Of Note is an occasional series in which we share items that have caught our eye.
In March 1909, William H. Taft was inaugurated president of the United States. At the same time, his younger brother Horace D. Taft operated The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, where President Taft’s son Charles P. Taft was a student. This confluence of events allowed a humorous classroom episode of students misinterpreting their textbook to be captured in a May 3, 1910, letter from Horace to Will that is now available online in the William H. Taft Papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.
Horace reported to his brother an exchange between Mr. McIntosh, who taught Charlie Taft’s Roman History class, and the students. Mr. McIntosh asked the students about “the dreadful events in the later Roman Empire, when everything was going to eternal smash and taxes were crushing the life out of the people.” To this one of the pupils added that “husbands had divorced their wives in many places.” Another boy agreed about the breakdown of family life in the later Roman Empire. An understandably confused Mr. McIntosh queried the class, which was “almost unanimous in saying that that was what the book said.”
And what had the textbook actually stated? “That