President William Howard Taft

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William Howard Taft moves across the American story like a large, courteous ship that prefers deep water to spectacle. He is remembered in cartoons as girth and in footnotes as an asterisk—only man to be both president and chief justice—but the truth is more intricate: he was a craftsman of institutions, a temperament tuned to law and procedure in an epoch that rewarded drumbeats and banners. He did not hunger for the presidency; he wanted the Court. Yet the republic, in one of its recurring experiments, placed him first where he was least comfortable and later where he was always meant to be. To understand the man is to watch intelligence and decency continually choose duty over desire and to see how that choice, repeated long enough, becomes a kind of greatness that the loud decades often mishear.
He is born in Cincinnati in 1857 into a household that treats character like a family heirloom and books like furniture. His father, Alphonso Taft, is a lawyer’s lawyer, a judge’s judge, eventually a cabinet officer and diplomat, a man whose sentences are careful at the joints. From him the son learns the pleasures of clarity, the moral of patience, the sense that public work should be clean enough to leave in a will. Yale adds polish to that inheritance. He is bright rather than dazzling, diligent rather than showy, a natural conciliator who rises by doing the day’s work so thoroughly that tomorrow’s work seems to nominate him. Back in Ohio he reads law and walks into the life that will make him: prosecutor, then judge of the Cincinnati Superior Court while most men of his age are still trying to memorize which fork belongs to which course. He marries Helen Herron—“Nellie”—an ambitious, cultured partner who loves music and power with the same frankness. She prefers the executive mansion to any robe; she will push, plan, cheer, and, after a stroke early in his presidency, recover into a quieter but still formidable counsel. Their partnership is a theme: his decency does not wilt in her heat and her heat does not scorch his prudence.
Washington notices the young Ohio judge in the Harrison years. At thirty-two he becomes Solicitor General of the United States, the government’s lawyer before the Supreme Court. He argues with a voice that never rises and a logic that never wobbles. The justices come to trust him because he reads the record like a man who will have to live with the consequences of his argument. He wins a great many cases because he picks his ground and because he is almost constitutionally incapable of swagger. Then he returns, as if on a spring, to the bench: the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, a jurisdiction that includes the beating heart of the industrial Midwest. There he writes opinions that are both conservative and energetic—conservative in respect for precedent and property, energetic in insisting that the new trusts cannot auction off the public interest with private contracts. In Addyston Pipe and Steel he explains with crystalline patience why a cartel is not merely another word for cooperation; he describes the difference between efficiency that lowers prices and conspiracy that taxes them; he translates the Sherman Act—still a young statute—into a workable doctrine without cheering himself hoarse. The habit is revealing: he likes the law best when it behaves like a civilized tool in a rough century.
His life changes course not with a gavel but with an ocean. In 1900 William McKinley sends him to the Philippines to chair the new commission that will translate victory and occupation into governance and law. A year later, as Civil Governor, he becomes the face of an American promise complicated by American presence. He builds courts, schools, and a civil service that tries to outgrow patronage; he restrains generals when they confuse punitive expedition with policy; he sits, for hour after meticulous hour, hearing petitions from Filipinos who want roads, justice, and dignity. He loves the work, not because it is power but because it is construction—arguing into existence rules that might endure. Twice he declines a seat on the Supreme Court because he says he cannot abandon the islands before they can stand. It is the most revealing act of his career: turning away from his heart’s office to finish the job his conscience assigns. His correspondence from Manila is full of schedules, budgets, health orders, appointment lists, and a paternal affection that can sound old-fashioned and still be genuine. He is not a poet of empire; he is a municipal reformer with a whole archipelago on his desk.
Roosevelt brings him home through the War Department door. As Secretary of War he becomes the administration’s general contractor. He tames the paperwork of the Panama Canal and walks the ditch with engineers as if he has always been one of them; he oversees the Army’s reorganization; he is the provisional governor in Cuba long enough to teach the lesson that American occupation, however clumsy, need not be perpetual; he remains the emissary to the Philippines in spirit and in letters. Roosevelt admires him as only a man of constant motion can admire a man of constant steadiness. He begins to pronounce the name “Taft” in sentences that look like plans for succession. Taft demurs and then acquiesces, because he trusts a friend and because his wife’s eyes shine when the topic is the White House.
The 1908 campaign puts his temperament on parade. He is courteous to a fault, disciplined in argument, a little shy in crowds. He speaks for the gold standard and a protective tariff arranged with more brains than sentiment; he defends Roosevelt’s program without wearing Roosevelt’s costume; he treats William Jennings Bryan as a serious man with wrong answers rather than as a demon; he wins with margins broad enough to leave the party feeling unified on paper and divided in its blood. The party’s right wing hopes a judge will be predictable; the party’s progressive wing hopes a friend of Roosevelt will be energetic. The judge-president becomes a test of how far serenity can travel in a decade that loves noise.
