Father of the Court
William Howard Taft may have been America's heaviest president. He was also a legal visionary whose work still shapes our judicial system today.
When I was little boy, all those years ago in New Mexico, I was one of those children who decided to, rather than play sports or video games, memorize the chronology of every single American President, from George Washington to, at the time, George W. Bush. One of my favorites I came across was William Howard Taft, the 27th officeholder (though only the 26th man) to assume the presidency. My admiration for Taft had little to do with the merits and accomplishments of the Ohio-born lawyer, judge, territorial governor, cabinet secretary, president, and eventually Chief Justice of the United States. No, it was entirely because this little boy was amused by Taft’s, shall we say, robust frame. One of my favorite children’s books happened to be entitled President Taft is Stuck in the Bath. The more one learns more about the life of our 27th President, the more one realizes that William Howard Taft was far more than just obese. He was a legal genius whose vision still shapes our courts today.
Peaking at a corpulent 354 pounds, William Howard Taft was by far the heaviest among all the American Presidents. His daily food intake clocked in at a astonishing 8,000 calories, including two 12-ounce steaks (one for breakfast and another for dinner), three buttermilk waffles drenched in maple syrup for breakfast, a hearty lunch comprising four mutton chops topped with potatoes, jelly, and a mountain of whipped cream, and the heaviest meal of all, dinner, where Taft gorged on salads, roast turkey, salmon, and more potatoes on top of his second 12-ounce steak. Such culinary excess eventually caught up with him, as Taft suffered from a parade of unpleasant ailments, including sleep apnea, severe bowel irregularity, and even trouble breathing. His frame was also, unsurprisingly, viciously mocked by the press. These struggles pushed the 27th president into a lifelong hamster wheel cycling between these aforementioned binges and exhausting crash diets.
Unlike his muscular and energetic predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, Taft’s preferred exercise was a round of golf. After being introduced to the game in the summer of 1894 in Canada, Taft became hooked, teeing up at the Chevy Chase Club in Maryland five days a week. While Roosevelt criticized Taft’s habit, nothing could stop Taft from exercising his lifelong passion, not even his weight (this was after all, an era before golf carts.) Even during the 1908 election, when Taft’s “aristocratic” habit was a political liability, Taft wrote,
Preceding the late election campaign there were many of my sympathizers and supporters who depreciated its becoming known that I was addicted to golf, as evidence of aristocratic tendencies and a desire to play a rich man’s game. You know and I know that there is nothing that furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint, nothing which puts one on an equality with one’s fellows or, I may say, puts one lower than one’s fellows than the game of golf.
Amen, William.
However, the true legacy of William Howard Taft is not his physique. It is the man’s accomplishments, both inside, but more so outside the White House. Born in Cincinnati in 1857, father was Alphonso Taft, the patriarch of the Ohio political dynasty who served each as Secretary of War, Attorney General, Ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and finally Ambassador to Russia. However, unlike his father, the young William, disgusted by the brazen corruption of the Gilded Age, wanted absolutely nothing to do with politics and instead found his calling in the practice of law, at which he excelled. After graduating second in his class from Yale University in 1878, Taft returned to Cincinnati and established himself almost immediately as a prominent member of city’s legal establishment. However, by Taft’s 30th birthday, it was clear that he was destined for judicial benches far weightier than those in Cincinnati.
What followed was nothing less than a rocket ship to the legal and political stratosphere. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Taft as the United States Solicitor General at age 32, the youngest individual before or since to be the chief counsel of the executive branch arguing before the Supreme Court of the United States. For this author who turns 32 in October and who found his niche only a few years ago, such a promotion is, by anyone’s account, nothing short of astounding. Two years later, Taft joined the bench of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, where he served for eight years on the bench while specializing in labor and antitrust cases. While balancing the workload of the federal judiciary, Taft still managed to find time to lecture for two hours a week at the University of Cincinnati Law School. Becoming President of the United States was still not in Taft’s plans.
By 1900, the United States was an expanding colonial power. One of these new colonies happened to be the Philippines, an Asian acquisition from the Spanish-American War. However, the Filipino population did not take kindly to their new rulers, and Washington needed a way out of a costly counterinsurgency. In 1901, Taft arrived in Manila with the mission to pacify the restless Filipinos. As a legal expert devoted to building a legal framework for a population with no concept of the rule of law, William Howard Taft was the perfect man for the job. In the place of ruthless crackdowns, institutionalized segregation, or forced assimilation, Taft made the wise decision to treat the Filipinos humanely. After his appointment as governor, Taft implemented land reform, distributing farmland to peasants, while institutionalizing strong legal and education systems Taft hoped would eventually allow the Philippines to achieve full independence. As a result, within 50 years, the Philippines became a fully sovereign state.
