William Howard Taft

Biography

William Howard Taft was born in Cincinnati in 1857, the son of Alphonso Taft, a judge who served in Ulysses S. Grant's cabinet. He graduated from Yale in 1878 and from Cincinnati Law School in 1880, then rose quickly in Ohio's legal world: assistant prosecutor, collector of internal revenue, judge of the Cincinnati Superior Court from 1887, Solicitor General of the United States from 1890, and from 1892 a judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, while also serving as dean of the Cincinnati law school.

In 1900 President McKinley put him at the head of the commission organising civilian government in the Philippines, and in 1901 he became the islands' civilian governor. Theodore Roosevelt made him Secretary of War in 1904, and Taft briefly acted as provisional governor of Cuba in 1906. With Roosevelt's backing he won the Republican nomination and defeated William Jennings Bryan in the 1908 presidential election.

His presidency (1909-1913) brought antitrust suits, fights over the tariff and the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy, which widened a split with Roosevelt and the party's progressives. In 1912 Roosevelt challenged him; Taft held the Republican nomination but Roosevelt bolted the party, and Taft carried only Utah and Vermont as Woodrow Wilson won. He then taught law at Yale, presided over the League to Enforce Peace and co-chaired the National War Labor Board in the First World War. Appointed Chief Justice by Warren Harding in 1921, the post he had long wanted, he championed the Judiciary Act of 1925 and resigned in poor health in February 1930, a month before his death.