He begins with a promise and a misstep. He promised tariff revision; the Payne–Aldrich Tariff arrives as a product of congressional craft and industrial pressure rather than of neutral arithmetic. It barely reduces some schedules, raises others, speaks in the old dialect of favors. Taft signs because he believes in the separation of powers, because he has extracted a tariff board that might make future policy data-driven, because he thinks half a loaf can be leaven for better bread later. Then he praises the bill too generously, calling it the best the party has ever produced. The sentence hangs in the air like a wrong note. Progressives hear betrayal; old guard members hear permission. The judge’s habit—explain the record as it is, not as people wish it to be—does not translate well at a rally where the public had been promised a cleansing.
The Ballinger–Pinchot affair widens the crack into a canyon. Richard Ballinger, the new Interior Secretary, is a lawyer who finds some Roosevelt-era conservation withdrawals overbroad; Gifford Pinchot, the high priest of forestry, hears in Ballinger’s caution the ancient song of the land dealer. Taft, confronted with accusations that Ballinger has favored private theft masked as policy, orders an investigation conducted with the punctilio of a judge. The report clears Ballinger of corruption while condemning some judgments; Taft, loyal to process, defends his subordinate and fires Pinchot for insubordination when the forester continues to attack. This is, politically, suicidal; personally, it is consistent with his creed. He is determined that a president should not be ruled by notoriety when the facts, assembled and weighed, point elsewhere. Roosevelt, returning from Africa to drums and flags, hears about forests and faithlessness and sees in his friend’s legalism a retreat from moral energy. What had been a friendship becomes a correspondence of grievances.
Yet the Taft presidency is not a desert of accomplishments. It is, instead, a ledger dense with reforms written in the small clean hand of a man who thinks statutes matter more than slogans. He signs the Mann–Elkins Act in 1910, which strengthens the Interstate Commerce Commission and extends its reach to telephone and telegraph rates, folding the new nervous system of commerce into the law’s jurisdiction. He creates a short-lived Commerce Court to specialize in rate cases, an experiment in judicial administration that later reformers will abolish but that reveals his instinct to pair complexity with expert adjudication. He signs the Postal Savings System into existence, giving small savers a federal mattress; he pushes parcel post to the finish line, and on New Year’s Day 1913 packages begin to move under a public stamp rather than only under private cartel prices. He champions a Bureau of Mines to prevent the waste of mineral wealth and the waste of miners’ lives; he supports the Children’s Bureau to collect facts about the vulnerable and transform sentiment into policy; he signs statehood for New Mexico and Arizona, bringing the star count to forty-eight; he plants cherry trees along the Tidal Basin, a gentle treaty with beauty that will outlast any argument about tariffs.
On taxes and representation he moves the constitutional furniture. The old income tax had been struck down; the corporation tax of 1909, drafted as an excise on corporate privilege, becomes a bridge to the Sixteenth Amendment. He urges the amendment forward; the states will ratify after he leaves office, but the authorship of the idea belongs to the period when a careful president decided the federal government required a modern revenue to match a modern economy. He also comes, after initial qualms, to support direct election of senators; the Seventeenth Amendment, too, will be ratified in the first months of his successor, but the momentum gathers under his hand. It is not drama; it is constitutional maintenance, and he is a superb custodian.
His Department of Justice sues more trusts in four years than Roosevelt sued in seven. Numbers are not everything; philosophy matters. Taft does not hate bigness as bigness. He hates combinations that use bigness as a weapon against competition and the public. The Supreme Court’s “rule of reason” opinions in 1911, dissolving Standard Oil and American Tobacco, occur on his watch. He applauds the doctrine because it makes antitrust a scalpel rather than a club: punish suppression of competition, tolerate scale where it does not prey. He appoints Edward Douglass White as Chief Justice of the United States in 1910—an associate justice elevated to the center chair—and he chooses judges by reading their opinions rather than their résumés. This is a president who keeps the judiciary close to his heart because it is the institution that fits his mind.
Abroad he practices what his opponents label “Dollar Diplomacy” and what he and Secretary of State Philander Knox consider strategic arithmetic: substitute bank loans and customs receiverships for gunboats where possible, stabilize finances to keep European powers from inventing pretexts, encourage American investment where railways and ports will tether growth to order. In Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic the policy looks alternately like hygiene and like intrusion; customs houses become schoolrooms for fiscal responsibility and also symbols of foreign oversight. In China, an effort to finance Manchurian railways runs aground on great-power suspicion. In Canada, a carefully negotiated reciprocity agreement collapses not on its merits but under elections that convert tariffs into identity. He is personally passionate about arbitration and drafts ambitious treaties with Britain and France to submit disputes to law; the Senate reserves the right to reserve; the treaties survive only as modest statements of aspiration. It is the recurring story of his life: a lawyer’s imagination domesticated by a politician’s math.
