Background
Taber was born in Auburn, New York on May 5, 1880, the son of attorney and businessman Franklin P. Taber and Mary (Parker) Taber.
Taber was born in Auburn, New York on May 5, 1880, the son of attorney and businessman Franklin P. Taber and Mary (Parker) Taber.
After attending the local public schools, he received a B. A. from Yale in 1902. Two years later he graduated from the New York Law School in Albany.
He was admitted to the New York bar. He then joined his father's law firm of Taber and Brainard in Auburn. In 1918 he opened his own law office and in 1924 went into partnership with Sherman Parker.
As a young lawyer, Taber joined the Cayuga County Republican Committee, serving as supervisor of Auburn's second ward. He was elected county judge in 1911, a post he held until 1919. He was a delegate to the Republican national conventions of 1920, 1924, and 1936. Taber began his long congressional career in 1923, when he was elected to the House of Representatives from the thirty-sixth district comprising Cayuga and three (later seven) other counties. Conservative Republican farmers and townsmen dominated this rural district of central New York, and Taber's own conservatism reflected their attitudes on most issues.
From 1923 to 1963 he served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, where he soon became known as a fiscal conservative and a bitter partisan. As the result of Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic landslide of 1932, which toppled senior Republican committee members, Taber became Appropriations' ranking Republican.
After the Republican congressional election landslide of 1946 Taber assumed the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee. He also became the first chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Budget, which made him one of the most influential members of government. His nearly obsessive concern for fiscal conservatism now earned him the ironic epithet "generous John. " On the Congress floor his deep, rasping voice thundered against the "excessive" financial requests of President Harry S. Truman's administration. In committee, no appropriation item was too small for scrutiny. His forty-three-member group quickly went to work on President Truman's $37. 5 billion budget, with Taber vowing to use a sledgehammer. He recruited a temporary staff of thirty financial experts from the private sector, paying most of them only $15 a day. His committee reduced the budget by several hundred million dollars, the biggest departmental cuts coming from the Interior and State departments. Although Taber failed to reduce federal jobs by 50 percent, enough government employees were fired to justify the expression "Taberizing, " meaning dismissal or cutback.
Taber's activities jeopardized Truman's foreign policy in 1947 when he persuaded his committee to cut appropriations to Greece and Turkey by $3 million. He also was responsible for the temporary $1. 5 billion reduction in Marshall Plan funding. These decisions came after Taber returned from a European trip, at which time he supposedly quipped that foreigners appeared to be almost as lazy and inefficient as American civil service workers. Despite Taber's postwar isolationist tendencies, he reluctantly supported United States participation in the United Nations and favored loans to Great Britain.
Taber's Appropriations Committee chairmanship terminated when the Democrats regained control of Congress in 1949. By that time he claimed that he had saved the federal government more than $6 billion, a figure Democrats disputed because many of his cuts were soon overturned. If anything, they charged, his actions contributed to the uncertainty of the period. Moreover, liberal critics accused Taber of stopping only projects not in accord with his views. Taber opposed public housing, prolabor legislation, price and wage controls, and federal grants for school lunches. He voted for a permanent House Un-American Committee, believing that Communists had infiltrated the government, universities, and army. In 1953 he regained the Appropriations Committee chairmanship, which he retained through 1954. Although friendly to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Taber sometimes found himself at odds with the administration's centrist policies. He jocularly labeled himself "the worst Republican in Congress. "
By 1956 Taber appeared to have mellowed, for he urged the Appropriations Committee to propose $335 million more for national defense than the committee favored. He continued to serve in the House until 1963. Two years later he died in an Auburn nursing home.
During the 1930's he was a leading anti-New Dealer. He unsuccessfully assailed "extravagant" unemployment relief allocations, agricultural subsidies, and other Roosevelt programs. Congressional Republicans who refused to compromise with the New Deal, he asserted, were more likely to be reelected. He also opposed the administration's Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 and the Naval Appropriations Bill of 1938. Although Taber voted against the relaxation of the Neutrality Laws and the original lend-lease bill, his isolationism evaporated once the United States entered World War II. He voted for all war appropriations despite his continued criticism of Democratic domestic policy. No one more despised Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Taber thought to be deceitful and a warmonger.
He won the grudging respect of his colleagues, who viewed him as fair-minded and hardworking. His bluntness and gruff demeanor made him few friends, but he nonetheless showed kindness to those who penetrated the hard exterior.
On April 13, 1929, Taber married his secretary, Gertrude J. Beard; they had one son.