Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 103, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1908 — TELLS TRUTH OF TAFT [ARTICLE]

TELLS TRUTH OF TAFT

Great Union Convention's Officiai Volume Praises His Sympathy With Labor. In the official volume issued in connection with this year’s convention, the fifty-fourth, of the International Typographical Union in Boston, beginning Aug. 10, there is a five-page article entitled “The Hon. William H. Taft’s Relations to Union Labor.” All of the 46,000 members of that union have read or will read it, as well as organized workmen generally. All it says is true, but it will stir up the animals in the Bryan menagerie. Here are some of the truths printed in the article: “Secretary Taft’s whole public career, and it is an extensive one, contains no incident in which he has ever, by word or action, arrayed himself against the principles of trade unionism. On the contrary, he has been its consistent friend and advocate. “In this connection information showing that not only were his sympathies with the organization, but that his actions were those of a friend many years before either he or the American people had thought of him as a presidential possibility.

“No class of men will resent being imposed upon quicker than union workers, and those who havS held up Mr. Taft as opposed to organized labor must now take the condemnation that honest men place upon falsifiers. “Probably no judge ever has been more misquoted and unjustly judged by trades unionists than Judge Taft. His many decisions in favor of the laborers have been minimized to such an extent that one is prompted to inquire if those who have exploited his record before labor organizations were not more interested in the welfare of some political party than in those of the labor organizations. “Trades unionists should stand together without regard to party in contending for everything that would legitimately advance their principles, and should credit an honest judge with doing his duty, even though his decisions be adverse to them, so long as they are in accordance with the law of the land.

“His decisions, of course, may not voice the opinion of the judge; he does not make the law. On the other hand, there is no decision by Judge Taft that can be cited that Indicates personal antipathy or a personal unfriendliness on his part to labor organizations?* The article concludes with the following: “Do not these facts, coupled with what is more generally known with regard to his great achievements as a jurist and a public official, appeal to every man of right reasoning in such a manner as to convince him that, as president of the United States, Mr. Taft’s great intellect and power would be found valiantly contending for the rights of the laboring, producing people and in favor of everything that would help society from the bottom rather than from the top; for the welfare of this nation depends not upon the high cultivation of the sons and the daughters of the rich, desirable as that may be, nor upon the great aggregations of wealth in the hands of the few, but rather upon the high average intelligence and prosperity of those who really do the nation’s work?”