twenty-sixth president
of the United States, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, September 15, 1857. He was the son of Alphonso Taft by his second wife, Louisa Maria Torrey. Through both parents his ancestry goes back to the Massachusetts Bay colony of the earlier half of the seventeenth century. From his father's line he inherits his interest in scholarship and his love of the law; from his mother's, probably, his bodily strength and stature, tradition representing one of his maternal great-grandfathers as six feet and seven inches tall. Alphonso Taft was an able lawyer and a distinguished public servant. He first attracted national attention when, as judge of the superior court of Cincinnati, he rendered an opinion sustaining the right of the local board of education, in deference to the feelings of the Roman Catholic and Jewish taxpayers, to abolish the reading of the Bible in the common schools. Although this stand, taken at a time when religious prejudice was most bitter, undoubtedly cost him the governorship of Ohio, its independence also
commanded widespread respect, a sentiment freely
expressed when President Grant made him
successively secretary of war and attorney-general of
the United States.
When, after a preparatory course at the Woodward
High school in his home city, William joined
the class of 1878 at Yale university, he frankly
entered the lists for scholastic honors, and avoided
the distractions of competitive athletics, in which, with his powerful muscular equipment, he might have made a mark. Nevertheless, he soon won and always held the good will of his classmates, proofs of which have followed him everywhere through his career. At the close of his four years he stood second in a class of 121, and returned to Cincinnati to study for the bar. On his admission he became a newspaper law-reporter, to familiarize himself with court procedure. Almost from the start he attracted the notice of the republican party managers, and was made first an assistant county prosecutor and then collector of internal revenue; but neither position afforded him the professional scope he desired, so he went back to private practice till called to the assistant county solicitorship. There he was when, in 1887, a vacancy occurred in the superior court, and Governor Foraker, though head of a hostile faction, appointed him to fill it temporarily. When his term expired he was reëlected; but in 1890 President Harrison invited
him to Washington as Solicitor-General, and introduced
him to the whole American people.
Mr. Taft's brief judicial experience had chanced
to fall in a period when the labor field was in a
state of unrest, and one case brought before him
involved the right of a trade-union to boycott a
firm which was not a party to any dispute, and
whose sole offence lay in continuing to have dealings
with an employer whose men had gone out on
strike. The opinion he rendered was very broad, upholding the right of laborers to quit work in order to coerce their employer into paying higher wages, and of a trade-union to punish or expel its disobedient members; but on the other hand declaring unlawful a combination to injure the business of a stranger to the dispute, since such indirection obscured the original intent of the strike and became merely malicious and oppressive. The supreme court of Ohio sustained this decision on appeal without comment, and it is frequently quoted in labor cases to this day.