that I have (laughter).
I am glad to know that I am having the pleasure of addressing not only those who use the automobile, who really form that class that I dare call, in the presence of a brother of mine who teaches the classics, fruges consumere nati, but also those gentlemen who are making it an industry that contributes so greatly to the wealth of this country, and adds so much to its manufacturing product. I tried to help them out by getting the duties lowered into Canada (applause). Once in a while I do something for somebody that ought to make them grateful (laughter and applause), but even that seems to be broken up by a slowness on the part of Canada to appreciate a good thing when she sees it.
Seriously speaking, my friends, the working out of the automobile is a wonderful development. As you look back as far as I can look back -- at least with any sense of economic changes -- to 1876, and think of what has happened in that period in the promotion of the comfort of the human race, the changes are marvelous. The telephone, the electric railway, all the electrical devices for the reproduction of the human voice, and the automobile -- what could we do without them now? How rapidly we adapt ourselves to the absolute necessity of those improvements of which we knew and imagined nothing fifty years ago! I am sure that of all of them the automobile coming in as a toy of the wealthier classes is going to prove the most useful of them all to all classes, rich and poor (applause).
President Taft at the head table, with the Presidential Seal above, which marked White House endorsement of the automobile
There was a time in the use of the automobile -- I shared it myself when I was plodding along with the tandem that nature gave me, as Holmes called it (laughter), when a spirit of intolerance was manifested against the horrible looking machine that the automobile then was to the ordinary eye. There was an intimation of "get-out-of-the-way or we will run you over," and a resentment against those who were using it until you yourself got into the automobile. Then human nature was shown in the quickness with which the attitude of mind can change, and you regarded as utterly unreasonable the slowness of the pedestrian and the idea that he had any right to any part of the street (laughter), either for crossing or anything else. And then the utter outrage of having any dogs at all in any community that should get in the way of that magnificent instrument of travel and comfort!
Automotive enthusiasts and press lauded Taft's embrace of the automobile, such on this cover of the February, 1910 AAA magazine.
If you had traveled as much as I have (laughter and applause), if you had been met in every town of five or ten thousand people in every State, with a hundred automobiles, in order to demonstrate the prosperity of that particular town, you would understand that the use of the automobile has gone quite beyond that class which I aspired to and never acquired membership in (laughter). It means that the automobile has come here for use. It is contributing, like the telephone, like the suburban railway, like the rural delivery of the Post Office, to the possibility of a comfortable life on the farm, and it is tending, together with high prices of farm products, to turn back again those who seek the city and professional life, to a place where they have an assured income and are not troubled with suits or litigation, or chased by the government (laughter and applause).
Many serious problems are going to be presented, and you are having them now, with these State lines, and these authorities, of whom you can have three in a very short automobile ride just in this neighborhood. I do not know how you are going to get rid of them. You might set some theory of yourself being an unopened and complete package, sent from Connecticut into New Jersey, through New York, that can not be opened until you reach the point of your destination, and in some way or other, call upon the Federal Court to protect you in that transportation (laughter). Whether you escape the tax and the license and all that sort of thing, for the grooves that your automobile makes in the roads of your State, I am unable to say, because those charged with the responsibility of keeping up the roads know that while the automobile owners have promoted the question and the pursuit of good roads, they have very largely contributed to the difficulty of building and maintaining them. The experiments made as to what may avoid the influence of those great big rubber tires upon macadam roads are proceeding, and I hope something will come of them.
Closeup from cover photo of February, 1910 AAA magazine.
I speak with considerable deference, because I find that gentlemen who study good roads as a diversion, as an avocation, have such decided views that one who is just charged with the good old governmental way of building a road finds some difficulty in appreciating, and also finds that he is not regarded as an authority in any respect. I had a call from a gentleman who is an automobilist and also a good roads man, and eats, sleeps and drinks good roads. He came to me and said: "Mr. President, I desire that you appoint delegates to a good roads convention -- a national good roads convention." I said, "I will be very glad to do it, sir. We have two departments in which there are road experts." "Which are they," said he. Said I, "We have the Agricultural Department, where we have a Bureau devoted to experts who are laying experimental roads for the country, for the farmers." Said he, "I have had occasion to know how much they know. I have looked into it, and they don’t know anything about it at all. They have not the first principles at hand." I said, "Then we will go into the War Department, and we will take the army engineers, and I will send you some of them. They have been building roads in the Philippines, in every State in the Union, in Cuba, on the Isthmus, and elsewhere." Said he, "If my boy did not know more about the real principles of building roads than they do, I would not allow him to continue the study of it." I said, "Good morning, sir, I am not in the road business, and I have no delegates worthy of being sent there."*
The question of good roads, as I say, is a difficult one, not only because of the perfection of the road for the purpose of resisting this much heavier travel, but also because of the question who is to pay for the roads. Are they to be built by the State? Are they to be built by the county? And whoever builds them, who is to take care of them? This is a much more important question. But I hear the earnest patriot -- and it does not make any difference how he construes the constitution -- if there is any plan of running a national road near his farm, I hear the earnest patriot say, "it is the business of the general Government to build its roads" (laughter). Says he, "let us have a national road running from New York to San Francisco to teach the world what a model road is." "What will it cost?" Ah," what difference does it make what it costs? You can strive and hunt ways of saving $100,000 in the matter of employees at Washington; but when it comes to building roads, what is $100,000,000 between friends?" (laughter). And there is the difficulty, gentlemen. I admit that the general Government has the power to build National roads for the purpose of promoting interstate commerce.** It has done it already, but I venture to question the wisdom of opening that method of spending Federal Government money. I think it is much better to have the neighborhood and the State, as a large unit, expend its money in the construction of roads across the State, of aiding the counties to keep the roads in repair, because, if you once set out upon a plan of national roads, in addition to the plan of national waterways, I don’t know how great the expenditure will amount to. If we could confine it to two or three roads, I would not object, but we have forty-eight different States and every State is as anxious to share in the common funds at Washington as every other State (laughter). It is a dangerous experiment that I would suggest great delay and deliberation before you undertake so great an expenditure, the stopping of which will have no end. We have had some experience in that in Washington, and we are looking forward now to large expenditures. If you are going to add roads, and you are going to run your automobiles through them and over them and into them, and are going to promote the cost of them as you will, increasing, of course, the intercourse between all the people, creating a benefit which I do not minimize, nevertheless I say to you that if you can reach that benefit without opening the national treasury, I think it will be the wiser and more statesmanlike course (applause).
I did not intend to talk so long gentlemen, but when you get into a governmental discussion on the subject of economy, the mind runs on to a Congress that is striving to save money (laughter), and I am anxious to express the sympathy that we all feel in that effort. I thank you sincerely for your kind attention.
[Adapted from text of speech, Taft Papers, Library of Congress (reel 580) and Club Journal of the Automobile Club of America, January 6, 1912, pp. 601-606]
[* These sections were omitted in the ACA reprint of the speech, therefore any applause, shock, or laughter that followed is unrecorded. Someone at the ACA either felt, or thought someone else might feel, offended by the President’s jokes about royal motorists and Good Roads fanatics.]
[** The White House text lacked the word "National," which was included in the ACA version, and in those printed elsewhere.]