William Howard Taft (27)

I was perhaps the largest president ever elected.

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I loved playing baseball and golf.

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I am the second president to have held office in every major branch of government, and the only to hold the top office in judicial and executive offices.

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My Vice President was James Sherman.

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Big Bill

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Big Lub

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Willie

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Fatty

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Dollar Diplomacy

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Trustbuster

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“Politics, when I am in it, makes me sick.”

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“Anti-semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out.. it has no place in America.”

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“In my present state… I don’t remember that I ever was president.” (Spoken when he was chef justice of the Supreme Court)

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16th Amendment

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New Mexico and Arizona

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Titanic

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Payne-Aldrich Act

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Supreme Court Chief Justice

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Golfer

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First Baseball

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Cherry Trees

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Wife was mover

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North Pole and South Pole discovered

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He was born September 15, 1867, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Alpha so Taft, secretary of war and attorney general under President Ulysses S. Grant, and Louisa Maria Torrey, Taft graduated second in his Yale class of 1878, studies law, and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1880.

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Drawn to politics in the Republican Party, he served in several minor appointive offices.

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He was named to fill the unfinished term of a judge of the superior court of Ohio.

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The following year he was elected to the 5 year term of his own, this was the only time he ever won office by way of popular vote other than his election to the presidency.

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From 1892 to 1900 he served as a judge of the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he made several decisions hostile to organized labor. He upheld the use of injunction to stop a strike by railroad workers, and he declared illegal the use of a secondary boycott.

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He upheld the rights of workers to organize, to join a union, and to strike.

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He made a goodwill mission to Japan and the Philippines in 1905.

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Taft resigned his judgeship in 1900, to accept appointment by Wllilam McKinley to serve as chairman of the Philippine Commission, following the Spanish-American War.

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In 1901, he became the first civilian governor of the Philippines.

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He was very popular among the Philippine people, Taft twice refused to leave the islands when offered appointment to the Supreme Court by President Theodore Roosevelt.

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In 1904, he agreed to return to Washington to serve as Roosevelt’s secretary of war.

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Although different in physique and temperament, the rotund, easygoing Taft and the colorful outgoing Roosevelt became close friends;

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Roosevelt considered his secretary of war as a trusted adviser.

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When Roosevelt declines to run for reelection, he threw his support to Taft, who won and defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the electoral college by 321 votes to 162.

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Roosevelt fully expected his hand-picked successor to carry on with his many progressive ideas.

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On his departure from the White House, Taft returned to Yale, to become a professor of constitutional law.

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He served on the National War Labor Board during World War I.

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He strongly supported American participation in the League of Nations.

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Warren G. Harding appointed Taft chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

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As Chief justice Taft probably enjoyed the happiest period in his long career in public service.

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His influence helped to secure passage of the Judge’s Act in 1925, which gave the Supreme Court greater discretion in choosing its cases.

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His most important contribution to constitutional law was his opinion in Myers v. United States (1926) upholding the authority of the president or remove federal officials, thus upholding the repeal of the very same Tenure of Office Act for which Johnson was impeached.

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Suffering from heart disease, Taft resigned as chief justice on February 3, 1930, he died about a month later. Taft’s last words were never recorded.

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Roosevelt was sorely disappointed with Taft.

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He lacked Roosevelt’s strong leadership.

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He failed to appoint ANY progressives to his cabinet.

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He backed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff of 1909.

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Roosevelt expected Taft to veto, but Taft not only signed the Tariff but called it “the best Bill that the party has ever passed.”

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Taft supported the more conservative members in the Republican Party.

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He proved to be a bigger trustbuster, than his predecessor having busted twice as many.

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He backed conservation of natural resources.

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However, when he fired Gifford Pinchot-head of the Bureau of Forestry, an strong conservationist, and close friend of Roosevelt, Taft removed the support of many Republicans and definitely Roosevelt.

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When Roosevelt returned from a safari many Republicans urged him to publicly renounce in political protege.

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At first Roosevelt declined to criticize Taft by name, however when the next election rolled around, they had become bitter political rivals.

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When Roosevelt decided to challenge Taft for the Republican presidential nomination, they attacked each other mercilessly.

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The primary results proved that voters wanted Roosevelt to be the nominee; but Taft’s forces controlled the convention and made sure that the nomination went to Taft.

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Roosevelt was convinced (probably correctly), that the convention was rigged and that he was cheated out the nomination.

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The progressives formed the “Progressive,” or Bull Moose Party, nominated Roosevelt as their presidential candidate.

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This split among the Republicans assured the Democrat win.

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Roosevelt came in a distant second, and Taft, won less than a quarter of the popular vote, winning only two states, Utah and Vermont.

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In the electoral college,e Taft set a record of the poorest performance by an incumbent president seeking reelection: He won a mere 8 electoral votes compared with 88 for Roosevelt and 435 for Wilson.

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Taft frequently said that politics made him sick.

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He was never eager for the office.

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He was pushed and encouraged to pursue the presidency by his ambitious wife, Helen Herron Taft, whom he had married in 1886. As first lady, she was a key political adviser to her husband.

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The popular belief that Taft got stuck in the White House bathtub is entirely fictional. There is no basis for this myth outside of a comment from one questionable source who worked in the WH and who only said that the 340 pound Taft was so large he would sometimes require help getting out. Even this account is not realistic.

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Prior to winning the White House, Taft actually installed a seven foot long, two-thousand pound tub installed on the USS N. Carolina, when he went to Panama, the same tub was later installed in the White House when he became president and it would quite easily have supported his large frame.

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On other occasion, however, at a banker’s convention in New Jersey Hotel, Taft miscalculated the level of water in a sizeable tub, and upon getting into the tub, caused such a surge of water to overflow that it leaked through the flooring into the dining room where the bankers were waiting for him. His last words were never recorded.

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