In 1904, Taft returned to the United States to become Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, and it quickly became clear that Taft was being groomed as Roosevelt’s preferred successor. Thus, Taft, a distinguished judge who did not dream of a political career, was on the fast track towards the highest office in the land. And on November 3, 1908, the American public gave their stamp of approval to the judge from Cincinnati to become the 27th President of the United States. Unfortunately for Taft, the job did not sit well with him. Having yo-yoed his weight for years, the stress of the presidency pushed him into those dreadful culinary habits discussed above, a lifestyle that proved disastrous for his health. Taft’s overeating unleashed a vicious cycle where his weight gain produced ever more physical agony, thus escalating Taft’s already elevated mental stress and further fueling his massive appetite just to cope with it all. By the last full year of his term in 1912, the man was absolutely miserable, with golf as his only relief from the pain.
To William Howard Taft’s credit, and Theodore Roosevelt’s chagrin, Taft broke up more monopolies (75 investigations) than his legendary “Trust Buster” predecessor, as, unlike Roosevelt, Taft was philosophically committed to upholding the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 clause-by-clause. While his predecessor was content to manage and work with “good trusts” whose existence served the public interests while dismantling “bad trusts” abusing consumers, Taft made no such exception. He was a man of the law first and foremost and thus unwilling to tolerate any corporation whose practices clearly violated it. By 1911, when Taft’s administration launched another investigation against the US Steel corporation, the gloves came off between the two men, spawning most legendary feuds in American political history, with sharp insults flying in both directions. While Roosevelt insulted Taft as a fathead and stupid, deeply wounding Taft, the 27th president rebutted by accusing Roosevelt of being a demagogue and a dangerous egotist.
For Taft, insults targeting his weight crossed the line and wounded a deeply kind and warmhearted man known for both his booming belly laugh and sensitive nature.
The pair’s ugly vendetta ultimately led to Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” defection from the Republican party and their mutual defeat 1912 presidential election, and Taft, freed from the job he so hated, was finally free to pursue his passion for the rest of his life: the law. So unhealthy and miserable was the 27th president, that another term likely would have killed him. For the next eight years, the now former president returned to his alma mater of Yale and taught constitutional law, where his warmhearted nature made him beloved by both students and faculty, earning him the nickname Big Bill. However, this name may have been a misnomer, for it was at Yale where Taft finally committed himself to exercising through daily walks and losing weight, dropping down to the relatively slim frame of 244 pounds and publishing continued critiques of what he believed were executive abuses of power by the Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson Administrations. In Taft’s own words, “it seems to me as if I were young again and had shed some of the flesh that evidences advancement in years.”
After years of physical and emotional suffering, William Howard Taft was finally happy and healthy.
It was after 1921 when Taft finally was offered his opportunity to shine. Even into the 1920s, the Supreme Court of the United States was a mess. In that era, any case, no matter how frivolous or constitutionally irrelevant, had the right be heard by the highest court in the land. In practice, this meant that even a minor dispute between two men from Taft’s old home of Cincinnati with zero constitutional relevance held the same status with the most complex constitutional questions, ensuring the court would be overworked with frivolous cases and leave the most critical cases in limbo for years. It was President Warren G. Harding (not a great guy, by the way) who offered, upon the death of Chief Justice Edward D. White, Taft the opportunity to succeed him. After nearly half a century of honing his legal expertise, interrupted by four years in the White House he hated, Taft was now offered the job he had always cherished.
Today, Taft is known as “the Father of the Modern Supreme Court,” and for good reason. Under the Chief Justice’s own guidance, Congress in 1925 passed the Judges Act, a law that not only eliminated direct appeals from lower district courts but also, critically, gave the Supreme Court discretion over its own docket of cases, ensuring the most critical constitutional questions could not only be heard but properly scrutinized. The system Taft designed survives to this day. So in love with his new job was Chief Justice Taft that he even went so far as to write “I don’t remember that I ever was President.” After Taft died in 1930, it was clear to everyone at the time that his legacy would be firmly judicial, not presidential.
In conclusion, let us reflect on William Howard Taft not as the obese man who allegedly (the incident never occurred) needed help just to climb out of his bathtub, but the legal scholar whose brilliant mind not only was a tremendous asset in his lifetime, but has lived on more than a century later in the fundamental structure of American federal courts. Such a reflection would most certainly please the Chief Justice from Cincinnati, likely as he enjoys his heavenly round of golf.
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