"A Judicial Temperament": The Education of Judge Taft

William Howard Taft inherited his judicial temperament and constitutional vision from his father, Alphonso Taft. A mutual acquaintance who heard the young Judge Taft hand down a decision exclaimed: "That young man has the judicial temperament, and the power of analysis and clear presentation of his father to an extent that is amazing." Alphonso Taft was born on November 5, 1810, on a farm in Townshend, Vermont. He was graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School and then settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, where in 1841 he married Fanny Phelps, the cultivated daughter of a county judge. Two of their five children survived infancy: Peter Rawson Taft II and Charles Phelps Taft, who became a U.S. congressman and owner of the Cincinnati Times-Star, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Chicago Cubs. Fanny died eleven years later, in 1852, and the following year Alphonso married Louisa Maria Torrey, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, who later became a champion of women suffrage and free education.

As a delegate to the first Republican Convention, held in Philadelphia in 1856, Alphonso Taft voted for the first Republican platform, in which the delegates declared themselves opposed "to the extension of Slavery into Free Territory." Appalled that President Franklin Pierce had signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed the extension of slavery into territories north of the line drawn by the Missouri Compromise, the delegates insisted that "the dearest Constitutional rights of the people of Kansas have been fraudulently and violently taken from them." And they resolved: "That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in the Federal Constitution are essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions, and that the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the union of the States, must and shall be preserved." This resolution would define the political philosophy of both Alphonso and William Howard Taft, who was born the following year, on September 15, 1857, two days before the seventieth anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

Alphonso and Louisa Taft's first son had died of whooping cough, steeling Louisa's determination for the survival of her second son, known as Will, who delighted his doting mother with his sunny temperament and good humor. "He is very large of his age and grows fat every day," his mother wrote of Taft as a baby. "He has such a large waist, that he cannot wear any of the dresses that are made with belts. He spreads his hands to anyone who will take him and his face is wreathed in smiles at the slightest provocation." Three more children followed — Henry, Horace, and Fanny — and Will would consult them for political advice along his circuitous path to the White House and the Supreme Court.

In 1851, Alphonso had bought a substantial Greek Revival house in Cincinnati with eight bedrooms and room for five Irish and German servants, where Will was born, grew up, and returned after college. The comfortable library in the Taft house still contains some of the law books that Alphonso and Will read together during Will's youth, filling the house with conversation about law and the Constitution. They include a first printing of the infamous Dred Scott decision published in 1857, the year of Will's birth, with a handwritten notation on the cover calling attention to Justice Benjamin R. Curtis's dissent. Other books in the library include a Political History of Slavery in the United States and an early edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Alphonso gave some of his law books to his protégé George Washington Williams, an African American politician, historian, and diplomat from Ohio, who later endorsed his nomination for governor in 1879 in these terms: "Judge Taft, the only white man in the Cabinet of any President during the last eighteen years who had the manhood, the temerity and humanity to exact ... the powers of the Constitution of the United States to protect the black man in the exercise of his constitutional rights."

On the Ohio Superior Court, Judge Alphonso Taft's most famous opinion was an 1870 dissent in a case about Bible reading in public schools. In the 1860s, the Cincinnati school board had banned the mandatory reading of the King James Bible in the classroom, after failing to resolve a conflict between Protestant and Catholic parents, who preferred the Douay version. A majority of the court struck down the ban, on the grounds that "revealed religion, as it is made known in the Holy Scriptures, is that alone that is recognized by our Constitution." In his forceful dissent, Taft held that sectarian reading from the Protestant Bible was offensive to Catholics and Jews and represented an unconstitutional preference of one religion over another. The Framers of the U.S. and Ohio Constitutions, he emphasized, intended to prevent the "union of Church and State." Following Alphonso Taft's reasoning, the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Superior Court's decision in 1872, and nearly a century later the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that no sect may be preferred over another. Alphonso may have been influenced by his Unitarian faith, which he passed on to his son. Will Taft later declared as much, with the admirable candor that often bedeviled his political career. "I am a Unitarian. I believe in God. I do not believe in the Divinity of Christ," he said, "and there are many others of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."

Alphonso lost the Republican nomination for governor to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1875 and lost again four years later; he blamed his defense of the separation of church and state for both defeats. Both father and son viewed the political difficulties that resulted from unpopular constitutional rulings as a sign of their principled devotion to law rather than to politics.

His son was so sensitive to slights against his father's honor that when a newspaper editor published an item criticizing Alphonso Taft, Will confronted the editor on the street, lifted him up, and bashed his head repeatedly against the ground. (These spasms of anger would recur throughout Taft's career, as he lashed out self-righteously against those he considered disloyal.) And Alphonso reciprocated his son's devotion. But Alphonso's dauntingly high expectations, combined with a habit of withholding parental approval when his son failed to meet them, created a lifelong...