Cloud of Witnesses: Helen Taft Manning

Her books on The Revolt of French Canada and British Colonial Government After the American Revolution remain standard references, but Helen Taft Manning ( 1891-1987) was a far more interesting talking history in the 1970s when I knew her in Pennsylvania. She had become dean of Bryn Mawr College at the age of 25, was acting president twice, and was professor of history from 1930 to retirement in 1956. As the wife of a history professor at Yale, where she had taken her doctorate, and the mother of two daughters, she contradicted a maxim of the astringently unnatural M. Carey Thomas who, as a founding mother of Bryn Mawr, opined that only the college’s failures married. A sophomoric Katherine Hepburn was nearly expelled by her for low grades. From early years she was a suffragette, while not sharing Dr. Thomas’s impatience of convention on the subject.

A few weeks after she was born Edison patented his motion picture camera, of which she would approve, while sensibly frowning on lesser inventions like mixed drinks and aerated bread. By paternal inheritance she was a Unitarian but was formed by Episcopalianism in the maternal line and widely embraced more traditional religious views. She told me that the first African cardinal, Laurean Rugambwa, exclaimed that she was the only one he had ever met who had known Pope Leo XIII. Her brother Charles, a mayor of her native Cincinnati, helped found the World Council of Churches and was the youngest president of the International YMCA. Their father was president of another institution known as the United States of America.

A photo of the family in Manila, absent brother Robert (the future senator), included their governess who taught her German and a little Tagalog. It was in the interest of fixing a fair price for church lands that her father, as governor of the Philippines, had treated with the pope and had taken her along when she was ten years old. She confided in an unpublished sentiment that her father thought the Chinese and the Spanish noble races but that a tempest brewed when they commingled. My impression was that the bad blood between Taft and Roosevelt began with dislike for Teddy’s bumptious ways by her mother whose ardent campaigning he thought unwomanly. After the First Lady’s stroke, teenaged Helen served as White House hostess, assisting her father in serving full suppers rather than the frail buffets customarily offered at the end of receiving lines. Although her father was not unyielding to the temptations of the groaning board, she wanted it known that his 350-pound frame was the mountainous resolution of a glandular injury he had suffered in a childhood fall from a carriage.

Taft was the lovely kind of kindly man whose bewilderment by unkindness rendered him incapable of intelligent response. As progressivist pressure against his administration increased, he took solace in automobile drives on which his daughter often accompanied him. The bellowing of Bull Moose demagogues ensured Taft’s defeat, but it was his wife and not he who had wanted the White House. His prize came when Harding appointed him chief justice; and when the family went to Buckingham Palace in 1922, the former president wore his judicial robes for their official portrait with George and Mary.

On March 8, 1930, Herbert Hoover was taking a quiet motor drive in the established tradition and only heard of Taft’s death when he returned to the White House. He was received at the Taft house on Wyoming Avenue by the two Helens, neither of whose faces launched a thousand ships, but one who gave Washington its cherry trees and the younger one who lived to see the misery of telephones in automobiles.

Author

  • Fr. George W. Rutler

    Fr. George W. Rutler is a contributing editor to Crisis and pastor of St. Michael's church in New York City. A four-volume anthology of his best spiritual writings, A Year with Fr. Rutler, is available now from the Sophia Institute Press.

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