William Howard Taft

Biography

William Howard Taft, a 350-pound federal judge who wanted nothing in life but a seat on the Supreme Court, was talked into heading the Philippine Commission by President McKinley in 1900. To general surprise — including his own — he became the war's most consequential American civilian. Calling Filipinos his 'little brown brothers' (a phrase that embarrassed even his contemporaries and enraged the soldiers), Taft championed civil government while the war still burned: courts, schools, roads, a civil service open to Filipinos, and negotiated purchase of the Church friar lands whose abuses had helped fuel the revolution. His running battle with military governor Arthur MacArthur over authority ended with Washington backing Taft, and on July 4, 1901 he became the islands' first civil governor. The Philippines made Taft. He rode the governorship to Secretary of War, the presidency in 1908, and finally — the job he had always actually wanted — Chief Justice of the United States in 1921. He remains the only person to have led two branches of the American government, and Philippine policy bore his stamp for a generation: benevolent in intention, colonial in fact.