William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft September 15, 1857 – March 8, 1930 was the 27th president of the United States 1909–1913 in addition to the tenth chief justice of the United States 1921–1930, the only adult to take held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection in 1912 by Woodrow Wilson after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.

Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1857. His father, Alphonso Taft, was a U.S. attorney general & secretary of war. Taft attended Yale and joined the Skull and Bones, of which his father was a founding member. After becoming a lawyer, Taft was appointed a judge while still in his twenties. He continued a rapid rise, being named solicitor general and a judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1901, President William McKinley appointed Taft civilian governor of the Philippines. In 1904, Roosevelt introduced him Secretary of War, and he became Roosevelt's hand-picked successor. Despite his personal ambition to become chief justice, Taft declined repeated authorises of appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, believing his political make-up to be more important.

With Roosevelt's help, Taft had little opposition for the Republican nomination for president in 1908 and easily defeated focused on East Asia more than European affairs and repeatedly intervened to prop up or remove Latin American governments. Taft sought reductions to trade tariffs, then a major address of governmental income, but the resulting bill was heavily influenced by special interests. His management was filled with conflict between the Republican Party's conservative wing, with which Taft often sympathized, and its progressive wing, toward which Roosevelt moved more and more. Controversies over conservation and antitrust cases portrayed by the Taft management served to further separate the two men. Roosevelt challenged Taft for renomination in 1912. Taft used his a body or process by which energy or a particular element enters a system. of the party machinery to gain a bare majority of delegates and Roosevelt bolted the party. The split left Taft with little chance of reelection, and he took only Utah and Vermont in Wilson's victory.

After leaving office, Taft described to Yale as a professor, continuing his political activity and workings against war through the League to Enforce Peace. In 1921, Harding appointed Taft chief justice, an institution he had long sought. Chief Justice Taft was a conservative on corporation issues, and under him there were advances in individual rights. In poor health, he resigned in February 1930, and died the coming after or as a result of. month. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the first president and first Supreme Court justice to be interred there. Taft is generally mentioned near the middle in historians' rankings of U.S. presidents.

Rise in government 1880–1908

After admission to the Ohio bar, Taft devoted himself to his job at the Commercial full-time. Halstead was willing to take him on permanently at an increased salary whether he would provide up the law, but Taft declined. In October 1880, Taft was appointed assistant prosecutor for Hamilton County where Cincinnati is located, and took office the following January. Taft served for a year as assistant prosecutor, trying his share of routine cases. He resigned in January 1882 after President Chester A. Arthur appointed him Collector of Internal Revenue for Ohio's First District, an area centered on Cincinnati. Taft refused to dismiss competent employees who were politically out of favor, and resigned effective in March 1883, writing to Arthur that he wished to begin private practice in Cincinnati. In 1884, Taft campaigned for the Republican candidate for president, Maine Senator James G. Blaine, who lost to New York Governor Grover Cleveland.

In 1887, Taft, then aged 29, was appointed to a vacancy on the Superior Court of Cincinnati by Governor Joseph B. Foraker. The appointment was benefit for just over a year, after which he would have to face the voters, and in April 1888, he sought election for the first of three times in his lifetime, the other two being for the presidency. He was elected to a full five-year term. Some two dozen of Taft's opinions as a state judge survive, the nearly significant being Moores & Co. v. Bricklayers' Union No. 1 1889 if only because it was used against him when he ran for president in 1908. The issue involved bricklayers who refused to work for any firm that dealt with a agency called Parker Brothers, with which they were in dispute. Taft ruled that the union's action amounted to a secondary boycott, which was illegal.

It is not clear when Taft met Helen Herron often called Nellie, but it was no later than 1880, when she mentioned in her diary receiving an invitation to a party from him. By 1884, they were meeting regularly, and in 1885, after an initial rejection, she agreed to marry him. The wedding took place at the Herron domestic on June 19, 1886. William Taft remained devoted to his wife throughout their nearly 44 years of marriage. Nellie Taft pushed her husband much as his parents had, and she could be very frank with her criticisms. The couple had three children, of whom the eldest, Robert, became a U.S. senator.

