Taft Administration, William Howard

[Page 761]William Howard Taft (1857–1930) was the 27th president of the United States, from 1909 to 1913. He has the distinction of being the only person to serve both as president and as chief justice of the Supreme Court, having been appointed to this position by President Warren Harding in 1921 and serving until his death in 1930. Before his career in the executive branch—he was President William McKinley's governor-general of the Philippines and President Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war—he was a Yale-educated lawyer who became a judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In running for re-election, he ran against his own predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, who failed to get the Republican nomination and so created the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party; both were defeated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the governor of New Jersey.

As president, Taft adapted Roosevelt's “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine into what was known as Dollar Diplomacy: the shift from war to economic incentives in the United States’ dealings with Latin America, encouraging Latin American countries to realize American ambitions through loans, economic collaborations, and the activity of American corporations. Though Dollar Diplomacy did not survive the later Cold War unchanged, the general modus operandi that Taft set forth set a precedent that American officials continued to follow in dealing with Latin America, including the involvement of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, and military in Latin America in their efforts against international drug traffickers.

Though it may seem a minor point in drug policy history at first glance, Taft is the president responsible for federal income tax. In his first summer as president, he proposed a 2 percent federal income tax on corporations, and a constitutional amendment in order to empower the federal government to enact such a thing (as well as income taxes on individuals if necessary). The resolution proposing the Sixteenth Amendment was passed less than a month later, and was still in the ratification process during the 1912 election (in which all major candidates were supporters of the tax). The amendment was ratified just a few weeks before Taft's presidency ended, and federal income tax began with Wilson's presidency. What this tax did was provide an alternate revenue source for the federal government. Originally, one reason this was desirable was that tariffs on imported goods could be lowered, making prices lower for consumers. In the long run, this new source of revenue meant that excise taxes on specific [Page 762]goods were no longer as critical—which freed the federal government to shift from a revenue-collection approach to narcotics to the public health and law enforcement approach that developed.

The Food and Drug Act had been passed under Theodore Roosevelt's administration, but one of the challenges to it was brought to the Supreme Court during Taft's. In its ruling on United States v. Johnson (221 U.S. 488, 1911), the Supreme Court ruled that the Food and Drug Act did not, contrary to the executive branch's view, forbid false “curative or therapeutic statements” about a product. It forbid only misbranding the identity of that product: caffeine must be labeled as caffeine, for instance, but could be sold as a cold remedy. The Sherley Amendments passed in 1912 explicitly forbade fraudulent claims of health benefits, but this has remained a contested issue in food and drug labeling laws because of the number of instances in which a company may believe the claims it makes about its product, claims that are contested by another party.

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