page_1056 < previous page page_1056 next page > Page 1056 T Taft, William Howard (18571930), twenty-seventh president of the United States and chief justice, U.S. Supreme Court. A native of Cincinnati and a graduate of Yale, Taft was an able administrator and an intelligent, if unimaginative, lawyer and jurist. He was, however, a poor politician. Taft served as U.S. solicitor general from 1890 to 1892 and as a federal circuit court judge from 1892 to 1900. He became head of the Second Philippine Commission in 1901 and the first governor-general of the Philippines the year following. In both posts he did much to advance civil government and to reconcile the Filipinos to American rule. Appointed secretary of war in 1904, he faithfully executed President Theodore Roosevelt's policies. In 1908, at Roosevelt's urging, he ran for president, handily defeating the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Conservative in temperament but moderately progressives in intellect, Taft deemed it his mission as president to consolidate rather than expand the Roosevelt reforms  to give them "the sanction of law," as he privately phrased it. But he surrounded himself with conventionalminded lawyers and allowed Old Guard Republican leaders to control his lines to Congress. Partly in consequence, he compromised on the tariff after a courageous initial call for reform. He also suffered the resignation of Roosevelt's intimate, Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, because he believed that some of the Roosevelt-Pinchot conservation practices had been "exercised far beyond legal limitation." Yet Taft instituted twice as many antitrust proceedings as Roosevelt had, and he signed a number of long-deferred measures, including a corporation tax, into law. Constitutional amendments for an income tax and direct election of senators were also approved during his administration, though they owed more to a coalition of progressive Republicans and Democrats than to the president. Taft's performance in foreign affairs was similarly mixed. A strong proponent of international law, he strove unsuccessfully to win Senate support of a series of arbitration treaties, but he also sent marines into Nicaragua. Nevertheless, he much preferred economic to military action, and he supported an unproductive program of "dollar diplomacy" in the Caribbean and the Far East. Taft failed to be reelected in 1912 because of the defection of progressive to Roosevelt, who ran on the Bull Moose ticket, and to Woodrow Wilson, the successful Democratic candidate. From Yale University, where he became a professor of law after leaving the White House, Taft gave measured support to Wilson's neutrality policies before the United States entered World War I. In 1915 he became president of the League to Enforce Peace, an organization of largely Republican internationalists, and he subsequently influenced Wilson to modify his proposed Covenant of the League of Nations. Convinced that qualified American membership in the League was better than nonparticipation, Taft reluctantly supported proposed Republican reservations. He hoped, in vain, that the internationalist wing of the GOP would control for-  < previous page page_1056 next page >