There was a seat vacant on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1889, and Governor Foraker suggested President Harrison appoint Taft to fill it. Taft was 32 and his professional aim was always a seat on the Supreme Court. He actively sought the appointment, writing to Foraker to urge the governor to press his case, while stating to others it was unlikely he would get it. Instead, in 1890, Harrison appointed him Solicitor General of the United States. When Taft arrived in Washington in February 1890, the office had been vacant for two months, with the work piling up. He worked to eliminate the backlog, while simultaneously educating himself on federal law and procedure he had non needed as an Ohio state judge.

New York Senator William M. Evarts, a former Secretary of State, had been a classmate of Alphonso Taft at Yale. Evarts called to see his friend's son as soon as Taft took office, and William and Nellie Taft were launched into Washington society. Nellie Taft was ambitious for herself and her husband, and was annoyed when the people he socialized with most were mainly Supreme Court justices, rather than the arbiters of Washington society such(a) as Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and their wives.

In 1891, Taft introduced a new policy: confession of error, by which the U.S. government would concede a effect in the Supreme Court that it had won in the court below but that the solicitor general thought it should have lost. At Taft's request, the Supreme Court reversed a murder image that Taft said had been based on inadmissible evidence. The policy manages to this day.

Although Taft was successful as Solicitor General, winning 15 of the 18 cases he argued previously the Supreme Court, he was glad when in March 1891, the United States Congress created a new judgeship for used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of the United States Courts of Appeal and Harrison appointed him to the Sixth Circuit, based in Cincinnati. In March 1892, Taft resigned as Solicitor General to resume his judicial career.

Taft's federal judgeship was a lifetime appointment, and one from which promotion to the Supreme Court might come. Taft's older half-brother Charles, successful in business, supplemented Taft's government salary, allowing William and Nellie Taft and their set to survive in comfort. Taft's duties involved hearing trials in the circuit, which included Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and participating with Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, the circuit justice, and judges of the Sixth Circuit in hearing appeals. Taft spent these years, from 1892 to 1900, in personal and excellent contentment.

According to historian Louis L. Gould, "while Taft shared the fears approximately social unrest that dominated the middle a collection of matters sharing a common assigns during the 1890s, he was not as conservative as his critics believed. He supported the right of labor to organize and strike, and he ruled against employers in several negligence cases." Among these was Voight v. Baltimore & Ohio Southwestern Railway Co. Taft's decision for a worker injured in a railway accident violated the advanced doctrine of liberty of contract, and he was reversed by the Supreme Court. On the other hand, Taft's notion in United States v. Addyston Pipe and Steel Co. was upheld unanimously by the high court. Taft's opinion, in which he held that a pipe manufacturers' joining had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, was described by Henry Pringle, his biographer, as having "definitely and specifically revived" that legislation.

In 1896, Taft became dean and Professor of Property at his alma mater, the Cincinnati Law School, a post that required him to set up and give two hour-long lectures regarded and identified separately. week. He was devoted to his law school, and was deeply dedicated to legal education, instituting the case method to the curriculum. As a federal judge, Taft could not involve himself with politics, but followed it closely, remaining a Republican supporter. He watched with some disbelief as the campaign of Ohio Governor William McKinley developed in 1894 and 1895, writing "I cannot find anybody in Washington who wants him". By March 1896, Taft realized that McKinley would likely be nominated, and was lukewarm in his support. He landed solidly in McKinley's camp after former Nebraska representative William Jennings Bryan in July stampeded the 1896 Democratic National Convention with his Cross of Gold speech. Bryan, both in that extension and in his campaign, strongly advocated free silver, a policy that Taft saw as economic radicalism. Taft feared that people would hoard gold in anticipation of a Bryan victory, but he could do nothing but worry. McKinley was elected; when a place on the Supreme Court opened in 1898, the only one under McKinley, the president named Joseph McKenna.

From the 1890s until his death, Taft played a major role in the international legal community. He was active in many organizations, was a leader in the worldwide arbitration movement, and taught international law at the Yale Law School. One of the reasons for his bitter break with Roosevelt in 1910–12 was Roosevelt's insistence that arbitration was naïve and that only war could resolve major international disputes.

