William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft is the only person to have been both president of the United States and chief justice, and he wanted only the second job. He was a judge by temperament and training, served on the federal bench in his thirties, and was sent by McKinley to govern the Philippines after the American conquest, where he built a civil administration, bought out the friar lands and referred to Filipinos as his little brown brothers, a phrase that has outlived everything else he said there. Roosevelt made him secretary of war and then his chosen successor, and he won easily in 1908. In office he brought roughly twice as many antitrust suits as Roosevelt, including the ones that broke up Standard Oil and American Tobacco, established the Bureau of Mines and a postal savings system, and supported the constitutional amendments that produced the income tax and the direct election of senators. He also signed a tariff his own party split over and fired Roosevelt's conservation chief, and Roosevelt turned on him, ran against him in 1912 as a third-party candidate and split the Republican vote so thoroughly that Taft finished third with eight electoral votes, the worst performance by a sitting president in American history. Wilson won. Taft taught law at Yale for eight years, and Harding appointed him chief justice in 1921, where he served nine years, reorganised the federal judiciary, got Congress to give the Supreme Court control over its own docket, and secured the building the court still sits in. He said the presidency was the greatest disappointment of his life and that he could not remember having been it. He weighed over three hundred pounds and the story of getting stuck in a White House bath is probably apocryphal, though an oversized tub was installed. He is buried at Arlington, one of two presidents there. He swore in two later presidents as chief justice.

• Lived: 1857 CE – 1930 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: head_of_state