William Howard Taft

I INTRODUCTION

William Howard Taft (1857-1930), 27th president of the United States (1909-1913) and tenth chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1921-1930). Taft was the only person in U.S. history to hold those two offices. He succeeded President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), who expected Taft to continue his crusade for reform. Instead Taft was more conservative, and the domestic reforms of the early 20th century slowed. Taft also replaced Roosevelt's aggressive foreign policy with one that was more measured. Taft's conservatism irritated Roosevelt, split the Republican Party, and ensured a Democratic victory for Woodrow Wilson in the presidential election of 1912.

II EARLY LIFE

William Howard Taft was born on September 15, 1857, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Alphonso and Louisa Torrey Taft. Both parents were descendants of old and substantial New England families of British origin. His father, a native of Vermont and the son of a judge, had moved to Cincinnati in 1837 to practice law. His mother came to Ohio from Massachusetts years later as Alphonso's second wife. Their first son died in infancy, but in 1857, William Howard Taft was born, healthy and strong. In time there were six children, including William, his two brothers, his sister, and his two half brothers by his father's first marriage. Traditions revering education and public service ran strong in the family. Alphonso Taft himself served as a judge in Ohio, as attorney general and secretary of war in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877), and as U.S. minister to Austria and to Russia. He set an example that his son William was to emulate and exceed.

Taft received his early education at local public schools. Even-tempered and intelligent, he had little difficulty in meeting his parents' exacting standards. In 1874 he entered Yale College (now Yale University), where he was both successful and popular. When he graduated in 1878, he ranked second in his class. After Yale he went home to attendthe Cincinnati Law School. He graduated in 1880 and passed the Ohio bar examinations the same year.

III EARLY CAREER

Although Taft was successful in his first job as court reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, only a few months passed between his graduation from law school and his first public appointment as assistant prosecutor of Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1881. The next year he was appointed Cincinnati's collector of internal revenue, but later resigned to pursue a private law practice.

In 1885 Taft returned to public service as assistant county solicitor in Hamilton County. The following year he married Helen Herron, whom he called Nellie, the daughter of a well-known Cincinnati lawyer. The couple had three children, Helen, Charles Phelps, and Robert Alphonso Taft, later a United States senator from Ohio. An intelligent and ambitious woman, Nellie Taft played an important role in Taft's choice of career and in his advancement.

A Judicial Appointment

Taft wanted a career in law. As he once said, “I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.” His first opportunity to serve as a judge came in 1887, when Ohio Governor Joseph Foraker chose Taft to complete an unfinished term on the Ohio Supreme Court. The following year, Taft was elected to a full term on the court. In 1889, although Taft was only 32 years old, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him United States solicitor general. Much later, Taft attributed his success in these early years to his father being well known, his own good standing with the Republican Party, and the fact that “like every well-trained Ohio man I had my plate the right side up when offices were falling.”

B Circuit Judge

Taft was an able solicitor general, winning 18 out of 20 cases. He gained a thorough grounding in constitutional law and “a pretty general knowledge of the persons who run things.” However, after a year he was back in Cincinnati as a circuit court judge. His wife regretted he would no longer be “thrown with the bigwigs,” but Taft welcomed his return to the bench as the beginning of the career he wanted. He remained on the circuit court for eight years. During this time he issued a series of injunctions against labor unions and labor leaders that earned him a reputation as an enemy of workers.

C Governor of the Philippines

In 1900 a fellow Ohioan, President William McKinley, asked Taft to head a commission to bring peace and order to the Philippines. The United States had captured the islands from Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, but rebels led by Emilio Aguinaldo resisted American occupation until 1901, when Aguinaldo was captured. Taft had been opposed to U.S. seizure of the islands and was unwilling to undertake the job, but McKinley persuaded him it was his duty. In Manila, Taft was soon involved in a conflict of power and policy with the military governor, General Arthur MacArthur, whose harsh treatment of the Filipinos contradicted Taft's objective: “to hold the Philippines for the benefit of the Filipinos.” Taft won, MacArthur was replaced, and in 1901, Taft was made civil governor of the islands. He then launched a sweeping reorganization of central and local government on the islands. He revised the educational and judicial systems, tax structure, and civil service. He purchased 161,880 hectares (400,000 acres) from the Roman Catholic church to redistribute among Filipinos (see Philippines: United States Rule).

