There was a lot of support for the amendment rooted in antipathy to the millionaire class and a desire to make them pay, but did that mean the bill would get the necessary 2/3rds vote from Congress in 1909? That’s less likely.
If Congress had just passed an income tax law the courts could have overturned that. If the conservatives had fought the amendment in Congress, they might have defeated it.
Probably the amendment would have been passed in the next Congress or the one after that, since the Democrats took over Congress in the midterms, but we got the amendment when we got it because of a technical miscalculation by the conservatives.
This. This is exactly why I named Theodore Roosevelt.
All that support and antipathy you talk about? It's true. But what does it mean? Teddy caused it to be focused on a graduated income tax. That was Teddy's talking point. A graduated income tax. That's the word - graduated income tax. Some of that "support" and "antipathy" was not real. It was fake. It was ginned up, it was astroturf. Teddy ginned it up.
Not only did he keep insisting on the need for class warfare in his State of the Union Addresses, he would also give speeches and write articles about the graduated. In his "Man with the Muck Rake" Roosevelt uses his dour attitude to pimp for the income tax and that's not even what the article is about. He just could not help it. Teddy loved him some huge government. That is who he was. He lived and breathed big huge massive government, like any other progressive. Theodore Roosevelt embodied statism and he needed it to get bigger.
Process-wise this is how we got the 16th Amendment. We really got fsssked by Teddy. It was all Theodore Roosevelt. He fsssked us.
This was not Taft. Taft may have been the guy who did the speech in 1909, but he's just a fall guy here. Taft does not deserve the blame. Roosevelt does. Taft is innocent.
You mention a lot of "ifs". Maybe one or more are true. If this, maybe that, if if here and the other if. I can buy a number of them and agree. The fact is though as the history actually happened. We in the United States are saddled with the 16th amendment because of Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose Progressive Crusader. It is all singularly his fault. It was dead with Pollock, and he brought it right roaring back to life like a necromancer.
And Teddy also wanted the death tax. Which we did end up being saddled with also. Woodrow Wilson did that because Wilson was such a mirror copy of Teddy's progressivism in his true beliefs after the campaign ended.