By the midterms of 1910 the country has grown impatient with balance. The progressive revolt in the House breaks Joseph Cannon’s old autocracy; the party fractures along a line that runs through Taft’s desk. He tries to govern on the center of that line, which in that year is the least stable place in America to stand. Roosevelt, returned from safari with a notebook full of sentences and a heart full of grievance, declares that the next phase must be called New Nationalism, a creed that takes Taft’s administrative progressivism and adds moral voltage—social insurance, a more explicit doctrine of federal guardianship over industry, the recall of judicial decisions in extreme cases. Taft hears in this a hazard to the constitutional balance he reveres. The two men do not merely disagree; they embody rival ethics of change.
The 1912 campaign is less an election than a rupture. Roosevelt, denied the Republican nomination after a convention fight conducted with all the parliamentary pageantry of a family argument at Thanksgiving, bolts and forms the Progressive Party. Taft remains the Republican nominee with the party machinery and the courthouse vote; Roosevelt takes the crowds and the headlines; Woodrow Wilson walks between and beyond them with a scholar’s reformism trimmed to fit a governor’s patience. Taft knows he will lose. He campaigns with a dignity that sounds, in that year, like silence. In November Wilson wins; Roosevelt beats Taft; the incumbent carries only Utah and Vermont. The country has voted for energy and poetry. The judge folds his papers and goes home.
Relief arrives in the form of Yale and a classroom. He becomes Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, a title that fits like a coat. He writes, lectures, travels, and returns to an idea that had been brewing since his Philippines years: a League to Enforce Peace, an architecture for arbitration backed by concerted pressure. He is no isolationist; he wants the civilized world to learn the habit of law. When Wilson later proposes a League of Nations he supports the concept and quarrels with the details; he is a Republican internationalist when his party is busy inventing the opposite posture. He serves as president of the American Bar Association and finds that the administration of justice, from crowded dockets to badly drawn statutes, can command his enthusiasm as completely as tariff schedules once did. He also does something practical about his own health. The jokes about his size are everywhere and never kind. In 1913, freed from travel and banquets, he submits to a rigorous diet and walking regimen and loses a startling amount of weight. He looks younger because he feels lighter; he looks lighter because he is.
Then the telephone rings with the call he had been waiting for since his twenties. Warren Harding appoints him Chief Justice in 1921. The smile that follows is the smile of a man who has been allowed to rejoin his own vocation. He is not a philosopher-king; he is an administrator of genius and a strategist for institutional dignity. He works to give the Supreme Court a home worthy of its function, pushing plans for a separate building so the justices will no longer wander rented corridors in the Capitol. He reorganizes judicial administration with inventions that sound modest and turn out to be foundational: a national Judicial Conference where senior judges coordinate calendars and caseloads; circuit councils that exchange information; a view of the federal courts as a system rather than as a collection of near-strangers wearing similar robes. He champions the Judges’ Bill of 1925, which gives the Court control over most of its docket through discretionary review. The reform transforms the Court from a tribunal drowning in mandatory appeals into a constitutional court that can choose cases that settle principles. It is the most important administrative reform in the Court’s modern history, and it bears his fingerprints on every line.
He writes opinions with the same clarity he brought to the Sixth Circuit, now on a stage where sentences echo for decades. In Myers v. United States he defends the President’s constitutional authority to remove executive officers without Senate consent, writing the history of the separation of powers in a tone that is both respectful and assertive. In Carroll he recognizes a practical automobile exception to the warrant requirement, balancing emerging technology with old liberties. In Ex parte Grossman he upholds the President’s power to pardon criminal contempt, refusing to read the Constitution through a keyhole when it was written for rooms. In Olmstead he writes for a majority that sees no constitutional violation in wiretaps applied without trespass, a judgment that later Americans will correct but that in his moment exemplifies his tendency to read text and precedent soberly in the face of novelty. In the Child Labor Tax case he invalidates a “tax” used as a criminal prohibition under another name, warning that if Congress can do by taxation what it may not do directly then enumeration becomes a joke. He is, throughout, a conservative of process: skeptical of evasions, protective of constitutional architecture, modest about judicial heroics, ambitious about judicial housekeeping.
He also knows when to be large. He is not a friend of the Lochner impulse to treat the word “liberty” in the Due Process Clause as a solvent that can dissolve reform at will; his conservatism is not the worship of contract; it is the love of competence and the fear of chaos. He likes the administrative state when it behaves. He respects Congress when it writes clearly, and he scolds it by implication when it writes with one hand and winks with the other. Above all he believes the Court’s authority depends less on metaphysical splendor than on predictable work and visible integrity. He shepherds colleagues, arbitrates quarrels, and uses his office as a conductor uses a baton, not to make the music by himself but to keep time so that music may happen.