Although a skillful administrator, Taft disliked politics and continued to declare his ambition to become a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. On the other hand, his wife wanted him to become president. In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's successor, offered to elevate Taft to the Supreme Court. Taft declined, pleading that he wanted to finish the job in the Philippines properly, but late in 1903 he returned to Washington as Roosevelt's secretary of war.

D Secretary of War

Roosevelt considered Taft one of the country's most valuable assets, and even Taft admitted that “the president seems really to take much comfort that I am in his Cabinet.” So able was he that Roosevelt felt free to leave the capital whenever he wished, because he had “left Taft sitting on the lid.” As Roosevelt's personal ambassador Taft was sent on many diplomatic missions. Taft helped to suppress a revolt in Cuba, supported a newly formed Panamanian government to hasten the construction of the Panama Canal, and took part in peace negotiations between Russia and Japan following the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).

E Presidential Candidate

In 1906 Taft was again offered a place on the Supreme Court. When asked if his father would accept, one of Taft's sons replied, “Nope. Ma wants him to wait and be president.” After the 1904 election, Roosevelt had vowed not to run again. Taft was closely identified with Roosevelt and his policies, and many Roosevelt supporters considered him an ideal successor. Because Roosevelt himself was satisfied that Taft's election would ensure that his reform programs were continued, he used his influence with each state's Republican Party to get Taft the nomination. As a result, Taft became the Republican candidate on the first ballot. He was elected president in 1908 with a popular vote of 7,675,320 to 6,412,294 for Nebraska editor and Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, and an electoral vote of 321 to Bryan's 162. Although decisive, Taft's margin of victory was not as great as Roosevelt's had been in the previous election.

IV PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

In succeeding a president as colorful and popular as Roosevelt, Taft was at a disadvantage. Taft had a judicial, not a political, personality. Although Roosevelt said of Taft that “there cannot be found in the whole country a man so well fitted to be president,” Taft was a procrastinator and a poor public speaker, and he altogether lacked Roosevelt's flair for dramatizing the issues and his intentions.

A Relations With Congress

Taft began his term of office thinking of his administration as a “progressive development of that which has been performed by President Roosevelt.” Roosevelt was a symbol of a period of reform, called the Progressive Era, which lasted from the last decade of the 19th century into the second decade of the 20th century. Reformers, or Progressives, were concerned about abuses of power by government and businesses. They wanted to make the United States a better place to live, and like Roosevelt, they believed that the government had an important role to play in change.

Taft, too, was eager to contribute to social progress by laying the legal foundation for this reform. However, by nature, Taft was more conservative than Roosevelt. Furthermore, conditioned by his legal training and cast of mind, he conceived the role of the presidency in different terms: He expected the Congress of the United States to take the lead and refused to extend executive or federal powers without Congressional approval.

Taft soon offended Roosevelt's supporters. Roosevelt had been able to maintain an uneasy alliance between the two wings of the Republican Party, the so-called Standpatters (conservative Republicans) and the Progressives. Unfortunately Taft drove the two further apart.

The Standpatters, led by Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich and House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon, represented financial and industrial interests and supported high tariffs (import taxes), minimal government intervention in business, and few, if any, social and economic reforms. The Progressives, led by United States Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and Nebraska Representative George William Norris, represented Midwestern and Western farming and small business interests and supported lower tariffs, more government regulation of big businesses and social and economic reform.

B Republican Party Split

Taft chose almost all Standpatters for his Cabinet, including five corporation lawyers, and then clashed with the reformers on three major issues during his administration, splitting the Republican Party and alienating Roosevelt. The issues were tariff reform, conservation, and revision of the House of Representatives' rules of procedure.

