George W. Liebmann

In The Tafts, veteran Baltimore lawyer George W. Liebmann provides an account of five generations of the Ohio-based dynasty of Republicans, highly accomplished but less prone to self-advertisement than some of the United States’ better-known political families. Louise Taft Semple, President Taft’s niece, bequeathed her fortune for the promotion of classical studies at the University of Cincinnati, which consequently boasts one of America’s most prestigious Classics departments and one show more of the world’s biggest Classics libraries. The university itself was rescued by the first of Liebmann’s subjects, lawyer and judge Alphonso Taft (1810-91), who successfully defended the will of the founder, Charles McMicken, which financed its establishment. McMicken was a slave-owner. In 2022 the university removed his name from all its buildings and spaces named after its benefactor because, it argued, not to do so ‘betrays academic values’. What about historical truth?

As a judge of the Ohio Supreme Court, Alphonso Taft dissented in a ruling that allowed the King James Bible to be read in public schools. Alphonso’s insistence on a duty ‘to keep religious partisanship out of the public schools’ was cited in 1963 by the US Supreme Court, which held Bible reading and the recital of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools to be unconstitutional. His principled dissent is said to have cost him three governorships. One of Alphonso’s lawyer sons, Henry Waters Taft, opposed actions for alienation of affections, ‘criminal conversation’ (i.e. adultery) and breach of promise of marriage – as did his British contemporary, Mr Justice McCardie – as degrading and instruments of blackmail. The highly cultivated Taft’s Opinions, Literary or Otherwise (1934) repays reading.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/tafts-george-w-liebmann-review

Antony Lentin is a Senior Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge. show less

Five diplomats, Lewis Einstein, Sir Horace Rumbold, Johann Count von Bernstorff , Count Carlo Sforza and Ismet Inonu, and their careers during and between the two great world wars. Political biographies of an American, a Briton, a German, an Italian and a Turk.

59 p.