/his/ — Daily Presidents Thread #26: William Howard Taft

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Based

>>18530398 (OP)
mf-er was a jurist at heart who shouldn't have been president and he knew it

allowed Congress to kick him around with the Payne-Aldrich tariff disaster

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If Taft could lose weight, why can't you?

>Taft was the first president to embrace the automobile age--during his presidency, a garage was built at the White House and he had a favorite White steamer used to escort him around D.C.; the driver could open a valve and let out a cloud of steam to conceal the president from nosy onlookers.[3]

>>18530398 (OP)
Tomorrow's thread is all gonna be bad, definitely the worst since the Lincoln thread.

>>18530398 (OP)
Taft was a strict constructionist who believed in doing things by the book, he thought TR abused executive power too much. He supported a Federal income tax but the Supreme Court had earlier shot that down in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. so he pushed for the 16th Amendment to be passed (for some odd reason Wilson is credited with the 16th Amendment when it actually was Taft's baby and just didn't get ratified until he was out of office).

>>18530984
to be fair most pre-FDR presidents tended to believe in the executive branch having a limited, defined role, especially a trained lawyer like Taft

he also changed it so the Supreme Court could refuse to hear cases. prior to that time the Court had to hear any case brought before them and by the 1920s the workload was getting to be far too much. the Supreme Court also got a dedicated building for the first time thanks to Taft, who selected its design although he didn't live to see it completed.

>>18530984
he wasn't against progressive reforms, but he thought they had to be done by the book. he also busted more trusts than TR.

>>18530998
Taft was an innovator as Chief Justice as for example devising the certiorari system so the USSC could selectively choose what cases they wanted to hear, but his actual rulings were fairly backward and shitty like ruling that Indians aren't white, upholding restrictive housing covenants, etc. He didn't want to retire and ended up dying on the bench because he didn't trust Herbert Hoover, whom he considered a liberal, to choose his successor.

>>18531018
he did have somewhat backward views on race, he really ignored civil rights in favor of sucking up to the South (which had snubbed TR for inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House).

>The Payne-Aldrich Tariff was the fiasco that effectively ended Taft's presidency. High tariffs were a traditional Republican plank and the Dingley Tariff of 1897 had established average rates at around 47%. This was left untouched by the normally bombastic TR, who figured the tariff issue was a hornet's nest he preferred not to kick.

>Taft, breaking with GOP tradition, was impressed by arguments for lower duties, favored by progressives, and two weeks into his presidency he called on Congress for a reduction in the Dingley rates. The House passed a bill that reduced some duties, but in the Senate, then controlled by a coterie of ultra-reactionaries headed by Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich, the bill was log-rolled by lobbyists who immediately tacked on hundreds of raises. A few token items such as hides and birdseed were made duty-free.

>>18530398 (OP)
Easily in the top 5 presidents

>>18531044
by gravitational field.

>Taft reluctantly signed the Payne-Aldrich bill into law and immediately drew the ire of progressives, mainly in the Midwest. The president further demonstrated his poor political judgement in the aftermath. He might have said he was sorry and it was the best he could do, but instead embarked on a nationwide speaking tour where he defended the bill and called it "the best bill the Republican Party has ever passed."

>A staunch conservationist, Taft did more to protect natural areas than Roosevelt; he created the Bureau of Mines to control mineral resources, rescued huge areas of the West from development, and protected water power sites from industrial use. But this was all undone by the Pinchot-Ballinger fiasco. Interior Secretary Ballinger, a plant of big capital, promptly opened public land in Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska to development. Gifford Pinchot, head of the Agriculture Department's Division of Forestry and a staunch Roosevelt ally, denounced him. Taft fired Pinchot for insubordination, outraging Roosevelt allies and conservationists.

>Roosevelt made his return to New York in June 1910 and immediately stirred up a tempest. He traveled to Kansas and made a fiery stump speech calling on the government to have increased powers to remedy economic and social ills. The divided GOP was routed in the midterms that fall, giving the Democrats 228 House seats and putting them back in charge of the House for the first time in 17 years. As a sign of the times, Victor Berger of the Socialist Party was elected to Wisconsin's 5th Congressional District, encompassing the city of Milwaukee. The GOP held the Senate but precariously.

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>>18530263

>>18530398 (OP)
...And President Taft, he got the bill

>>18531052
lmao.

>Taft's problems were compounded by the abortive Reciprocal Treaty with Canada, which would have proposed to establish a free trade zone between the two countries. House Speaker "Champ" Clark of Missouri, a folksy orator of the old school, whose constituents' general educational level was summed up by their phrase "Don't be kickin' mah dawg around", made an unwise and provocative remark that the treaty would be the first step to eventual annexation of America's northern neighbor. The Canadian elections in the fall of 1911 brought about a new government and prime minister who immediately ripped up the Reciprocal Treaty.