By the end of the twenties his health is failing. The weight has crept back, the heart complains, the energy that once looked inexhaustible now visits by appointment. He remains Chief Justice until 1930, resigns with reluctance that sounds like a whispered apology to himself, and dies soon after. He is buried at Arlington, the first president to lie there, honored more for the robes he wore last than the office he wore first. He has, in the end, arranged his own posthumous reputation: a judge who did a tour of duty in politics and an executive who returned to the bench to complete the only career he ever truly coveted.
How to weigh him? Begin by shedding the trivia that made him a sketch artist’s favorite. Begin by listening to the virtues he put to work: a candor that prefers dull truth to stimulating myth; a gentleness that is not weakness; a reverence for process that, in his hands, becomes a defense of the poor against the rich and of the Constitution against its friends; a patience that does not mean delay but rather preparation; a refusal to hate even when an old ally tries to reassemble the country with bolts that do not fit. He lacked Roosevelt’s gift for transmuting frustration into a program of public ardor; he lacked Wilson’s gift for making abstractions walk and speak. He possessed a rarer gift—the ability to translate the excitement of reform into the stability of law. The progress that lasts is often the progress that arrives on the quiet feet of administration. He made a path for that kind of progress and walked it without looking behind to count admirers.
Consider three rooms. In the first, in Manila, he sits at a long table with papers sorted into piles and inkwells refilled by a staff that has learned, from him, the geometry of effort. A mayor from a dusty town wants a bridge; a teacher wants a uniform curriculum; a priest wants a guarantee that land will not be taken without law; a general wants patience interpreted as victory. He hears, questions, decides, and writes, and at the end of the day he has made one island less chaotic and one principle more legible. In the second, in the White House, he meets with a coalition of angry progressives and complacent regulars, each group certain that the other will wreck the party and the country. He speaks about tariffs and boards, prosecutions and courts, and when the meeting is done no one has cheered and yet everyone has a list of work to do and a calendar for doing it. In the third, at the Supreme Court, he presides over a conference where nine minds explore five cases and, by the time he rises, the outlines of the law have emerged from argument into coherence. In all three rooms the same man is at work: the builder who thinks institutions are the way a democracy remembers itself day to day.
There are failures worth naming. Payne–Aldrich taught him that accuracy is not always wisdom in politics; the Ballinger–Pinchot storm taught him that legality is not always sufficient as a reply to believers; the 1912 split taught him that party is a living organism with instincts that do not bend to persuasion; his Court opinions in cases like Olmstead show a man who could miss the moral edge of a technical change because he was rightly preoccupied with text. There are also quiet, massive successes. The federal government emerged from his presidency with stronger regulators, cleaner accounts, a broader revenue base, a more civilized postal service, two additional stars on the flag, and a habit of antitrust that was less theatrical and more continuous. The judiciary emerged from his chief justiceship with the tools that would make it the modern Court—control over its docket, a home to dignify its work, a conference to coordinate the federal bench—and with a reputation for sober competence that has weathered tempests.
He was not the president of crusades; he was the president of consequences. He closed loops others opened and opened doors others could walk through with more color. He accepted that government is mostly deciding on Tuesdays how to implement promises made on Saturdays. He treated citizens as adults by refusing to feed them the sugar of miracles. He did not ask to be loved. He did not mind being underestimated. He minded only when sloppiness threatened to undo hard-won order. The country, which often learns by ricochet, benefitted from the dull virtue he practiced: do it right, and then do it again until doing it right becomes a habit people can trust.
If we are honest, much of what we now consider normal owes something to his hands. The parcel you post without thinking, the savings a nervous immigrant once deposited at a counter with an eagle above it, the telephone rates that were not merely a company’s whim, the notion that the government may learn before it acts, the sight of cherry blossoms each spring against Washington light, the idea that the Supreme Court is a steward more than a slave to its docket, the presence of a great white building where the Court speaks in marble tones rather than in borrowed hallways—all of these are parts of his signature. He would dislike the poetry of that sentence. He would prefer a shorter list, with appropriations attached, and a reminder that every reform requires maintenance.
Imagine him at the end, writing a note to a young judge who has asked for advice. He would say: master the record; write short when you can; read long when you must; distrust rage; respect colleagues; love the law enough to tell it the truth; remember that power is a trust that wastes quickly if handled for display; do not be ashamed to change your mind when better arguments arrive; do not mistake applause for legitimacy; do not mistake fatigue for wisdom. Then he would add, perhaps in a postscript, the oldest sentence he knew by heart: privilege is not the point; service is. It is the line that connects the Cincinnati courtroom to Manila’s council chamber, the Oval Office to the justices’ private conference. It is the line of his life.