William Taft

U.S. History

William Howard Taft was overweight, but he made a great president. To be exact he was our 27th President of the United States, and the 10th Chief Justice of the United States. Taft was born on September 15, 1857, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father Alphonso Taft was Republican, who also served as Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant. His mother was a graduate of Mount Holyoke, Louisa Torrey. He was brought up in the Unitarian church, and would remain a faithful Unitarian his entire life. When Taft was 18 he met his future wife Helen Herron at a sledding party in Cincinnati; she and Taft courted while he was away at college.

Father like son, Taft attended college at Yale University. Taft was very much part of college, he became a member of Skull and Bones, the secret society co-founded by his father back in 1832. His nickname at Yale University was "Old Bill" initially, given because of Taft's physical size. If you’re thinking he played football for Yale University, sorry his father showed concern for his safety. I think that was good move after all, maybe there was a chance he could not have been our president. In 1878, Taft graduated from Yale ranked second in his class out of 121. After college, he attended Cincinnati Law School, graduating with his LL.B in 1880. While in law school, he worked on the local newspaper The Cincinnati Commercial.

Shortly after Law School Taft joined the Ohio bar, he was appointed Assistant Prosecutor of Hamilton County, Ohio. In 1882, he was selected as a local Collector of Internal Revenue. Taft married his longtime sweetheart, Helen Herron, in Cincinnati in 1886. In 1887 he resigned that position, and was appointed to be a judge of the Ohio Superior Court. Taft showed his great brain by quickly getting attention of President Benjamin Harrison appointed him Solicitor General of the United States. Bolstered by his acute legal knowledge, in 1892 President Harrison appointed him as an associate judge for the newly created United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, a post which he held until 1900. He was acquainted to Theodore Roosevelt, when was the civil service commissioner. Their friendship grew stronger and stronger after they met. In 1900, President William McKinley appointed Taft as the chairman of a commission to organize a civilian government in the Philippines, which had been ceded to the United States by Spain following the Spanish-American War and the 1898 Treaty of Paris. Although Taft had initially