During the campaign, Taft had committed himself to lower tariffs. Tariffs on imports raised money for the government and protected U.S. businesses from foreign competition by increasing the cost of importing those goods. Industries in Northern urban areas and banking interests tended to favor high tariffs because they helped domestic businesses; agricultural areas in the West and the South tended to oppose them because they made it harder for people to buy cheap foreign goods such as clothing. Taft called a special session of Congress early in 1909 to fulfill his low-tariff promise, but he was not as skilled at politics as Roosevelt had been. The Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, which he signed reluctantly, actually raised the tariff on many products and protected special interests. In an attempt to convince the American people that it was a good law, Taft made a 20,920-km (13,000-mi) railroad tour of the United States. In Winona, Minnesota, he said he thought it was the best bill the Republican Party had ever passed—a statement he would long regret. Enraged reformers were certain he had betrayed both them and the people.

The conservation controversy further widened the gap in the party. In forming his Cabinet, Taft had replaced Roosevelt's secretary of the interior, James R. Garfield, with Richard A. Ballinger. Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forestry Service and as much a symbol of conservation as his friend Roosevelt, accused Ballinger of allowing private companies to obtain reserved coal lands in Alaska. In the course of investigating the charges, Taft dismissed Pinchot. His action further alienated Roosevelt and heightened Progressives' accusations that Taft had abandoned the Roosevelt tradition.

Revising the rules of the House of Representatives was the third major issue that divided the party. At stake was the stranglehold maintained on the United States House of Representatives by its dictatorial speaker, Cannon, through his power to recognize speakers and appoint members of the various House committees, especially the powerful Rules Committee. Using these prerogatives ruthlessly the speaker had blocked efforts to pass progressive legislation and reform.

On the private advice of Roosevelt and New York Senator Elihu Root, Taft did not support an assault on Cannon, and the reformers were defeated in 1910. However, in 1911, in coalition with the Democrats, the Progressives succeeded in restricting the speaker's powers, but they accused Taft of betraying the Roosevelt legacy and never forgave him for failing to support them.

Having lost Progressive backing, Taft was forced increasingly to depend on conservative support for his legislative program, and by fall he was actively opposing the Progressives in Republican state conventions and primaries as well as in Congress. As a result, in the 1910 elections the Democrats won a 50-seat majority in the House and an additional 8 seats in the Senate. Roosevelt, back from his trip, campaigned for Republicans in 1910 and blamed Taft for the Democratic gains. The gap between the Republican factions was now unbridgeable.

C Reform Program

Despite the attacks on him, Taft made important contributions to reform. He actively and consistently prosecuted monopolies (one company supplying a commodity or service, and therefore controlling its price) and trusts (one company running several companies as though they were one company to control prices).

Almost twice the number of antitrust cases were brought to the courts in Taft's four-year term than during Roosevelt's seven and a half years in office. In 1910 Taft signed the Mann-Elkins Act, which placed various communications companies, including telephone, telegraph, radio and cable services, under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which had been created in 1887 to help regulate the economy. This act increased the commission's powers and jurisdiction, giving it the right to set railroad rates and intervene in freight classifications, and formed a Commerce Court inside the commission to review and enforce its decisions.

During Taft's administration, Congress passed the 16th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which gave the U.S. government the right to collect income taxes, and the 17th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of U.S. senators. His Commission on Efficiency and Economy pioneered major changes in federal finances and cut the cost of government by making operations more efficient. He helped to improve the U.S. currency and banking system. Furthermore, he signed the Publicity Act, which required political parties to divulge the sources and amounts of money they spent in federal election campaigns.

Taft's social legislation was also impressive. Under him, Congress divided Roosevelt's Department of Commerce and Labor into two departments and established within the Labor Department a federal Children's Bureau. He set up a Bureau of Mines in the Department of the Interior to help reduce mine accidents and fatalities. He also signed bills to introduce railroad safety devices, compensation for injured workers, and the eight-hour day on federal work projects. Many of these reforms were progressive, but Taft failed to convince many people that he was responsible for pushing them forward.

D Dollar Diplomacy

Taft, like Roosevelt, had ambitious plans to expand U.S. influence abroad. Aided by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, Taft substituted “dollars for bullets,” as he put it, a plan soon known as dollar diplomacy. Taft encouraged U.S. bankers and industrialists to invest abroad and used diplomatic pressure to force U.S. capital into regions where “it would not go of its own accord.” One of the first regions he chose was China, where he persuaded U.S. bankers to finance railroad construction. Taft and Knox also conceived a plan to help China purchase Japanese and Russian railroads in Manchuria. When Japan and Russia objected, however, the plan was abandoned, because U.S. military power was too weak to force these nations to agree to the plan. Roosevelt disliked this waste of U.S. diplomatic effort and told Taft that he shouldn't pursue policies unless he was prepared to back them up with force.

