Brother Horace

Horace Button Taft, founder, saint and for 46 years headmaster of the Taft School for Boys, died last week at the age of 81. He leaves Groton's venerable Endicott Peabody (now 85) as the last of the generation of schoolmasters who built the U.S. private preparatory-school system. Like his brother William Howard, Horace had great good humor and a flowing mustache, but he was several inches taller and weighed half as much.*

Horace Taft practiced law briefly in William Howard Taft's Cincinnati office, then tutored Latin at Yale before deciding to open a boys' school in 1890. At that time when a boy was sent away to school people usually asked, "What's the matter with him?" Taft first thought of Kansas City, but it seemed too frontierlike. He began his school--"small and in some ways comical"--at Pelham Manor (near New York City) with seven day pupils and ten boarders, whom he woke each morning by pulling off their blankets.

Three years later, the very gentle, scholarly and upright teacher moved to an old summer hotel at Watertown, Conn, and used an abandoned race track as a playing field. Not all the hotel guests had moved out when the school moved in, and boys were sometimes interrupted during study hour by cries for "Three beers and some pretzels to Room 32!"

In Watertown the Taft School stayed and prospered. Horace Taft and another master owned the school personally until 1927, when they turned it over to a board of trustees so that endowments could be solicited. Taft himself soon raised $2,000,000--notably $300,000 from half-brother Charles Phelps Taft and $500,000 from Yale's and Harvard's great benefactor, Edward S. Harkness.

Horace Taft, stern as well as benign, made his boys work their heads off. Said he, with a scornful glance at progressive education: "I am a great believer in the vital importance for character building of that which comes from training in old-fashioned obedience. . . . The farther we move toward the Golden Age in which the people shall rule, the more vital becomes the necessity that the people shall obey." His passion for civic as well as scholastic discipline won him undeserved notoriety as a prohibitionist. Sighed he: "Although I was never a prohibitionist, I rarely succeeded in making anybody believe there was a distinction between a prohibitionist and a law-enforcement man."

Taft retired from his school in 1936, when it had more than 300 boys. The secretary of Worcester Academy, hearing that Horace Taft was "leaving Taft," sent him an application blank for admission to Worcester. Taft gravely filled it out (including the question "How old are you?") and mailed it back. Said he: "One thing looked a little bad about the questionnaire. There was no question as to why I was leaving the Taft School, a very important question for a school receiving a new boy."

* Other prominent Taft brothers: Charles Phelps, Cincinnati publisher (died 1929), and Henry Waters, of Manhattan's law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.

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