William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft: The Man Who Wanted the Other Job

Theodore Roosevelt twice offered him a seat on the Supreme Court, and he turned it down. Roosevelt made him president instead, and he was miserable. Of the 1908 campaign his wife Nellie observed that there was "nothing to criticize, except his not knowing or caring about the way the game of politics is played." Thirteen years later Warren Harding gave him the job he had wanted all along, and William Howard Taft — the only person ever to hold both offices — spent the happiest years of his life on the Supreme Court.

A Family Trade

He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 15 September 1857, to Alphonso Taft and Louise Torrey. The law was the family business: Alphonso had been a judge, an ambassador, and both Secretary of War and Attorney General under Ulysses S. Grant. At Yale he won the intramural heavyweight wrestling title and graduated second in a class of 121 in 1878. He took his law degree at Cincinnati Law School in 1880, and the climb that followed was fast and almost entirely judicial: assistant prosecutor, tax collector, and in 1887, at twenty-nine, a seat on the Superior Court of Cincinnati. He married Helen "Nellie" Herron in June 1886, after she first refused him; the marriage lasted nearly forty-four years.

The Lawyer's Lawyer

As Solicitor General from 1890, Taft argued eighteen cases before the Supreme Court and won fifteen. He also created, in 1891, the "confession of error" — the practice by which the government tells the Court it won a case it should have lost. It survives: a rule built to make government behave correctly when nobody is forcing it to.

From 1892 to 1900 he sat on the Sixth Circuit. He backed labour's right to organise and strike, and in *United States v. Addyston Pipe and Steel Co.* he held that a manufacturers' association violated the Sherman Antitrust Act — an opinion unanimously upheld and credited with reviving that statute. From 1896 he was also dean at Cincinnati Law School, where he introduced the case method.

Manila

In 1900 McKinley pulled him off the bench to chair the commission establishing civilian government in the Philippines. He served as Governor-General from 4 July 1901 to 4 July 1904, through the closing phase of the Philippine–American War. He approved General J. Franklin Bell's use of concentration camps in Batangas and Laguna, and accepted General Miguel Malvar's surrender in April 1902. He also refused to segregate official events, treated Filipinos as social equals, and wrote of the American assumption of racial superiority that "we propose to banish this idea from their minds" — while regarding independence as decades away.

Roosevelt made him Secretary of War in 1904 and used him as a universal troubleshooter: he oversaw the Panama Canal, picked George Goethals to build it, and in 1906 briefly governed Cuba himself.

The Presidency He Did Not Want

In 1908 Roosevelt's machine delivered him a first-ballot nomination, and he beat William Jennings Bryan 321 electoral votes to 162 on 51.6 per cent of the popular vote. He was sworn in on 4 March 1909 inside the Senate chamber, Washington being sheathed in ice. Then came four years in which a first-rate lawyer discovered he was a third-rate politician.

He brought seventy Sherman Act suits in four years against Roosevelt's forty in seven — a more aggressive record than the trust-buster's — and got no credit. When Congress wanted an income tax, he objected on constitutional grounds and proposed an amendment instead; it passed both houses in July 1909 and was ratified in 1913 as the Sixteenth Amendment. The Payne–Aldrich tariff he signed that August satisfied nobody and, in his biographer Coletta's judgment, cost him the initiative permanently. The Ballinger–Pinchot affair — his dismissal of the whistleblower Louis Glavis and then of chief forester Gifford Pinchot, followed by Louis Brandeis's proof that the exonerating report had been backdated — convinced progressives he had abandoned conservation. On race his record was worse than his predecessor's: his "Southern Policy" removed most Southern Black officeholders. He appointed six Supreme Court justices, a total exceeded only by Washington and Franklin Roosevelt.

Armageddon

The break with Roosevelt was, at bottom, about courts. When he began calling for the popular recall of judges and their decisions, Taft — who privately agreed that cases like *Lochner* had been wrongly decided — concluded that his old friend was a danger to constitutional government and had to be stopped "whatever the cost." Roosevelt won 278 of the 362 delegates chosen in primaries; Taft held the machinery. At the Chicago convention Roosevelt told his followers, "we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord," and lost the decisive procedural vote 567 to 507. Taft was renominated on the first ballot; Roosevelt bolted to form the Progressive Party. In November, running on what he called "progressive conservatism" against Roosevelt's "benevolent despotism," Taft carried Utah and Vermont — the result he expected, and the price he accepted for saving his party from Roosevelt.

The Center Seat

He taught constitutional law at Yale, sat on the National War Labor Board, and campaigned for the League of Nations. In 1921 Harding appointed him Chief Justice — probably the happiest period of his career, and the one in which his gifts finally matched his job.

His major achievement was legislative: the Judges' Act of 1925, which gave the Supreme Court broad discretion over its own docket through certiorari, letting it concentrate on constitutional questions of national weight, and it is the reason the modern Court works as it does. He wrote *Myers v. United States* (1926) upholding the president's power to remove executive officials, and restricted injunctions against organised labour. He also presided over a Court that upheld racial segregation and compulsory sterilisation, struck down minimum wages for women, and decided *Olmstead* in favour of warrantless wiretapping. Failing health forced his resignation on 3 February 1930; he died on 8 March, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the first president and the first justice laid there.

Why William Is Called a Genius

Taft's claim is narrow, technical and strong. As a lawyer and judicial administrator he was formidable: fifteen wins from eighteen Supreme Court arguments as Solicitor General, an opinion that restored life to the Sherman Act, a law-school deanship, and finally the Judges' Act of 1925 — an institutional redesign that changed what the Supreme Court is for, and few people have restructured a branch of government as durably. The "confession of error" and the certiorari power show the same quality of mind: a talent for building rules that make institutions behave well after their designer has gone.

The counter-case is equally clear, and Taft largely conceded it himself. He was a poor politician who did not enjoy politics, could not manage the press, and repeatedly took defensible legal positions in ways that lost him every constituency at once; historians place him near the middle of presidential rankings. His Philippine service included approving concentration camps; his racial policies as president were retrograde even by his own party's standards; and his Court, for all its administrative brilliance, produced some of the worst constitutional law of the century. Taft was a legal intellect of the first rank who spent four years in a job requiring a different faculty entirely, and knew it.

Legacy

The Supreme Court that selects its own cases, and speaks only on questions it judges nationally important, is Taft's Court, built by his statute — a larger legacy than a presidency remembered mainly for the schism it produced. He is the answer to a trivia question; the point is that he was far better at the second job than the first.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Yale Law School, Boston University and University of Cincinnati
• Educated at Yale College, University of Cincinnati College of Law and University of Cincinnati
• Worked as judge, lawyer and prosecutor