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 in many places ‘husbandry almost ceased.’” The students mistook “husbandry” to mean the marital bonds of human husbands rather than the practice of animal husbandry, which involves raising livestock.
One can almost hear an echo of Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride” saying “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Endowed with a keen sense of humor, Horace Taft no doubt enjoyed the misinterpretation of the state of things in the late Roman Empire, as well as an essay from another pupil who argued that Benjamin Franklin “was too much influenced by the books he read, as when he gave up his faith in God and became a vegetarian.” While President Taft probably had a chuckle over these stories as well, his May 6, 1910, reply to his brother’s letter only commented on Horace’s postscript, in which he ribbed Will about violating speed laws when allowing the presidential chauffeur to drive too fast.
Horace D. Taft operated what became The Taft School from its inception in 1890 until his retirement in 1936. He died in January 1943, but his legacy lives on in the school he founded and which carries his name to this day.
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Comments
Fun!