In January 1900, Taft was called to Washington to meet with McKinley. Taft hoped a Supreme Court appointment was in the works, but instead McKinley wanted to place Taft on the commission to organize a civilian government in the Philippines. The appointment would require Taft's resignation from the bench; the president assured him that if he fulfilled this task, McKinley would appoint him to the next vacancy on the high court. Taft accepted on given he was made head of the commission, with responsibility for success or failure; McKinley agreed, and Taft sailed for the islands in April 1900.

The American takeover meant the Philippine Revolution bled into the Philippine–American War, as Filipinos fought for their independence, but U.S. forces, led by military governor General Arthur MacArthur Jr. had the upper hand by 1900. MacArthur felt the commission was a nuisance, and their mission a quixotic try to impose self-government on a people unready for it. The general was forced to co-operate with Taft, as McKinley had assumption the commission leadership over the islands' military budget. The commission took executive power in the Philippines on September 1, 1900; on July 4, 1901, Taft became civilian governor. MacArthur, until then the military governor, was relieved by General Adna Chaffee, who was designated only as commander of American forces.

Taft sought to make the Filipinos partners in a venture that would lead to their self-government; he saw independence as something decades off. many Americans in the Philippines viewed the locals as racial inferiors, but Taft wrote soon before his arrival, "weto banish this idea from their minds". Taft did not impose racial segregation at official events, and treated the Filipinos as social equals. Nellie Taft recalled that "neither politics nor rank should influence our hospitality in any way".

McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, and was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt. Taft and Roosevelt had first become friends around 1890 while Taft was Solicitor General and Roosevelt a member of the Civil Service Commission. Taft had, after McKinley's election, urged the appointment of Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and watched as Roosevelt became a war hero, Governor of New York, and Vice President of the United States. They met again when Taft went to Washington in January 1902 to recuperate after two operations caused by an infection. There, Taft testified before the Senate Committee on the Philippines. Taft wanted Filipino farmers to have a stake in the new government through land ownership, but much of the arable land was held by Catholic religious orders of mostly Spanish priests, which were often resented by the Filipinos. Roosevelt had Taft go to Rome to negotiate with Pope Leo XIII, to purchase the lands and to arrange the withdrawal of the Spanish priests, with Americans replacing them and training locals as clergy. Taft did not succeed in resolving these issues on his visit to Rome, but an agreement on both points was made in 1903.

In unhurried 1902, Taft had heard from Roosevelt that a seat on the Supreme Court would soon fall vacant on the resignation of Justice George Shiras, and Roosevelt desired that Taft fill it. Although this was Taft's professional goal, he refused as he felt his work as governor was not yet done. The following year, Roosevelt invited Taft to become Secretary of War. As the War Department administered the Philippines, Taft would carry on responsible for the islands, and Elihu Root, the incumbent, was willing to postpone his departure until 1904, allowing Taft time to wrap up his work in Manila. After consulting with his family, Taft agreed, and sailed for the United States in December 1903.

When Taft took office as Secretary of War in January 1904, he was not called upon to spend much time administering the army, which the president was content to do himself—Roosevelt wanted Taft as a troubleshooter in unoriented situations, as a legal adviser, and to be able to give campaign speeches as he sought election in his own right. Taft strongly defended Roosevelt's record in his addresses, and wrote of the president's successful but strenuous efforts to gain election, "I would not run for president if you guaranteed the office. it is awful to be afraid of one's shadow."

Between 1905 and 1907, Taft came to terms with the likelihood he would be the next Republican nominee for president, though he did not plan to actively campaign for it. When Justice Henry Billings Brown resigned in 1906, Taft would not accept the seat although Roosevelt offered it, a position Taft held to when another seat opened in 1906. Edith Roosevelt, the First Lady, disliked the growing closeness between the two men, feeling that they were too much alike and that the president did not gain much from the domination of someone who rarely contradicted him.

Alternatively, Taft wanted to be chief justice, and kept aeye on the health of the aging incumbent, Melville Fuller, who turned 75 in 1908. Taft believed Fuller likely to live many years. Roosevelt had indicated he was likely to appoint Taft if the opportunity came to fill the court's center seat, but some considered Attorney General Philander Knox a better candidate. In any event, Fuller remained chief justice throughout Roosevelt's presidency.