[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 ...