Does William Howard Taft Run for President Again
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William Howard Taft never really wanted to exist president. Politics was his wife's ambition for him, not his own. Before he was Secretary of War or governor of the Philippines, Taft, an intellectual son and grandson of judges, spent eight blissful years every bit a federal appeals court judge. "I dearest judges, and I beloved courts," President Taft said in a voice communication in 1911. "They are my ideals that typify on globe what we shall run into hereafter in heaven under a just God." When Taft promoted associate Supreme Court justice Edward D. White of Louisiana to chief justice in 1910, he confessed his green-eyed to his attorney general. "At that place is nothing I would take loved more being main justice of the U.s.," he said.
Years after his humiliating 3rd-place defeat in the 1912 presidential election, Taft finally got his dream task. In June 1921, President Warren Harding nominated Taft, historic period 63, to lead the Supreme Court. Taft served nine years as chief justice afterwards his four years as president—the only person to hold both jobs. "He loathed being president," Justice Felix Frankfurter once observed, "and being principal justice was all happiness for him."
Americans recollect presidents ameliorate than they recollect chief justices, merely Taft was a improve estimate than executive, and his judicial leadership arguably left a more than lasting marker on the nation. Today, as conservatives promise the adjacent Supreme Court appointments give them the power to remake American constabulary and liberals look to it to check the excesses they expect from the president-elect, both alive in a judicial world Taft created.
Taft was a reluctant president, accepting the 1908 Republican nomination only after his wife, Nellie, and sitting President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded him to run as his chosen successor. Roosevelt felt certain that Taft, his friend and confidant, would keep his progressive reforms. Instead, one time President, Taft aligned himself with Republican conservatives and businessmen, appointed few progressives, raised tariffs instead of lowering them, and fired Roosevelt'south friend Gifford Pinchot, the nation's chief forester and a leading conservationist. Enraged, Roosevelt ran against Taft as a third-party candidate in 1912.
Taft, never comfortable as a politician, gave almost no campaign speeches after his re-nomination, golfed frequently, and resigned himself to defeat. He finished third in the presidential election, backside winner Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt, winning less than 25 percent of the popular vote and only 8 electoral votes. Taft chosen his defeat "non merely a landslide but a tidal wave and holocaust all rolled into one general cataclysm."
Relieved and happy to be free of the presidency's burdens, Taft spent the next viii years as a professor of constitutional law at Yale, gave speeches across the country, served on the National War Labor Board during World War I, and assisted Wilson with his failed campaign to convince the United States to join the League of Nations. "Being a expressionless politician, I take become a statesman," he quipped.
As chief justice, Taft rejoiced in his reversal of fortune. On the bench, wrote journalist William Allen White, he resembled "one of the high gods of the world, a smiling Buddha, placid, wise, gentle, sweet." To manage his declining health and reduce his famous girth, Taft walked three miles to work at the Supreme Courtroom's chamber in the U.S. Capitol building. Before long he was down to 260 pounds, a near-low for him. He rarely looked back at his years as a political leader, except to bid them practiced riddance. "The strain, the worry, the peckish for mere opportunity to slumber without interruption, the flabbiness of one's vocal cords," he recalled in a sympathetic October 1924 letter to John Davis, the Democratic candidate for president, "the necessity for always being in a good sense of humour, and the obligation to smile when one would like to swear all come back to me."
As chief justice, Taft expanded federal power more than he did during his cautious term in the White House. Taft the president had embraced a narrow view of his own powers, hesitating to human activity if the law or Constitution didn't give him explicit permission. But in the nigh important and lasting stance he wrote every bit main justice, in Myers vs. U.S., he upheld the president'south power to dismiss federal officials without the Senate'south approval. And legal challenges to his presidential legacy were rare: Only one time did he recuse himself over a conflict, when a murderer whose expiry sentence he commuted sued for freedom.
That doesn't mean his time as principal 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 authorities'south power to regulate businesses, most famously when he struck down a punitive tax on companies that used kid labor. There were exceptions: he voted to uphold an Oregon police force that created a ten-60 minutes maximum piece of work solar day for women, and he dissented from a decision that struck down a minimum wage for female workers. A longtime foe of labor unions, Taft wrote a determination in Truax v. Corrigan that gave judges wide latitude to issue injunctions to terminate labor disputes.
Taft had opposed Prohibition before it passed in 1919 during the Wilson Administration, thinking it'd be hard to enforce. However, as chief justice he consistently approved strict enforcement of anti-liquor laws, fifty-fifty when it put him at odds with his married woman. On the a 1922 trip to London, Helen Taft and the U.Southward. ambassador to England drank beer, while the chief justice and the administrator'south married woman stuck to crackers, cheese and fruit.
Taft'south back up for the nation's dry laws led to perchance his most controversial civil-liberties decision. In 1928, Taft delivered the court's opinion in Olmstead five. U.Due south., a v-4 decision that allowed warrantless wiretaps of phone conversations to be used against defendants. The decision caused a national uproar – The Outlook, a leading mag of the time, chosen it "the Dred Scott decision of Prohibition" -- only Taft dismissed its critics in a letter to a friend. "If they retrieve nosotros are going to be frightened in our effort to stand past the law and requite the public a chance to punish criminals, they are mistaken, even though nosotros are condemned for lack of high ideals," he wrote.
Progressives institute the Taft court frustrating, its hostility to social-reform legislation tragic. "Since 1920 the Court has invalidated more legislation than in l years preceding," complained Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard professor and futurity Supreme Courtroom justice, in 1930. Decades later on, Justice Antonin Scalia praised Taft's chief justiceship, even though many of his decision "ran counter to the ultimate sweep of history." Olmstead, for example, was overturned in 1967, and Taft'due south rulings for business and against regulation and unions were overruled within years of his death. "Taft," Scalia wrote, "had a quite accurate 'vision of things to come,' did not like them, and did his best, with complete skill only ultimate lack of success, to alter the result."
Nonetheless, Taft left a more enduring judicial legacy: He permanently increased the Supreme Court'south power and prestige. When he joined the Court, its docket was mired in a backlog up to five years deep. Lobbying every bit no chief justice had before, Taft convinced Congress to laissez passer the Judges' Bill of 1925, which gave the Supreme Court greater command over its docket. It took away almost all automatic rights of appeal to the court, which allowed the justices to focus on important constitutional questions. Taft too convinced Congress to fund the construction of a Supreme Court building, so the justices could move out of the dreary Former Senate Chamber and their fifty-fifty drearier conference room in the Capitol's basement. Though Taft didn't live to see it open in 1935, the yard building reflects its independence from the other branches of government.
Justice Sandra Mean solar day O'Connor called Taft a "bully Chief Justice…who deserves almost every bit much credit as [John] Marshall for the Courtroom's modern-day role but who does non often receive the recognition." She noted that 84 percent of the Taft court's opinions were unanimous–a reflection of his attempts to craft opinions that kept the nine justices together. "Near dissents," Taft said, "are a form of egotism. They don't exercise any proficient, and just weaken the prestige of the court."
By i gauge, Taft prevented about 200 dissenting votes through diverse forms of persuasion, both carrots and sticks. In nine years, Taft himself wrote 249 opinions for the court, dissented only virtually 20 times, and wrote only four written dissents. He would exist frustrated to encounter how many dissenting opinions from his era, especially by liberal justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, are celebrated in history. But his goal in pushing for unanimity, notes O'Connor, was to build upwards the court's dominance as an "expounder of national principle" – the part information technology still plays today.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/chief-justice-not-president-was-william-howard-tafts-dream-job-180961279/
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