To safeguard the Panama Canal, Taft intensified dollar diplomacy in Latin America. He promoted U.S. investments in the Caribbean, arranged it so that Americans were in charge of Latin American finances whenever possible, and used U.S. Marines when persuasion failed to accomplish his objectives. His policies, although applauded by some, were severely criticized by many, both within and outside the United States. Less controversial were his support of an international agreement in 1911 to preserve seal herds and his settlement of the Newfoundland fisheries disputes.

Still in need of a major accomplishment in foreign affairs, Taft turned to Canada and in 1911 negotiated and pushed through Congress a reciprocal trade agreement to lower tariffs between the two countries. To Taft's dismay the Canadians, who held an election on the issue, rejected the treaty. He encountered even greater difficulty with treaties he negotiated with Great Britain and France the same year because the Senate amended them beyond recognition. Taft did not even go through the process of ratification, hoping, as he later stated, that “the senators might change their minds, or that the people might change the Senate; instead of which they changed me.”

E Election of 1912

Theodore Roosevelt made it clear early in 1912 that he wanted the Republican nomination for president. By now the former friends were bitter enemies, and Taft was determined that Roosevelt should not succeed. With his control over the party machinery, Taft prevented the seating of many Roosevelt delegates at the 1912 national convention and kept the official Republican nomination for himself. However, his hopes for reelection were limited, for as he himself put it, his administration was uninteresting and failed to attract anybody's attention or enthusiasm. Roosevelt agreed and led his supporters out of the Republican Party to a new party, the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party (see Progressive Party: The Bull Moose Party).

As a result of the Republican-Progressive split, the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, easily won the election. Although the popular vote for Wilson was less than the combined popular vote obtained by Roosevelt and Taft, he received 435 electoral votes against Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's 8. Even Arizona and New Mexico, which had become states during Taft's administration, supported the Democrats.

V LATER LIFE

A Law Professor

Once out of the White House, Taft went to his alma mater, which had become Yale University in 1887, to teach constitutional law. During his eight years at Yale he lectured throughout the United States and published a number of books. In time he and Roosevelt became friends again, and they worked together for the Republican ticket in the 1916 election. During World War I, in 1918, President Wilson appointed Taft cochairman of the National War Labor Board, created to mediate labor disputes during the war. After the war, Taft used his influence to support the League of Nations, an association of the world's nations that was the first international peacekeeping organization. In 1920 Warren G. Harding, a Republican from Ohio, was elected president, and in 1921, Taft secured his dream, appointment as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

B Chief Justice

Taft's service as chief justice of the Supreme Court contrasted sharply to his years as president. Cautious in his use of power in the White House, he greatly stretched the powers of the chief justice to press for judicial reform. At that time the court was swamped by a mass of litigation, much of it unimportant. Pushed by his lobbying, Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1925, which gave the Supreme Court more power over which cases it would hear. Taft also started a conference for circuit court judges and used his influence to get the Supreme Court its own building. His reform of judicial administration greatly increased the efficiency of the courts.

Judicial efficiency was of the utmost importance to Taft, for he believed that effective and just courts could help stop social unrest and prevent radical social change. Above all, he saw the Supreme Court as the guardian of the Constitution and of property rights. As he grew older, his position grew increasingly conservative. He was considered the leader of the conservative faction of the court, as opposed to the more liberal justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Dembitz Brandeis, and Harlan F. Stone. It was during these later years that the phrase “Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone dissenting” became commonplace. Much as these dissents annoyed Taft, the years that he spent as chief justice were extremely happy ones for him.

At age 72, gravely ill, Taft retired from the court and from a lifetime of public service. He died at his home in Washington, D.C., on March 8, 1930. Taft was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in northeastern Virginia, the first president to be buried there.

William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft was the first person to serve as both the president of the United States (1909-1913) and chief justice of the Supreme Court (1921-1930). Taft, who admitted that he never really wanted to be president, considered his appointment to the nation's highest court his greatest achievement.