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S1 E10: William Howard Taft

The Past, the Promise, the Presidency

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Is There a Ground for Taft to Stand on as a Republican?

Taft epitomizes the challenges of the Republican Party in the Progressive Era. He was clearly racist by modern terms, but he wanted the country to be better and aspired to a system where there were fuller citizenship rights for African Americans. Taft didn't want to take a stand on some of these issues that might then exacerbate racial prejudice and then violence. So why we see all this time in his first inaugural talking about race relations? It's not good politics related to systematic disenfranchisement in the South.

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