Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

MR. AND MRS. JOHN WILLIAMSON HERRON, MRS. TAFT’S FATHER AND MOTHER

But in spite of all this gaiety, Mr. Taft was making very satisfactory progress in his career. As a law reporter he showed his growing interest in the public welfare by meeting certain elements in Cincinnati politics with vigorous denunciation. There was a man named Tom Campbell, a clever criminal lawyer, who had something more than a suspicion against him of bribery and corruption of both witnesses and juries, and he had succeeded in organising a political machine that was running the town according to his directions.

Campbell was counsel for the defence in what was known as the Hoffman case and was strongly suspected of tampering with the jury, and Mr. Taft in reporting the case, took special pains to bring out all the fine points in the lawyer’s character and methods, telling the truth as he saw it.

This brought him into association with Mr. Miller Outcalt, the Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, who represented the State in the Hoffman case, and when Mr. Outcalt succeeded by election to the position of prosecuting attorney he offered the place of assistant to Mr. Taft, although he had been at the bar not more than seven months. Mr. Taft served in this office for fourteen months and the experience he had in the rough-and-ready practice in criminal trials, in preparing cases for trial, in examining witnesses, in making arguments to the court and in summing up to the jury, was the most valuable experience he could possibly have in fitting him for trial work at the bar.

But this experience was shortened by a circumstance not of his seeking. Major Benjamin Butterworth was the Congressman from one of the Cincinnati districts in President Arthur’s administration, and the President being anxious to relieve the Collector of Internal Revenue, called on Major Butterworth to suggest the name of another man. Major Butter worth had been for a long time a warm friend of Mr. Taft, thought he had a good family name and was too young in politics to have many political enemies, so he suggested him and wrote to urge him to accept the appointment which the President immediately offered to him. He accepted the place and held it for a year, but it proved a serious interruption in his legal career. He resigned as soon as it was possible and began practice with Major H. P. Lloyd who had been his father’s partner before he went to Vienna.

Mr. Taft went abroad in the summer of 1883 to visit Judge and Mrs. Taft in Vienna, and it was about this time, when we had all spent several years in frivolities, that several of us became very serious-minded and decided that we must have something by way of occupation more satisfying than dancing and amateur theatricals. I secured a position as school teacher and taught for two years, first at Madame Fredin’s and then at White and Sykes, both private schools out on Walnut Hills. Then, with two of my intimate friends, I decided to start a “salon.” We called it a “salon” because we planned to receive a company who were to engage in what we considered brilliant discussion of topics intellectual and economic, and we decided that our gathering should include only specially invited guests. Among these were the two Taft brothers, Will and Horace, and other men common friends of us all.

In view of the fact that two marriages resulted from this salon, Mr. Taft has suggested ulterior motives on the part of those who got it up, but there was no truth in the charge. We were simply bent on “improving our minds” in the most congenial atmosphere we could create, and if our discussions at the salon usually turned upon subjects of immediate personal interest, to the neglect of the abstruse topics we had selected for debate, it was because those subjects were just then claiming the attention of the whole community.

Cincinnati, thanks to the activities of Tom Campbell and his followers, was then in a tangle of political mismanagement of a particularly vicious character, and our little circle developed a civic spirit which kept us alive to local interests to the exclusion, for the time being, of everything else. Mr. Taft was intimately connected with the reform movement, and in all its phases, through comedy and tragedy, disappointment and elation, we fought it out at our salon meetings with such high feeling and enthusiasm that its history became the history of our lives during that period.

Then came the famous Berner case. This was in 1884. Berner had committed a deliberate murder of an unusually appalling nature and with robbery as the motive, and there was great excitement about it. Campbell became his counsel and, in a trial which held the attention of the community while it lasted, he succeeded in getting the man off for manslaughter when the unanimous opinion was that he should have been hanged. Nobody could see how an honest jury could have rendered any other verdict. There was intense indignation throughout the city and a meeting was called to denounce Campbell as an embracer of juries and a suborner of perjury.