William Howard Taft — 27th President of the United States
27th President of the United States, Republican
William Howard Taft
Term: Mar 4, 1909 – Mar 4, 1913
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) was the twenty-seventh president of the United States, serving from 1909 to 1913, and is the only person to have served as both president and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His administration continued the antitrust enforcement begun under Theodore Roosevelt, filing more suits under the Sherman Antitrust Act, and oversaw the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing a federal income tax. He lost the 1912 presidential election to Woodrow Wilson after a split in the Republican Party when Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate. Taft later served as Chief Justice from 1921 until his death in 1930.
“I should be untrue to myself, to my promises, and to the declarations of the party platform upon which I was elected to office, if I did not make the maintenance and enforcement of those reforms a most important feature of my administration.”