The last president to have visible facial hair (not including Richard Nixon’s 5 o’clock shadow), the “heaviest” president (in terms of body weight) and the only man to serve as both president of the United States and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, weighs in as the subject of today’s #stampoftheday. The honoree is William Howard Taft, who was born September 15, 1857, near Cincinnati. The stamp is a 50-cent stamp issued in 1938 as part of the “prexies,” a series of stamps portraying all former US presidents, from Washington to Coolidge.
Taft may be best known for the apocryphal and apparently untrue story that he was so obese that he got stuck in a bathtub at the White House. You may also recall that Taft lost his reelection bid in large measure because Theodore Roosevelt – who had selected Taft to be his successor in 1908 – unsuccessfully challenged him for the Republican nomination in 1912 and then ran as a third-party candidate. The two split the Republican vote, paving the way for Woodrow Wilson’s election as president. Taft finished third winning only two states and eight electoral votes, the worst defeat of an incumbent president in US history. (Herbert Hoover won six states and 59 electoral votes in 1932.) As Taft himself noted, his defeat was “not only a landslide but [also] a tidal wave and holocaust all rolled into one general cataclysm.” So, to the extent that anyone remembers him, Taft is generally relegated to an historical dustbin that is either a joke or an afterthought. But, it turns out, that while he was generally considered a mediocre president, he was a very important chief justice (which was the job he always wanted). “I love judges, and I love courts,” President Taft said in a speech in 1911. “They are my ideals that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.”
A native of Ohio whose father and grandfather were both judges, Taft was a state judge who then sent eight years as a federal appeals court judge. In 1900, President William McKinley, who knew Taft from his time as governor of Ohio, appointed him as the head of the American commission charged with organizing a civilian government in the Philippines. After McKinley was assassinated, Roosevelt, who had gotten to know, like and respect Taft in the early 1890s, became president. In 1904, Roosevelt made him Secretary of War and despite his personal ambition, Taft declined Roosevelt’s offer to nominate him to a Supreme Court post because he thought his political work, particularly the transition in the Philippines, was more important.
Roosevelt, who used Taft as a troubleshooter on a variety of problems, began to position Taft to be his successor, a prospect that did not exactly thrill Taft, who supposedly said, “I would not run for president if you guaranteed the office. It is awful to be afraid of one’s shadow.” But he ran and won. As President, Taft aligned himself with Republican conservatives and businessmen, appointed few progressives, and fired Roosevelt’s friend Gifford Pinchot, the nation’s chief forester and a leading conservationist. Moreover, he took a much more limited view of presidential power than Roosevelt. “The thing which impresses me most is not the power I have to exercise under the Constitution,” he said in 1909, “but the limitations and restrictions to which I am subject under that instrument.”
In an Atlantic article that appeared about two years ago, Jeffrey Rosen, who wrote a biography of Taft, argued, “Taft set the GOP down a path of supporting free trade and balanced budgets that continued, with only minor interruption, for nearly a hundred years. His refusal to use executive orders to circumvent Congress’s legislative authority on tariffs-as well as other matters-led to moderate policies with broad bipartisan support that were sustained by the next administration, even after the Democrats won the presidency and control of Congress.” Rosen went on to note, “Where Trump has used executive orders to impose his policies by fiat, Taft denounced executive orders as unconstitutional end runs around Congress. And where Trump has made populist appeals based on the idea that he ‘alone can fix’ America, Taft believed that populist appeals would encourage demagoguery and mob rule.”
Nine years after his humiliating defeat in 1912, President Warren Harding nominated Taft, age 63, to lead the Supreme Court, a job he held and loved for several years. “He loathed being president,” Justice Felix Frankfurter once observed, “and being chief justice was all happiness for him.” Moreover, according to a 2016 article in Smithsonian Magazine, Taft was a better judge than executive, and his judicial leadership arguably left a more lasting mark on the nation.” As chief justice, Taft expanded federal power more than he did during his cautious term in the White House. In Myers vs. U.S., the most important and lasting opinion he wrote as chief justice, the court upheld the president’s power to dismiss federal officials without the Senate’s approval. That doesn’t mean his time as chief justice didn’t tie in to his presidency, though. The Taft court extended the conservative legacy he’d developed as president. Taft usually voted to uphold limitations on government’s power to regulate businesses, most famously when he struck down a punitive tax on companies that used child labor. A longtime foe of labor unions, Taft also wrote a decision in Truax v. Corrigan that gave judges broad latitude to issue injunctions to stop labor disputes. And Taft’s support for the nation’s dry laws led to perhaps his most controversial civil-liberties decision in Olmstead v. U.S., which allowed warrantless wiretaps of phone conversations to be used against defendants. These ruling frustrated many progressives. “Since 1920 the Court has invalidated more legislation than in fifty years preceding,” complained Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard professor and future Supreme Court justice, in 1930. And, in fact, subsequent courts reversed many of Taft’s most infamous decisions. Olmstead, for instance, was overturned in 1967, and Taft’s rulings for business and against regulation and unions were overruled within years of his death.
More important Taft permanently increased the Supreme Court’s power and prestige. Lobbying as no chief justice had before, Taft convinced Congress to pass the Judges’ Bill of 1925, which gave the Supreme Court greater control over its docket. Taft also convinced Congress to fund the construction of a Supreme Court building. As chief justice, he tried to craft opinions that kept the nine justices together; in fact 84 percent of the Taft court’s opinions were unanimous. “Most dissents,” Taft said, “are a form of egotism. They don’t do any good, and only weaken the prestige of the court.”
For all these reasons, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once contended, Taft was a “great Chief Justice…who deserves almost as much credit as [John] Marshall for the Court’s modern-day role but who does not often receive the recognition.” Most notably, she claimed, Taft helped build up the court’s authority as an “expounder of national principle” – a role that it may well be called to play in the coming weeks and months.
Stay well, be safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.