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TAFT, WILLIAM HOWARD 1857-1930

SECRETARY OF WAR, 1904-1908

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1909-1913

Reluctant Politician

Few Americans had heard of William Howard Taft when President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to replace Elihu Root as secretary of war in 1904. In 1908, when conservative Republicans championed him as their presidential candidate, Taft's family and friends had to persuade him to run. He aspired to a seat on the Supreme Court, but his wife had greater ambitions for him. A large man given to lethargy, he did not have the drive or the skill to be a truly successful politician. "Politics, when I am in it, makes me sick," he exclaimed.

Background

Born on 15 September 1857 into a midwestern, staunchly Republican family of moderate wealth and some legal and political distinction near Cincinnati, Ohio, William Howard Taft was indoctrinated early with the conservative attitudes frequently found among members of the upper middle class. At Yale University he was exposed to the laissez-faire teachings of William Graham Sumner. After graduating as salutatorian from Yale University in 1878, he attended Cincinnati Law School, graduating in 1880. Except for his work in his father's law firm and as a part-time newspaper reporter in 1880 and his private law practice in 1883-1885, all the positions Taft held until he was elected president were appointive: assistant prosecuting attorney of Hamilton County, Ohio (1881-1882); collector of internal revenue for the First Ohio District (1882-1883); assistant county solicitor of Hamilton County (1885-1887); judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati (1887-1890); solicitor general of the United States (1890-1892); U.S. Circuit Court judge (1892-1900); president of the Second Philippine Commission (1900-1901); first civil governor of the Philippines (1901-1904); and secretary of war (1904-1908).

A Cabinet Post

Having already turned down an appointment to the Supreme Court, the job he really wanted, because of his sense of obligation to complete the work he had started as civil governor of the Philippines, Taft accepted the post of secretary of war in 1904 only because it would allow him to continue exerting control over activities in the Philippines. Powerful conservative Republicans welcomed his appearance in the cabinet as a counterbalance to Roosevelt's progressive leanings. Based on his success as civil governor of the Philippines, they bandied about his name as a possible challenger to Roosevelt for the Republican presidential nomination in 1904, but Roosevelt's popularity and his control of the party apparatus squelched the idea. Taft did a commendable job in the cabinet, traveling the world on missions to Japan, the Vatican, Cuba, China, Russia, and the Panama Canal Zone. Ignoring Taft's recent statements, which made him sound like a Roosevelt Republican, conservatives embraced him as the nominee in 1908 to block Roosevelt from seeking a third term, an event they feared even though the president had promised not to do so after the 1904 election. Elected to the presidency by a comfortable margin, Taft turned back toward his conservative roots just as the country veered to the left. His battles with the Republican insurgents on issues such as tariff reform and conservation split the party and opened the way for the Democrats to win the White House in 1912.

Judicial Temperament

As a judge Taft was a moderate on labor and social issues and a conservative on financial ones, and his judicial background influenced his philosophy about the role of the chief executive. He rejected Roosevelt's stretching and testing the limits of executive action, and he resented Roosevelt's fostering of this practice in his subordinates. As he wrote after his single term as president, "the President can exercise no power which cannot be reasonably and fairly traced to some specific grant of power or justly implied or included within such express grant as necessary and proper to its exercise. Such specific grant must be either in the Constitution or in an act of Congress passed in pursuance thereof." This philosophy was more in line with the nineteenth-century "caretaker" concept of the presidency than with ideas about the office in the Progressive Era. Yet Taft also met congressional attempts to encroach on his executive power with stiff rebukes. In spite of his conservative outlook, Taft's judicial approach allowed him to do more "trust busting" than the "Trust Buster" himself, to with-draw more public lands from development in four years than Roosevelt had in eight, and to enact more social-welfare legislation than his two predecessors. During World War I Taft served as head of the quasi-judicial War Labor Board. In 1921 Taft realized his lifelong dream when he was named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a post he held until his death on 8 March 1930. As chief justice he again proved somewhat more progressive than conservative, thus remaining something of an enigma in American political history.